DESY does not only offer training in areas such as industrial mechanics, technical drawing, warehouse logistics, or particle physics--chasing criminals has recently been added to the training program on the DESY campus in Hamburg.
To be fair though, the trainees have four legs and sharp teeth. Since March, police dogs are training inside and outside the large storage halls on the southern edge of the DESY premises. "We need buildings that are full of objects that offer all kinds of hiding spots," explains Heiko Valli, policeman and dog trainer at the police dog school. Moreover, the dogs always have to be taken to new sites to avoid routine. Since the Hamburg police is DESY's direct neighbor, they did not have to search far for a good location.
In each training unit, twelve dogs and their dog handlers had to successively pass the "basic training": stop a "suspect" (a policeman in protective clothing; this time Valli himself), start barking, bite in case the suspect tries to escape, and release on command. The training continued in the storage hall where the dogs had to find the hidden criminal and show their handler the hiding place by barking. This was child's play for cold-nosed professionals like Pollo, Carlos, Bonsai, and Butch; the excursion to the DESY site was evidently a great adventure for the dogs.
Hamburg has a total of 45 police dogs specialised in many different fields, including drug and explosives detection, blood, and cadavers. Even so, each dog regularly has to pass the training for suspect search and detention.
By Barbara Warmbein
This story originally appeared in DESY inForm. (PDF)
