TODAY (Monday) marks the 50th anniversary of a pioneering new recruit for the Isle of Man Constabulary.
PD Rex Corlett was the first police dog enlisted into the force back in 1962 along with his handler PC Henry Corlett.
Although things have moved on since the days of police boxes and Wolseley cars with bells, the island’s dog unit remains and now has 13 dogs.
Five handlers have two dogs each and there are currently three in training.
Sergeant Ian Kelly is in charge of the dog unit after previously working with Greater Manchester Police.
‘Each handler will have a general police dog as well as a drugs detection dog,’ he said. ‘They go home each night with the handler and are kennelled with them.’
‘The dogs are brilliant because they extend what we can do. For example, a burglar might be able to run faster than us – but he’ll not outrun the dog which is trained to bring him down and keep him there.’
For general work such as crowd control, chasing suspects or finding missing people, the force uses alsatians or Belgian shepherd dogs, which are similar to alsatians but less thick-set and with more ginger coats.
The dogs undergo a 12-week training course along with their handlers and are then certified as a pair at the end.
There are occasional failures, such as the dog recently who officially passed the course then decided he was a pacifist.
‘He just decided he didn’t want to bite anyone,’ Sergeant Kelly said.
‘He’ll make a brilliant pet but not much good for police work. He’s living the life of Riley down in the New Forest now.’
‘The beauty of them is they can go to a burglary and then track a burglar who may be hiding in a garden nearby.
‘Also, burglars conceal items nearby to collect later so the dogs are good at finding and recovering stolen goods.’
Dogs and trainers undergo a reassessment each year and most of the dogs are given to them by people who can’t cope with them.
The force currently has just one explosives detection dog but hopes to have a second one in the near future.
Out on the field by the police station Apollo demonstrated with enthusiasm how to detain a fleeing suspect – in this case a hapless Sergeant Kelly with a fortuitously padded arm.
‘Of course it’s all a big game to him. He doesn’t know he’s stopping a burglar. The reward is he gets to keep the arm,’ he said, as Apollo trotted triumpantly away, worrying the huge padded tube.
‘He’s quite soft really,’ added Constable McNally as Apollo took a flying leap into his arms and licked his face.
The dogs have to be house-trained and fit to live with a family – not too exuberant.
A variety of training venues are used from farmers’ fields – offered for the purpose – to empty buildings like the old Imperial and Castle Mona Hotels and, recently, Park Road School.
‘We did have one that was fine at sniffing things out but put him in a house and it was as if a tornado had gone through it,’ said Sergeant Kelly.
‘So much energy! He would wrap himself in the phone or television wires, then run off round the corner with the obvious consequences.’
Call for explosives detection is not huge in the Isle of Man but they are routinely used for parades, Tynwald Day and other occasions which could be a terrorist target.
Despite the relatively low need here in the Isle of Man, it’s cheaper to have our own than bring them over when needed.
The drugs detection dogs are mainly springer spaniels trained using small samples of the real drugs so they can identify the smell. The same goes for the explosives, which are precisely weighed out and weighed back in.
‘Some people seem to think we get them addicted to the drugs so they crave it but that’s not true,’ Sergeant Kelly said.
‘You just need to know what makes them tick – for some it’s playing with a ball and they’ll do anything for that and for others it’s food.
The dogs are also trained to detect money – which has a specific scent, apparently – and will indicate large amounts of cash which could be proceeds from crime or money laundering.
‘We’ve taken a few quantities of cash and no one has ever applied to get them back, which I think speaks for itself,’ Sergeant Kelly said.
Apart from having a visible presence at the Sea Terminal in Douglas the drugs dogs can be invaluable in house searches.
‘We had one instance where items were well hidden underneath floor boards,’ said Sergeant Kelly.
‘Without the dog we’d never have known that because you just can’t start ripping up floor boards on the off-chance.’
As we talked, a call came from the sorting office. An hour later Constable McNally returned with two packages of cannabis, wrapped up in innocuous padded envelopes.
‘People try all sorts of things to disguise it,’ he said.
‘It’s often in vacuum-sealed plastic now and people do things like putting it with coffee to mask the scent but it never fools the dogs.
‘The post office are very good at identifying packages that don’t seem quite as they should be, but we can only open the Royal mail if the dog indicates something that shouldn’t be there.’
At a special presentation on Friday, Deputy Chief Constable Gary Roberts welcomed the 20 surviving members of the police dog handling service and presented them with commemorative mugs and certificates.
‘It is a science now which it was not then, though the same skill and dedication was present,’ he said.
He recalled being a policeman on the beat and answering a call from a dog handler.
‘As I drove along the prom I saw the dog van going back the other way. Later I found out it had been stolen with the dog still in it,’ he said, adding: ‘Thank you for coming: it’s important to remember our history and where we came from.’
Graham Priest, now 67, started with the dog unit in 1973. His drugs dog Sam appeared on television and on the front of the national papers after assisting in 22 arrests during TT Week and his alsatian Rex was the only civilian dog at the time to perform with the RAF display team.
Roger Payne, now 70, was a handler from 1966 to 74.
‘We only had one patrol car in those days,’ he said. ‘It made a big difference when we got a van.’
‘We used to get the Hell’s Angels over at TT then and the dogs were a big asset for crowd control, whereas now a lot of the function is searching.’