This month, Rob Davis feels the long paw of the law when he joins Lincolnshire Police’s Dog Section Trainer Andy Durham, Dog Section Manager Paul Cragg and Dog Handler Lee Daubney to train police dogs at the force’s unit near Nettleham.

Andy and Paul handed the Editor a heavily padded glove and assigned him a special job title for the day… ‘the potential criminal’…

Prevention is demonstrably better than cure, and on that basis, a police officer’s angry snarling German Shepherd Dog on the end of a leash can be surprisingly effective at turning a potential criminal into a more subservient civilian. It’s a dramatic and effective way of encouraging a possibly dangerous criminal or rowdy football match crowd into submission, but an aggressive sounding dog is useless if it can’t be controlled… Dog Section officer Lee Daubney and Paul Cragg of Lincolnshire Police and the force’s 16 handlers have an astonishing level of control over the dogs they use day and night across a whole range of deployments throughout the county.

Having been challenged to help train two dogs halfway through their 13 week basic training programme, I turned up at the section’s dog training school on the Showground and joined the officers and their dogs, Nero & Leo to lend a hand

in teaching them the essential skills of their craft – tracking, searching and of course, biting.

Dog Section is one example of the force’s range of Operational Support Departments, whose officers specialise in disciplines from Firearm and Roads Policing, CBRN, Forensics, Underwater Searching and the use of dogs. Any of these departments can be called on by officers in the field, and each unit can be with an officer no matter where they are in Lincolnshire in as short a time as possible.

The Section has 16 trained officers who work with 14 German Shepherd Dogs, and two Belgian Malinois, one crossed with a German Shepherd, an explosives dog team consisting of three English Springer Spaniels and Labrador Cross and a team of passive and active drug detection dogs consisting of Springer Spaniels, Collies and Labradors.

Our first exercise was tracking, and whilst both Leo and Nero, Paul and Lee’s dogs, excel when using their noses to follow scents, that’s