For Jay Nix, some of the most vital members of any police department have four legs and fur. Like any officer, he said, police K-9s put their lives on the line every day — and sometimes lose them.

“Every year, these dogs are putting their life on the line to ultimately save the ones that we’re out here serving, as well as the officers that are utilizing them to help them do this job,” said Nix, president of K9s United. “That sacrifice isn’t going unnoticed.” 

To honor police K-9s that died in the line of duty, national nonprofit organization K9s United will host its seventh annual Memorial Run on Tuesday, Sept. 1 — National Police K9 Day. The event calls on law enforcement personnel and communities across the country to participate in a 9K, 5K or one-mile run. K9s United uses the funds from the event to support active-duty police K-9s, helping secure advanced training, safety equipment, heat alarms, kennels and other equipment. This year’s memorial honors 23 police K-9s that died in the line of duty during 2025, including but not limited to:

Arizona:

K-9 Raven, Tucson Police Department

California:

K-9 Spike, Burbank Police Department

Texas: 

K-9 Chico, Boerne Police Department

K-9 Azi, McKinney Police Department

Departments in Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia are also remembering K-9s who died in the line of duty. Participants can register online for the run at k9sunited.org.

McKinney Police Department’s K-9 Azi is among the four-legged officers who is being remembered on Aug. 10. Nix said that Azi worked with the department for a little over a year, when he was shot in the line of duty. 

“It was a barricaded suspect in a hotel room,” he explained. “(Azi) was deployed in this room to take the suspect into custody, and the suspect ended up shooting him and he ultimately succumbed to those wounds.”

Due to the demanding nature of the duties the K-9s fulfill, it is not a role undertaken by just any dog, Nix explained. K-9s are from specialized bloodlines and carefully selected working breeds that go through extensive training in order to help track and apprehend subjects, locate lost children and elderly people and use their noses to detect guns, bombs and other dangers. He said they’re bred to possess abilities that most dogs do not have and regularly enter harm’s way to save their partner officers.   

German shepherds and Belgian Malinois tend to be the dogs closely associated with police work, Nix said that other breeds work with the department as well. K-9 units often employ single-purpose dogs in airports and schools to complete tasks such as drug detection and can be breeds as seemingly unconventional as golden labradors.    

Beyond serving as K9s United’s president, Nix is a 26-year law enforcement veteran who spent the majority of his career training and working with police dogs — he was the K-9 unit commander for the Marion County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. He recalled the first time he experienced the loss of a K-9 from his own agency and described the experience as sobering.

“I remember vividly the very first time I watched the body cam video of the handler that worked for me, who was involved in a very violent situation with a suspect who had made up his mind that he was not going to prison and that he was going to do his best to kill that officer that day,” Nix said. “That dog sacrificially reacted to the moment without a thought in the world for its own well-being. 

“No doubt, no question allowed that handler to go home to his wife and his daughter.”

For the K9s United president, the purpose of the Memorial Run is to make sure that police dogs are not viewed as merely statistics. As living beings who gave their lives to protect their human partners and members of the community, Nix said their sacrifice matters. 

“We don’t want those dogs’ sacrifice to just be viewed as a statistic,” he said. “We want that to be viewed as a real sacrifice that a living, breathing animal made so that a human could go home to their family and so that a community could be safer. 

“We never want that to go unrecognized.”  

K9s United Fallen K9 Memorial Run
WHEN: Tuesday, Sept. 1 (register by Monday, Aug. 10)
WHERE: Virtual event
COST:  $32 for children; $42 for adults.
INFO: Visit k9sunited.org