Police Dog training at Former Walden School

Chase New Homes were approached by the City of London Police Dog Section earlier in the year to discuss using the Former Walden School site for training. We are delighted to have been able to assist the Police over the last couple of months.

Simon Ashton from the City of London Police has kindly put together some information about the dogs and the training involved:

‘The City of London Police Dog Section is a unique small team of 11 handlers who are responsible for providing support to officers policing the financial district of London, they also provide support to the Metropolitan Police. Each handler is responsible for the care of two dogs, these may be a combination of a General Purpose Dog i.e. German Shepard, Drugs Cash Firearms Search Dog or an Explosives Search Dog. The dogs live at home with us, they are kept in kennels in the garden and cared for by us even on our days off. We quite literally spend more time with our four legged partners than our families, however this means the bond we have with them builds trust and ultimately a great working partnership.

I live in the Saffron Walden area and earlier this year I noticed that the venue was vacant, we are always looking for suitable venues to conduct our dog training and I contacted the company and explained the sort of activities we would be involved in on site should we be allowed. The Company have been very helpful in facilitating the rigorous training that we put both our dogs and handlers through. The venue has without doubt been the most realistic arena we have conducted training, it has allowed our teams to be put through some very realistic scenarios, this is especially pertinent to our General Purpose Dogs, we have been able to search for officers acting as trespassers/burglars both in the extensive buildings and the grounds. We call this reality training and we have even had the help from the resident caretaker in facilitating this training.

I have been informed by some of the community that the presence of the warning signs I placed around the boundary of the venue and also our activities has possibly deterred some trespassers. There was an attempted burglary a while ago and I attended with PD Cairo my GPD and he located the entry point along with the discarded tools used in the attempted burglary. He did this by his amazing sense of smell despite the incident taking place approximately 10 hours previously. My other Dog PD Lloyd a 3 year old Springer Spaniel trained to locate Drugs, Cash and Firearms recently detected 500k in cash, this had been very cleverly hidden in a void in a wall, again showing the amazing talent that these animals offer.

These results are not possible without consistent training and testing of our teams and we would like to thank the team at Chase New Homes for allowing us access to this venue. If you would like to know more about our team and our operational work including training please follow us on Twitter @CityPoliceDogs ‘