Police ready to become dog handlers
Four new dog handlers will take up their posts this week in Worcestershire after they graduated from their dog handler training. The four policemen have been training to become dog handlers at West Mercia Constabulary.
The policemen, Rob Lilley, Steve Clarke, Steve Morrell and Belinda Johnson completed their training with their police dogs Croc, Rambo, Saiko and Dexter.
Inspector Al Short commented on the police officer’s success:
All four have successfully completed their initial dog training and will be heading back to North Worcestershire division to take up their general purpose dog handling duties.
These newly trained dog handlers are the first in force to work with the ‘high-drive’ breed of German shepherd dogs, specially imported from Germany.
These dogs are remarkably quick to learn new skills and require less training than dogs previously obtained for police work. Clearly this has many benefits, not least that it enables officers to complete their training and get back to their front line policing duties more rapidly.
The police officers and their dogs are now able to complete further training, should they wish, to work with firearms units or as sniffer dogs locating drugs.
We find the German Shepherds are great. Working with drug squad and armed offenders, SWAT etc, police dogs are usually more effective in many ways than some of our lazy guys in cop uniform. ;^)