Rooney, a burly, middle-aged cop of few words, was starting another day of police work when an alarming call came in.
Bomb threat.
It was Election Day last month in Toms River, N.J., and people quickly had to be evacuated from a polling place. Voting was halted.
Rooney and his partner sped down to Cedar Grove Elementary School. Within 20 minutes, they had cleared the school and determined there was no danger. Voting swiftly resumed.
Now Rooney, an 8-year-old German shepherd with a knack for sniffing out explosives, has been honored for his heroics alongside 28 of his canine counterparts. The pack of law enforcement dogs rushed to polling places across New Jersey on Election Day after a wave of bomb threats, sweeping the sites so efficiently that they were rarely closed for longer than 30 minutes.
For their efforts, the dogs received Selfless Service awards from the New Jersey attorney general’s office at a ceremony on Thursday at the Trenton War Memorial.
“The threats were addressed swiftly, quickly,” Matthew J. Platkin, the attorney general of New Jersey, declared before the dogs were brought onstage one by one to receive their awards. “It was remarkable service by our law enforcement across the state and by our four-legged partners in combating crime.”
Rooney, who was born in Hungary before arriving in Florida and then New Jersey, was the only dog made available for an interview with a New York Times reporter, alongside his partner, Sgt. Matthew Broderick of the Toms River Police Department. Rooney was chatty but interruptive, and spent much of the time howling.
The rest of the dogs at the ceremony — an assortment of German shepherds, golden retrievers, Belgian Malinois, and chocolate and black labs — lined up in the snow outside the War Memorial, barking and pawing at the ground.
Because bomb-sniffing dogs do not have the same physical demands as patrol dogs, various breeds can be trained for the work. Numerous dogs who were called into service on Election Day were rescues, including Remy, a 3-year-old golden retriever.
The need for the dogs on Election Day reflects an unfortunate reality: Distrust in American elections is rampant, efforts to stoke those doubts are pervasive, and the people who run elections face a wide range of intimidation and threats.
Before the 2024 contest, many polling sites were fortified with bulletproof glass, metal detectors, extra law enforcement officers — and bomb-sniffing dogs. In Arizona, rooftop snipers were deployed at the central ballot counting center in Maricopa County, which is home to Phoenix and was a nexus of 2020 election conspiracy theories.
Bomb threats in particular have become a common Election Day disruption. In 2024, at least seven states — Georgia, Maine, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio — faced such threats.
“It absolutely is the new normal,” said Tina Barton, a co-chair of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a nonpartisan group. She cited a surge “over the last five to six years” of swatting, bomb threats and physical intimidation surrounding elections. “The unfortunate part is that it’s really easy to do, to send an email and do it in mass quantities.”
In 2024, the job of clearing bomb threats often fell to dog units. Fulton County, Ga., which includes Atlanta, had 32 bomb threats alone, and a judge later ordered the county to extend its voting hours. Dogs were used to respond to the threats and also conducted “routine sweeps” at polling places, according to Natalie L. Ammons, a spokeswoman for the county sheriff’s office.
In New Jersey, most of the polling places had already been evacuated by the time the canine units arrived. They cleared the sites and surrounding areas, and often did additional walk-throughs throughout the day as a precaution.
“If he’s interested in something, he’ll slow down, and if there’s an explosive — which we’ve only seen in training — he’ll show interest in some way, what we call the final response,” Sergeant Broderick said of Rooney, who howled in what seemed to be understanding of the question.
Dogs’ powerful noses, of course, are invaluable for bomb detection because of the strong chemicals present in explosives.
“If you had a bomb threat called into a warehouse that had 20-foot high ceilings and shelves and a million boxes, and somebody called in and said, ‘Inside one of those boxes is a pipe bomb,’” said Kawika Lau, a military veteran and former law enforcement official and a member of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a trained dog would be much more effective. “Humans search visually and kinesthetically. We see and we move things around, it would take you all day to search that warehouse.”
“A detection dog starts searching the minute it pulls up in the back of the car, because it searches through olfaction,” Mr. Lau said. To clear that hypothetical warehouse, he added, “the dog just simply walks through maybe twice, and if it doesn’t alert, that is a more thorough search than a human could ever do, taking all day to do it.”
While the dogs’ main job is to rule out the presence of a bomb, they can also calm nerves and defuse some of the tension. Chase, a Black lab from the Essex County sheriff’s office who shares a name with a more famous police dog, showed off his cheery side as he accepted the award, leaping to greet Mr. Platkin and hamming it up for a photo.
“Equally important is the perception of safety, because even if people are safe, but they don’t feel safe in their mind, they’re not safe, right?” Mr. Lau said. “If you have a floppy-eared dog just walking through and it’s wagging its tail, and if it doesn’t detect anything, you know that canine handler can walk out and be like, ‘Hey, this passed the sniff test.’”
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
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