Wedneday August 26, 2020 | LANGFORD, BC [Updated August 28, 2020]
Mary Brooke, editor ~ Island Social Trends
On this being International Dog Day on August 26, the West Shore RCMP have introduced their newest police service dog to the west shore community.
Four-year-old Halla is a German Shepherd. She is the second dog at the detachment, joining six-year-old Eric who is also a German Shepherd.
West Shore RCMP serves the west shore area which includes Colwood, Highlands, Langford, Metchosin, View Royal, Songhees First Nation, and Esquimalt First Nation.
Police dogs honoured:
Police service dogs and their handlers go through extensive training before entering the field.
“Today we honour our Police Service Dogs and their handlers for all the hard work they do,” says Cst Nancy Saggar, Media Relations Officer, West Shore RCMP.
Trending on Twitter:
National dog day was started in 2004 or 2005 (references vary) and apparently has consistently trended #1 Worldwide on Twitter #NationalDogDay since 2012.
Standards for use of police dogs in BC:
The Province of BC has specific standards for the use of police service dogs, noting that they are “important policing tools” and can be used for a variety of tasks including searching and locating suspects; apprehending suspects; searching for evidence; protecting the handler; searching for missing people; controlling crowds; searching for drugs or explosives; and community relations and other demonstration events.
“Police dogs are also intermediate weapons; police dogs bite. One of the tasks of police dogs is to apprehend suspects by biting. Police dogs can bite either on command, or automatically in certain situations commensurate with their training, or sometimes even accidentally. The potential for a dog bite is inherent in every deployment, although not every deployment will result in a bite.”
“The use of a dog, as with all other force options, must be proportional to the level of risk posed to the officer, the suspect and the community as a whole,” say the BC Government guidelines.