#6 Policing Unleashed - Inside the Dog Unit

[Police officer in bodycam footage] – Come out now otherwise you're going to get bitten! Last warning!

[Intro voice over] – They're fast. They bite.

[Member of public in police bodycam footage] – Get the dog off me! He keeps biting me!

[Intro voice over] – And when they're on the case, there's nowhere to hide. From chasing criminals to uncovering vital evidence, this is policing on four legs.

[Music]

[Host] – Today we welcome Sergeant Nick Dachtler to the Interview Room. Nick, thanks for stepping in.

[PS Dachtler] – No problem.

[Host] – You have been a dog handler for more than 22 years. I believe it's pretty much your whole policing career. You're now the lead trainer here at Nottinghamshire Police, and today you are going to tell us a little bit more about general purpose police dogs.

Where we find them, how we train them and some of the things that they're capable of. So, without further ado, just being a dog handler. One of the coolest jobs in the world, right?

[PS Dachtler] – If not the coolest, in my opinion. But then I'm slightly biased. It certainly is in policing, yeah. It's one of those jobs that you get to come to work every single day with your best friend and you get to go home every single day with your best friend.

They live with you. They all live with their handlers. So, it's not something like a car or any other piece of equipment that you use in policing. These are your friends. These are your best buddies and they live with you at home, and they come to work with you, and they are with us all day, every day.

And there aren't any other roles that I can think of within policing where you have that tight bond, that love, with something that you work with. Policing in dog sections gives you that, it’s very, very unique.

[Host] – Tell me more about that unique bond and more to the point, what you can achieve with that bond.

[PS Dachtler] – So, it's a two-way street. So, there needs to be trust on both sides, so it's not all about the handler or about the dog. It is that bond, that ability for both to know how the other one's feeling, what they want from each other all the way through those different scenarios and different incidents that we all attend, that the fact that they both trust each other to look after them.

And that is as much the dog trusts the handler to be there for them as much as it is for the handler and the dog. Through those bonds and those beliefs and those understandings between them they become a team, they can read each other's body language. The handler will know what the dog's feeling if it's getting close to doing something, all through different parts of body language.

And that comes through that, again, that understanding of the animal that you are with every single day. So, the dogs that we use, they are only handled by one person because it's not something that you can do very quickly. It comes over a period of time, and even though we have very short periods to teach a dog, the actual true depth of it all and the true depth of understanding and the ability to read it properly takes a lot, lot longer for the handlers to do.

[Host] – Tell me more, Nick, about that trust, you mentioned trust a moment ago. And that's important, isn't it? Because as dog and handler, you can find yourselves in some pretty hairy situations, am I right?

[PS Dachtler] – Yeah, there's an expectation that because of the skills that the dogs have, there's an expectation that almost when normal policing has reached its limit, that they're the points normally that your Operational Support, your more highly trained officers then step in.

And we sit under that sort of remit where we have skills and the abilities to do things that everyday police officers don't have, and that skill comes through the dogs. So, we expect that when we put them in and put ourselves in situations that are sometimes frightening, a lot of the time we don't really want to be in, luckily, a lot of the times the dogs don't understand, but we need to be able to get through, in order to protect the public and keep people safe.

[Host] – Give me a couple of examples of those frightening situations that you've been in?

[PS Dachtler] – So, for me it's 22 years' worth. So, there's burglaries where you're chasing people through the middle of the woods, and you don't know who they are, you have no understanding or you don't know anything about them.

But the speed, the way that we deploy, the way that we use the dogs. A lot of the time, you're on your own when you catch up with these people. That in itself is a frightening situation. If you're in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the woods, say, and I found two, three, four or five people all by myself.

But I've never been overly concerned because I've got an understanding. I know what my best friend who is stood with me can do. And I also know that he will do whatever he can to look after me if something did happen.

Most memorable for me, I would say, was a burglary that I attended in the middle of the city, where the gentleman at the address had woken up in the middle of night to find somebody holding a knife to his throat, who then proceeded to walk him around his home address, placing all his belongings into a bag before he made his escape.

What I didn't know at the time, and I only found out when I was attending, is that actually this was the son of somebody I worked with. So, all of a sudden, the whole sort of premise and everything around the job changes slightly. There's that personal connection to this job now. Luckily I wasn't too far away, so we got there quite quickly.

And it's the ability then to do something positive for these people because you know them. You're a friend with this chap's father. So, I've gone out, we've gone through, we've started to deploy with my dog, and we've tracked through the city streets. It's the early hours of the morning and I've located, hidden in somebody's front garden in the hedgerow, the bag containing all of his property.

So, we've been able to firstly recover everything that's been stolen from it. We continued tracking from that point with the dog again and then we've gone down through other streets, through someone's back garden and out into a little cul-de-sac. And I've managed to find the person that's done it hidden under a car, and it's at that point where you've got everything, you've recovered everything.

It's not closure. It certainly doesn't make it any better, but it's a really nice feeling to be able to go back to those people and certainly the person that I worked with and go, yeah, we got him, we found him and we've got everything back for you.

[Host] – I'm assuming without the dog that was not possible?

[PS Dachtler] – Yeah, there's a phrase that dog handlers use when, you know, it's a proper dog job. Without the dog this will never have happened. We would never have caught him. When you use that phrase or hear that phrase being used, you know that without the dog, we'd have never done this. And they're the ones that the dog handlers certainly like the most, where you might have had the helicopter, you might have had a drone up and they've achieved very little. And then we arrive and pull it out the bag. They're the better jobs. They're lovely.

[Host] – How does that feel? When you are in that dark woodland, you're in that hairy situation. You're confronted by three guys. All of them might be bigger and stronger and faster than you, but you and the dog you've spent so long with have brought people like that to justice.

[PS Dachtler] – Yeah, bringing people to justice is what all police officers want to do. And if you don't want to achieve that, then you shouldn't be in this role. We want to bring people that do bad things and put them before a court and see that they get what's coming to them. The difference with a dog is that, yes, you're aware of what could happen, and I'm not naive enough to think that sometimes it goes wrong.

And I have had the odd occasion where it has gone wrong, but I don't go into those situations with that in the front of my mind. A lot of the time I know how quick and what my best mate can do.

I certainly give advice around the best course of action for people to take and it's not normally "please do as I ask" or, you know, it normally is "you really do need to follow my instructions very closely, else this could go very wrong very quickly" because I am more than confident, around the dogs, the dogs that we pick, there's a preconception that we're looking for psychotic, manic or aggressive, over the top sort of dogs. And that could not be further from the truth.

We need a really well-balanced dog. And only dogs that have all of these different sort of attributes of confidence will become police dogs. Out and out aggressive dogs, which we used to have in the past. I could be looking for a missing person of 83, one moment, and then going to somebody that's a violent offender for something else the next.

I want a dog that can flex and be able to move through those different scenarios and not just a one thing outcome for everything.

[Host] – That's great. We'll talk more about the dogs in a minute. But before I do that, I want to talk about the other end of the lead, if you like. I want to talk about the dog handlers. I mean, I know some of you guys. Remarkable group of cops. I mean, what does it take to become a dog handler in the first place?

[PS Dachtler] – Certainly. When we put assessments out and they'll go through a process. Every cop that joins the dog section goes through a couple of days process and interviews and other bits and bobs to get into the department.

What I'm looking for is there's a proven history, and the ability to prove to us and my senior bosses that you're a good and proactive police officer. We're going to give you a piece of equipment, and you are going to be working on your own a lot of the time without close supervision.

So, there's got to be that understanding and that trust that the person that's coming down to the department already does that really well. They've got to be confident. They've got to be ultra confident in their own abilities and relaxed enough to work on their own all the time. Some of the times it's a lonely place, it's a lonely job.

And a lot of the people that you see down there love their own company far, far more than having somebody sat next to them all the time. And that is unique in itself. So, they become hardened. They come across as hardened cops. They're not. They're actually a really caring bunch of people and really nice when you get to know them.

But that crusty exterior that they hold is there for a reason, because they are on their own all of the time.

[Host] – I'm going to make an assumption that I assume they all love dogs to start with.

[PS Dachtler] – Yeah, policing is sort of a career path more than a job. Dog handling is a vocation rather than a career. This is something that is 24/7. They live at home. They become part of your family. We bring them to work. We work with them every day. We train with them. We spend more time with our animals and with our dogs than we do with our kids and our wives and other partners.

This is something you've got to be able to commit to, or want to commit to, because it can become very burdensome. Every four days that other officers have off, we are still at work because we've still got dogs to walk.

We've still got things to do with them. We've got to care for them on our days off. So, this is really a passion rather than a career. This is something that if you love working with animals or you love working with dogs in particular, for me, this is the best job you can have because you can see them and take them from nothing, train them and actually see how they would have acted in the wild all those years ago. And we rekindle those passions and those things inside them that make them dogs again.

[Host] – And you mentioned dogs, plural, that I think is important, isn't it? Because if you are driving down the road and you happen to see a police dog car, what's in the back? Because it's not just one dog is it?

[PS Dachtler] – Yeah, sometimes it’s one or two. So, all of the dog handlers in Nottinghamshire and pretty much across the country. They'll have a GP (general-purpose) dog. They're your large dogs. We normally use a set couple of dogs across the country. In Notts we're using German Shepherds, Belgian Malinois and Dutch Herders. We use them because they do everything that we want them to do.

It is really as simple as that. We would use other breeds, but those three predominantly do everything we want them to and more importantly, they look like police dogs. So, when we get to that incident and we get to those jobs, you don't have the same impact jumping out of a police car and getting a chihuahua out, even though it could potentially do the job.

But a Dutch Herder or a German Shepherd, people start to pay a little bit of attention to you when you get one of those out, which is why we use them.

[Host] – And for fans of our social media, we're talking about dogs like Max, Seth, Rocket, Tuco. Those kind of well-known names of the kind of catching the bad guys and getting those fantastic results. We're talking there only about general-purpose police dogs. Just for the uninitiated, what are they trained to do? What is their job?

[PS Dachtler] – So, their main role is to do everything to do with humans so we can track people. We teach them to find people. Anybody that thinks that they can run off, anybody that thinks they can hide or outrun a police officer. The dog's role is to prove that is not the case because they do all of those things a lot more quickly and with a lot more enthusiasm than most cops. So we teach them around human scent and bits and bobs and there's loads of it. But we teach them to find.

We teach them to look for people, and we teach them to protect people. So, the main part, a big part of their job is to protect handler, protect other police officers, and protect the public. So, they have a lovely set of teeth that help them do that.

[Host] – And speed wise, talking Rocket, for example, is a rapidly quick dog. I've seen him running. Is there anyone, peak level Usain Bolt that can outrun that dog?

[PS Dachtler] – No, and that's why they’re so good. If you are looking at somewhere up to the region of in the 20s to 30 miles an hour at top speeds, some of these dogs. There's nothing on two legs that's going to outrun one of these.

You add the ability to jump, the power in the back legs is phenomenal. I would put them in a 100 meter race against anyone, and I'd bet on it because I know who'd win.

[Host] – Yeah, me too! I mean, you spoken about the breeds. What kind of qualities are we looking for in those breeds?

[PS Dachtler] – So, these are all herding dogs, so they have a definite set of instincts that are already in them. Our job as instructors and handlers is to bring out everything there that's lay dormant in those dogs. All I'm looking for when I go out to select or look at something to potentially become a police dog is I want to know they're confident.

And I want to know that they're quite sociable, you know, they're happy in the company of other people. They're happy at different locations. They're happy when we take them in vehicles. And that is a lot of it at the start is that I've just got a very confident dog. As long as I've got that confidence and that drive to want to play, to want to do different things, then we know we can teach them.

But for me it's, yeah, lots of drive, lots of confidence and then the right breed of dogs and the sort of dogs, hopefully comes together and we make it into a police dog.

[Host] – Where are we getting these dogs from?

[PS Dachtler] – So, there's a mixture of places. Since I've been here we try and get dogs in from charities. So, the dogs that you've spoken about like Tuco and Seth are from people that have had dogs that have thankfully donated them to us, there are a number of charities that we use as well. So, that's where we've had Russo and Jester from. Rocket is from another charity; The Dogs Trust, that we use quite often.

[Host] – And they are all exceptional dogs.

[PS Dachtler] – Yeah. Amazing dogs. And we have a really good working relationship with The Dogs Trust and these other places that allow us to look at these and let us know when these dogs with these qualities come in. We give them the second chance, a lot of the time is that they have been handed over or given away because they have these, how do we say, mannerisms and attributes that lots of people don't want sitting on the sofa at home.

All of those things that make them naughty dogs in the private setting. A lot of the times, things that make them really good police dogs.

[Host] – Fantastic!

[PS Dachtler] – So, we just harness them and train them to be good.

[Host] – How long a training program do we put them through? How does the licensing work? Because you can't just pick up any dog, can you, and go out across the streets with him?

[PS Dachtler] – No, everything we do in the police with police dogs is set by a national standard. So, we have set criteria, we have set areas that we have to achieve. And the main thing we're looking through and set to us, is that these dogs have to be safe. They have to be safe in the public.

And what we don't want is to be taking dogs out, in amongst other people and not knowing how they're going to react and respond. So, we're very, very tight. Those accreditations and everything we do in that training are constantly checked. So, there are a set amount of hours that they have to be re-accredited for every single year.

And that is just a rolling program throughout the career of the dog. It's not something that we do once and then leave. It is continuous throughout their life, and they are constantly assessed and checked to make sure that they are safe and able to do their job. As far as the timing and as far as the team, that's kind of a lot more of an individual thing.

Some dogs are really, really easy to read and their body language and what they do makes it so much easier for us. Sometimes it's a little bit harder. It is difficult regardless, especially at 3am in the morning, in the middle of the dark, in the woods somewhere. But the bond that the handler has with that dog helps him with that.

So, these dogs are only ever handled by one person. They are licensed and put together and they become a team. They never work separately. They don't work with other dogs or other people. They are a team that are licensed to work together, as a single unit, and they never get split up or moved around. That in itself allows us to become better at understanding what the dog's doing, what they think.

And that in itself then helps us catch people a lot more efficiently. And it takes some time, but they get there, and a lot of that comes from that love and that passion. Again, if you put yourself in to commit to something that you want to do, it actually becomes quite easy. It's a lot more difficult if you come and join the police dog section and you're not quite comfortable or that comfortable around dogs, or you're not happy that it's going to, impede on your home life and everything else. If you do all those different things, this job is easy.

[Host] – And that's what I find fascinating about the role. It's that constant development of a partnership. It's a bit like, I guess, passing your driving test when you're 17 and you're not quite sure what you're doing, but you get better and better over time and better in situations. How satisfying is it is when you deliver a result that maybe even you didn't think was possible?

[PS Dachtler] – That sometimes is the best response, when you get a dog that does nothing, you train it and make it into something that achieves what we do. Through tracking, we go out where everybody else thinks it's a lost cause. We can go off and come back 15 minutes later with somebody that they thought had escaped or wasn’t going to be brought to justice, and it's amazing. We can track people for hours and long periods of time and find them. People just don't understand it.

And I'm not going to lie, the ability and how the dogs do it is phenomenal. And it amazes me sometimes, even with the length of time that I've been working with the dogs, there's still moments where I go, how have you actually done that? How have you picked this person out over these great distances? But they do.

[Host] – How have you found this person in the wheelie bin?

[PS Dachtler] – Exactly. Have you work through all these distractions? How have you done that? How have you overcome all these elements that have made it so difficult and you still get to the point where you focus singularly on this one thing, I need to catch up person. They're amazing. They're amazing animals.

[Host] – Fantastic. And tell me about the future of dogs policing, because that's one of the fascinating things, isn't it, that I think police dogs I'm right in saying you're probably one of the only kind of consistents in policing over the last hundred years. Are we still going to have them in 50 years? 100 years? By which time you'll be retired? What do you think?

[PS Dachtler] – I sit here today and I can't see anything that can replicate what they do and what they can achieve. They are a very unique animal. In the future, maybe so. But as I sit here today, there is nothing that we can create or has been created that can do what that dog can do.

They bring so much to policing. They shouldn't be overlooked. Which happens occasionally because they achieve great, great things.

[Host] – But I'm talking about thermal imaging cameras, drones, robotic dogs. Can they do what a police dog can do?

[PS Dachtler] – They are all confined by different elements and different things. The good thing about a police dog is that we will work in the rain. We'll work in the wind, we'll work in the snow. We'll work at three in the morning. We work at five in the morning. And it's that consistency to deliver regardless of what the elements or the constraints are. That's what the dog will bring. The ability to find something that can't be masked, that can't be hidden. That other things can't rely on.

[Host] – Fantastic. Well, Nick, thank you so much for joining us in the Interview Room.

[PS Dachtler] – My pleasure.

[Host] – That's a fascinating insight into an area of our work that I know the public are hugely interested in. And I think the passion that you and all your colleagues have for the job is really something to listen to. So, thank you very much indeed.

[PS Dachtler] – No, I'd just like to say that the team down there are amazing. They work so hard, and they make my job as easy as it is. So, the thanks goes to them, to all the dog handlers in Notts Police, thank you.

[Host] – So, if you have enjoyed this visit to the Interview Room, please look out for us on YouTube and Spotify where we'll be uploading new episodes every single month.

So, thank you for listening and thank you for watching. Goodbye.