How does a Police Dog fight crime?
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2005
A police dog must have a close bond with their handler for them to work successfully together. To create this bond, the dogs are matched with their handlers while they are still puppies and go to live with them when they're around 12 weeks old. However, the dogs are very much working dogs, not family pets, so they live in kennels outside their handler's home. They begin their formal training together when the dogs are a year old.
Just as the dogs are carefully chosen, so are the police officers they will be working with. Officers who volunteer to become dog handlers must have already completed two years of street duty as a uniformed Police Constable. Once approved the prospective handler attends a two week suitability course. The police dog training course has been developed to prepare them for any situation they may face. The course builds on their instinctive behaviour to enable them to carry out tasks and obey the handler on command. A dog's natural instinct is to please their pack leader, and for a police dog this is their handler.
The course starts with basic obedience exercises. This is followed by tracking, where the dogs learn to follow a ground scent over different types of terrain and in varying conditions. They are taught how to bark continuously when they find what they are looking for. They also learn how to chase and attack, even when they are being threatened with weapons. Police dogs need to be aggressive, but never vicious and have to obey their handlers at all times. At the end of 14 weeks, the dogs should be ready to go out to work with their handler, with whom they will continue working until they are seven or eight years old.
Out on patrol, police dogs are used for searching and tracking situations. A police dog is able to search an area much more quickly than a lone officer, as well as being able to get into difficult places, such as dense undergrowth. The dog's ability to scent humans is also very useful in finding people who may be lost or hiding.
Dogs are also used in areas where there are large crowds, for example at football matches, or other places where there maybe incidents of anti-social behaviour. Specialist dogs are trained to search for drugs, explosives and fire-arms. For this work, Springer Spaniels and Labradors are often used because of the breeds natural tracking abilities. As the threat of terrorism has increased these specialist police dogs have become even more important to the police.
