LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The good thing about being a police dog is that your job is to play, all the time. And you spend hours learning how to do it well, with your buddy, whom others call your “handler”.
“They don’t work, they play. That’s what dogs do, and police dogs are no different,” Jean-Christophe Sauteral, press officer for Vaud Police told GenevaLunch during a demonstration of police dog training Wednesday 25 April high in the Jura hills near Sainte-Croix.
Police from four countries come together once a year in this area for a week of intensive specialty training for dog handlers and their animals.
The dogs play hard, and their level of discipline is striking.
Each country’s police dog teams have particular skills that they share with the others, says Sauterel. They also simply get to know each other and work together, useful because the police forces call on each other when highly specialized teams are needed.
The Austrian police dog teams are particularly known for their searches for bodies and tracing human blood, says Sauterel. “And the Belgians are the best at working with fires,” he adds. Paris teams have drug-search expertise.
Swiss pioneered Sokks method for training dogs with pure molecules
The Swiss are known for their dogs’ work searching pure molecules, a relatively new field called the Sokks method, where dogs are trained to search for pure molecules, for example those in drug odours, rather than the less reliable training in specific odours. With cocaine, for example, it can become contaminated with other odours and as it degrades, the odours shift. But the underlying molecules remain the same. Switzerland adopted the Sokks method in 2004. Dogs trained with it have shown a 28 percent increase in successful detection, according to Vaud Police.
Canton Vaud has 13 dog handlers, with 5 of them and their dogs on rotating duty, 24 hours a day. The dog teams are used in Vaud on average 5-6 times a day and throughout Switzerland about 40 times a day. The handlers use down time to continue their dogs’ training.
Once a week the dogs and their trainers meet for a day of joint exercises and continuing education for the handlers.
The dogs belong to the police force, but the handlers pick out their own dogs at the kennels when they are two and a half months old, and the dogs are then assigned to the families where they spend the rest of their lives. They train until they are two years old before they are put on duty with their handlers, but they join the police patrols as early as possible, to get them used to unusual situations and noise, for example in stations, markets, restaurants.
Vaud Police’s dog unit (K9) has one Labrador, but the rest are German or Belgian shepherds (Malinois). They are all trained to perform all police dog tasks: tracking, looking for lost objects, defending their masters, searching for explosives, and looking for drugs, for example. One dog has been trained specially to work with special intervention forces, learning to remain completely calm, quiet and still for hours, but ready to instantly move into attack mode.
Police officers carry the coffin of one of the 28 victims of Sierre's coach crash to load it into a Belgian military cargo aircraft at Sion airport, western Switzerland, Friday, March 16, 2012. Twenty-eight people, including 22 children, returning to Belgium from a skiing holiday died in a bus accident inside a tunnel in Sierre in the Swiss canton of Valais. (©2012 KEYSTONE POOL/Olivier Maire)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – (#Belgium#Sierre bus crash) The bodies of the 28 people who died Tuesday 13 March in a bus crash in Sierre, canton Valais, were flown out of the small Sion airport Friday morning at 09:00.
The small white caskets contrasted sharply with the vivid blue skies and white peaks above as they were carried to two planes brought to Switzerland by the Belgian armed services.
A police honour guard escorted them and police officers, all of whom have been involved in the massive transport, security, identification, investigation and cleanup tasks following the accident, carried them to the planes.
Several of the officers were clearly trying to hold back tears.
Belgium mourns
Belgium is officially in mourning today, as the victims, 22 of the 28 children, were flown home.
Swiss President Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf is in Belgium today for meetings with European Union leaders.
In Sion and Sierre, police stood on several corners as ambulances discreetly moved patients between hospitals, with eight of the children taken to the Sion airport to fly home in a third plane provided by Belgium.
The tunnel in Sierre, in the direction of Martigny-Lausanne, remains closed for now.
(Click on images to view larger)
Police carrying coffin to the plane at Sion airport, for the return flight to Belgium (©2012 KEYSTONE POOL/Olivier Maire)
Photos from Sion, Switzerland in canton Valais Friday morning 16 March 2012
 ©2012 KEYSTONE POOL/Olivier Maire |  ©2012 KEYSTONE POOL/Olivier Maire |
 ©2012 KEYSTONE POOL/Olivier Maire |  ©2012 KEYSTONE POOL/Olivier Mair |
 ©2012 KEYSTONE POOL/Olivier Maire |  ©2012 KEYSTONE POOL/Olivier Maire |
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Police in Russia have arrested a noted historian for keeping 29 mummies which he reportedly dug up from graveyards and dressed. He has not been identified by police but Russian media have given his name as Anatoly Moskvin, a 45-year-old historian “who was considered the ultimate expert on cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod”, according to wire service AP (Sydney Morning Herald and Moscow Times), which carries a photo released by police Monday, of one of the dolls in his apartment.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Thirty-five bodies were recovered by police in Boca del Rio in the Mexican state of Veracruz Tuesday, after they were left in two trucks abandoned on a busy rush-hour road, with the gates open and the bodies spilling out.
Police have identified seven of them, all with criminal backgrounds, according to CNN.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Air France and Airbus were called in by a French judge 19 and 20 May to provide evidence about the airplane that went down off the coast of Brazil in June 2009, reports French news service Free.
Details have not been released, but earlier in the week the BEA, the French agency charged with investigating the crash, came down hard on newspaper Figaro for publishing incorrect and unverified information. The agency said at a press briefing 16 May that all the data has now been downloaded from the black boxes found at the end of April, and “this data will now be subjected to detailed in-depth analysis. This work will take several weeks.”
The debate continues over whether to bring to the surface bodies from the June 2009 Air France crash into the ocean off the coast of Brazil, reports CNN, which reports that a French government statement says the first recovered body, still attached to a seat, was brought up. DNA samples from the body will be sent to a laboratory for analysis according to the US news service, but French media have not reported this.
Some families want their dead left at the bottom of the sea while others are asking for them to be recovered. Some but not all of the 288 bodies of those on the flight were discovered when a part of the plane was found in April 2011. The cause of the crash remains a mystery.
The process is technically complicated because the bodies have been at sea for nearly two years and can only be removed very slowly and cautiously from their burial place 3,900 metres deep.
The number of families that cannot afford to claim and bury or cremate their own people is growing, the Los Angeles county in California says. The number of people whose cremation was paid for by taxpayers rose 36 percent in 2008, over 2007, from 525 to 712. Los Angeles Times
Thirteen bodies have washed up on the Tanzanian island of Mafia (map), along with debris, and they are thought to be those of victims of the Comoros archipelago crash of a Yemeni airliner in 1 July. Officials say DNA tests will be needed to identify them. The island is south of Dar es Salaam, not far from the mainland. BBC
The Brazilian government says that two bodies have been found as well as debris that appears to be linked to the AF447 Air France flight that went missing 1 June, not far from where the plane was last heard from. Caution is being urged, however, after false alarms earlier in the week over debris spotted and that appeared initially to belong to the flight. Among the debris found: a backpack with a computer in it, a suitcase, an airline ticket. BBC, CNN, Reuters
