A police dog was used to investigate an allegation that a 10-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted as part of an astonishing new tactic.
Cheshire Police announced it has welcomed 15-month-old Golden Labrador April to the force as a 'sexual crime scene search dog', one of only three in the country. PD April, handled by PC Steve Gunn, has been trained to sniff out tiny traces of sexual fluids, sometimes years after they have been deposited, which can prove essential in cases of rape or sexual assault.
PD April will work across the Cheshire and North Wales Police Alliance Dog Unit following a "rigorous" six week training programme, pioneered by Derbyshire Constabulary's dog and Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) unit, which the force says "has changed the way sexual offences are investigated".
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Within just 36 hours of returning from their training course, PD April and PC Gunn were called into action in a shocking case in the Cheshire area. CSI investigators asked for PD April's help after reports that a 10-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted.
According to Cheshire Police, PD April helped locate an alleged deposit of semen at the scene which the force will now subject to further testing.
Chief Inspector Simon Newell, Head of Alliance Policing responsible for Armed Policing and Police Dogs for Cheshire and North Wales, said: “This is an early example of how this pairing of PD April and PC Steve Gunn will be a huge asset to the Alliance, helping both Cheshire and North Wales to prosecute sexual predators and safeguard victims.
"It shows how the skills of the dogs and their handlers play a vitally important role during sexual offence investigations, in scenes where traditional methods wouldn’t work. The introduction of this specialist search dog capability within the Alliance provides exciting opportunities to demonstrate how we can contribute towards tackling Force priorities."
Derbyshire’s lead trainer, PC Dean Allen, said: “It’s fantastic to welcome April to the team. Their training as seminal fluid dogs has been extremely thorough to test and prove their ability so they can best assist CSI.
"In the last six weeks they’ve learnt to identify and search for that scent in numerous scenarios that we’ve set up for them: indoors, outdoors, in vehicles, on grass, tarmac, and materials such as bedding and clothing. The result is we can catch sexual offenders that we may not have been able to otherwise due to the very difficult nature of some sexual offence scenes.
"The dogs can indicate the presence of seminal fluid in places traditional kits can’t detect it and, once they’ve identified the scent, that piece of material or vegetation can be sent away and the extracted DNA profiled, leading to more prosecutions and offenders behind bars."
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