- [Officer] Ready?

I'll sit him down.

And kind of calm him down a little bit.

I'll talk to him in calm tone, take off his leash and give him his search command.

- [Liz] What happens next is we see Bolt, well do exactly what his name implies, bolt into action.

- [Officer] He's came a long ways.

He's actually listening to me.

- [Liz] Most of the time.

- [Officer] He's trained in German and Dutch and he can definitely recognize my tones.

He picks up on body language, emotions, tone, if something's serious, if it's not, if it's work time.

- [Liz] And right now Bolt is on the clock, so to speak, racing against time to find a weapon that's unloaded for the sake of this demonstration in this school library.

- [Officer] He's going around trying to find the smell that he has associated the toy with.

And once he does, then he tries to pinpoint it.

And when he does, then he just locks up.

- [Liz] Ready for his reward.

- [Officer] We're still learning each other, so I'm still learning how to be able to read him.

Good boy.

You might need a little help.

As much as he's still learning what I want him to do so it's just, it's a continuous process.

- [Liz] Like the Granite School District's ever evolving efforts to keep everyone safe at school.

- Complacency is not an option.

So if there's a tool or a resource that's available to us, we're gonna explore that with vigor and hopefully find a good balance that works for all of our schools.

- [Liz] Granite School District Spokesperson Matt Sampson says lately there's been a spike in weapons and threats of weapons being brought to school in the district.

- It's concerning 'cause we're seeing incidents like this increase.

We see more weapons related incidences on our campus since before the pandemic.

And we want to try and do what we can to try and stop this situation before it escalates or gets any worse.

- [Liz] So far, district leaders say they've spent $50 million over the past five years on security upgrades like a touchless scanner, weapons detection system piloted first at Hunter High School and the district's first gun detection canine unit focused solely on that purpose.

- We can quickly deploy Officer Penrose and Bolt to one of our schools and have them search through that campus much quicker than it would take our officers in any type of traditional search.

- [Liz] While technology has provided a way to cut down the time it takes to communicate danger.

- Seconds can save lives.

Catapult, EMS gives an ability for a teacher in any classroom to send an alert from their phone or from their email, which would also include like their GPS location.

So say if they saw somebody suspicious, they can send that out and that's an alert that goes out through the entire school.

It then also goes to our site safety team who will evaluate that threat, but they're able to communicate with that.

They can send a text message or an email and say, I'm secure.

All of my students are in my classroom and accounted for, this is where I saw that person.

And then everybody else can respond to that message within a school and also check in and provide like GPS locations.

There's no one approach that's gonna magically solve any type of safety issue when it comes to school safety, student staff safety.

So we're looking at different strategies and different tools and resources that we can use.

- [Officer] Ha!

Good boy!

- [Liz] Even just spreading the awareness of Bolt's presence in the district.

- It's gonna make people think twice about bringing things that they shouldn't have into the schools.

Go ahead.

My whole goal is to prevent tragedy.

- [Liz] Reporting in Taylorsville, Liz Adeola for "Utah Insight."