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You Fight the Way You Train, So Train the Way You Fight

The profound principle of "You fight the way you train, so train the way you fight" extends seamlessly into the intricate dynamic between police dogs and their handlers. In police dog and handler training, this saying encapsulates the symbiotic relationship between the two, emphasizing the critical need for a cohesive and harmonized training approach that mirrors the challenges they might encounter in real-world scenarios.

Scenario-based training for police K9s involves setting up training scenarios that simulate real-world situations that the K9 and its handler may encounter on the job. This type of training aims to prepare the K9 and its handler to respond effectively to a wide range of situations and develop their skills and confidence in handling high-pressure situations.

During scenario-based training, the K9 and handler may be exposed to a range of stimuli, such as different scents, sounds, and environmental conditions. The scenarios may involve locating hidden suspects, tracking, de-escalation techniques, deployment strategies, and detecting explosives or narcotics.

Police dog training is a complex and challenging process that requires a significant amount of time and effort from both the dog and its handler. One of the most important components of police dog training is reinforcement. Reinforcement refers to the use of rewards or positive consequences to strengthen a dog's behavior and increase the likelihood that it will be repeated in the future.

Reinforcement is critical in building and maintaining a dog's proficiency in specific tasks, such as scent or odor detection or tracking. In these tasks, the dog is required to use its natural abilities to detect specific scents or odors following them to their source. By using positive reinforcement, handlers can help enhance the dog's natural abilities and create a strong association between the task and the reward. This association helps to ensure that the dog remains motivated and engaged in its work, leading to a more effective and reliable police dog.

We'll be holding a roundtable discussion on why core competencies are more critical than training to hours. This is a great opportunity to learn how you can get the most out of your training by focusing on core competency development. You'll hear from experts in the field who have been working with organizations of all sizes for years. If you're a canine handler, trainer, or supervisor responsible for training or improving police k9 performance, this is an event you can't miss!

To reserve your seat, contact Executive Director Don Slavik, [email protected], to hold a place for you.

 

Police dogs play a vital role in law enforcement, assisting in various tasks such as tracking, searching, and apprehension. To be effective in their work, police dogs must undergo intensive training, which requires patience, consistency, and repetition on the trainer's part.

In police dog training, cueing refers to the specific commands or signals used to initiate a specific behavior or action in the dog. A cue can be a verbal command, such as "search" or "find," or a visual signal, such as a pointing gesture or a flashlight. The cue is used to let the dog know that it is expected to perform a specific task, such as locating a specific item or person.

Cueing is an important aspect of police dog training because it allows the dog to respond quickly and accurately to different situations. In a real-life scenario, the dog may need to quickly switch between different tasks or behaviors, such as tracking a suspect to searching for evidence. Different cues can indicate different tasks, allowing the dog to respond quickly and effectively to different situations.

We are only as good as our training and if our training is flawed, so too is our response in times of duress. Training must include simulated responses of armed suspects in high-risk trails. We train for the situation in every other facet of police work, why not in high-risk trailing?

A K9 handler should never be alone. When handling the dog on a trail, the handler has no real ability to defend him or herself. Handlers are not tactical assets other than as a means to locate the suspect (s). Contrary to popular belief, even when handling a patrol dog with apprehension capabilities, when the dog and handler are attached by means of a trailing lead neither are capable of reacting fast enough to counter a threat. The handler is hampered by the lead in his hand while being focused on the dog's trailing behavior, thus completely negating any possibility that he or she might draw and employ a weapon with any effectiveness. The K9 is attached to the handler, who cannot even begin to move fast enough to keep up with the dog's reaction if there is one.

The Key to reducing this disadvantage is not in equipping or training the handler in better ways but in giving the handler a cover man who becomes the eyes, ears, and gun of the handler.

Whether you are a trainer or a handler, understanding dog training theory is best before working with a dog. Knowing how dogs learn, classical and operant conditioning, and reinforcement are a few essential tools for teaching and training handlers and dogs. Communication skills will improve, and a noticeable improvement in your training goals will increase.

Consider this...

 

Proper maintenance training requires planning, preparation, and execution

Planning is deciding what your dog needs, along with training that will develop the desired result. In real Law Enforcement canine deployments, teams never know what challenges their next call for service will contain.. Every deployment will include different combinations of time of day, weather, landscape, tactical issues, actions by suspects and civilians, legal issues, distractions, packaging (Detector Dogs), and the number of things to search. Learning is a process where scenarios are deliberately presented to the team producing obstacles or distractions for the handler to solve and the dog to overcome. Progress depends on the canine team’s ability to complete the exercise.

The majority of Law Enforcement work involves the use of canines in some scent-driven tasks. Tracking, Building Search, Area Search, Evidence Recovery, Narcotics, Explosives, Arson, and Game detection are some of the ways we use the super-sensitive noses of our canine partners. Proficiency in all areas is necessary for operational readiness. Accuracy determines how fast the canine should work. Training doesn’t stop when the team becomes certified; that’s just the beginning. Functional training is the next level of achievement and is based on possible scenarios you could see at work.

Have you ever said or heard “but he does it at the training area” when your dog fails to respond correctly in an environment that is new to him? You have just acknowledged that your dog has not yet generalized the behavior to all contexts and lacks Fluency. Fluency is when your dog knows how to search for odor or human scent, knows how to track, knows obedience, and agility, and will do that anywhere, anytime, and under any circumstances.

Residual Odor

Several court cases I have been involved with centered around residual odor prompted me to explain what it is and how you define it. Canine handlers have used residual odor for years to identify an odor plume followed by a K9 to a source, where nothing was found. The judge wanted to know how a canine could smell something not present in one case. In the second case, an expert from the other side was testifying that it is a dead odor, and we should be training our canines to a threshold so the dog would ignore odors that are no longer there.

Police dog handling requires more ongoing mindfulness than any other law enforcement discipline.

With the exception of horses, all other police tools are inanimate objects. As the only law enforcement tool that continually interacts with the environment, police dogs’ behavior changes over time.  As a result, the dog’s training is never “done.” Since a canine handler and the police dog spend most of their waking hours together, the canine handler is the person solely responsible for that dog’s performance.  That is not just a matter of policy, it is a pure behavioral fact. Even in units large enough to have dedicated trainers, their span of control and administrative load mean they cannot begin to approach the degree of influence over the dog the individual handler has.

The United States Police Canine Association, Inc. (USPCA) and the American Kennel Club (AKC) have agreed to form an alliance. One of the benefits of this alliance is AKC Reunite, Adopt a K-9 Cop matching grant. Our association with AKC allows us to sponsor USPCA members for grants to purchase canines. For more information on how you can take advantage of this benefit check here or contact Executive Director Don Slavik

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