Rhode Island
GoLocalProv | News | A Volunteer Canine Search & Rescue Team Wants Rhode Islanders to Know It Is Here to Help
Saturday, August 19, 2023
PHOTO: Jim Rawley/RICSR
Rhode Island Canine Search and Rescue (RICSR), an all-volunteer non-profit organization that was founded almost 20 years ago, wants Rhode Islanders to know it is a resource in the event of a missing person.
GoLocal spoke with founder Jim Rawley, who has decades of search and rescue experience, including being deployed to Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina for human remains detection.
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“We provide the service free of charge. We’re all volunteers — it’s on our own time,” said Rawley, who said the organization trains every weekend with the dogs.
According to Rawley, RICSR has gone as long as a year without being called by law enforcement to help with a search — and sometimes, they can have as many as a half dozen searches in one month.
“I want law enforcement to know we’re fully insured. We’re also covered medically. There’s no liability to any agency,” said Rawley. “We’re highly trained. We’re certified by Rhode Island State Police once a year as well as by the International Police Work Dog Association.”
PHOTO: Jim Rawley Finding a Calling — and Helping the Community 
Rawley, who works environmental health and safety at Amgen, said that it was through a first aid course at a previous employer that led him to inquire about search and rescue, and the rest is history.
“Working with the dogs has become second nature to me,” said Rawley. “You could say it’s a calling.”
Rawley says that the advantage of canine search and rescue is the dogs’ ability to cover a great amount of ground in a short amount of time, which is critical in the first hours after a person goes missing.
“Dogs have a natural ability to smell much better than we can. Time is of the essence when it comes to the elderly, children, and people on medication — a good search dog can cover 40 acres in 2 hours. If you deploy six dogs strategically, that’s 240 acres,” he said.
“The biggest aspect of a search is to know where someone is not,” says Rawley, who noted the dogs are also certified for water searches and disaster relief.
Rawley said that in the past the organization was primarily called in by the State Police, but increasingly they are being tapped by local law enforcement agencies — and he hopes that more will utilize their services.
“It’s important to note that we work in tandem with law enforcement. They are the ones that need to call us in and they are the lead on any search,” said Rawley, who said that RICSR has worked recently with East Greenwich, Warwick, and South Kingstown.
“To this day, we have agencies who say we didn’t know you existed,” said Rawley. “We try to reach out as much as possible with leadership in law enforcement — we want to use regular media and social media to get the word out to know where here if a person goes missing.”
And the organization is always looking for volunteers — both those with dogs to want to go through the training, and also individuals without canines who want to provide support.
“We’re looking for a mid-size dog such as Labs, Retrievers, mixes — basically dogs with a strong prey or hunt drive,” he said.
To learn more about RICSR, visit their website here.