What do police dogs actually do, and who handles them?

AnalysisA dog section is an unusually expensive capability to maintain: it needs animals, a breeding and training establishment, and officers withdrawn from other work for years at a time. A service that keeps one has decided the capability cannot be improvised, which is the same reasoning that produces any permanent specialist body.

The section divides into two kinds of team, and the balance between them is published: "Patrol dog teams (previously known as general purpose teams) operate in all dog sections and police districts and make up 90 percent of capability." Patrol dogs "are mainly used to track and search for people".

The second category is defined by what it is trained to find: "Detector dog teams are trained to detect narcotics, firearms, currency and explosives." All the service’s dogs are trained centrally, at the Police Dog Training Centre at Trentham, Upper Hutt, near Wellington.

The service also publishes what a handler must already be: "All police dog handlers are officers with about five years policing experience behind them before they join the Dog Unit."

Two categories, unevenly weighted

Patrol teams and detector teams. In this service the first makes up ninety per cent of the capability, which is the opposite of the usual public assumption.

Patrol teams are distributed; the capability is not concentrated

They operate in all dog sections and police districts. This is the distributed arrangement the corpus describes elsewhere when it discusses how specialist capability is spread.

Detection is defined by category, not by technique

The service names what detector teams are trained to find. What any of that involves is capability and is not described here.

Training is central even though the sections are not

All the service’s dogs are trained at one centre. A distributed capability with a single training establishment is a common shape for specialist work.

And the handler arrives with a career behind them

About five years of policing experience before joining. The section is a destination, not a door.

• Common belief: Most police dogs are detection dogs.

  In practice: In the service researched here, patrol teams make up ninety per cent of the capability and detector teams are the minority. The public picture is the reverse of the published balance.

• Common belief: You can join the police as a dog handler.

  In practice: The service researched here states that handlers are officers with about five years of policing experience before they join the Dog Unit. It is a later assignment, not an entry route.

• Common belief: A dog section is concentrated in one place like other specialist units.

  In practice: Patrol dog teams in this service operate in all dog sections and police districts. Training is centralised; the capability is distributed.

• Common belief: Police dogs are a single capability.

  In practice: The service divides them into patrol teams and detector teams, with different purposes and, for detection, different named categories of material.

• Common belief: This page describes what police dogs can do.

  In practice: It does not, and it will not. Capability, handling and deployment are outside what this platform publishes, and the source material of that kind is deliberately unused.

One service, as it publishes itself.

• Patrol dog teams in all dog sections and police districts — ninety per cent of capability.
• Detector dog teams trained to detect narcotics, firearms, currency and explosives.
• All dogs trained at one central training centre.
• Handlers are officers with about five years of policing experience.
• Not researched: every other country, and everything about how any of it is done.

AnalysisPublishing the composition of a capability is a modest but real form of accountability: it lets a reader see that the majority of the work is general rather than specialised, and that the people doing it are experienced officers rather than newcomers. Both are checkable claims a service has chosen to make about itself, and both would otherwise be guesswork.

• One service was researched — New Zealand Police. How dog sections are organised anywhere else was NOT RESEARCHED, and nothing here generalises.
• How a dog or a handler is selected, assessed, trained or worked was NOT RESEARCHED and is deliberately not described. The source contains material of that kind and none of it is used.
• What proportion of handlers come from any particular background, and how many apply, were NOT ESTABLISHED.
• Nothing here describes what a dog team does at an incident, or what any dog is capable of.

Related: specialist roles in policing, when a specialisation is a later assignment, and what a police unit is.