Nottinghamshire Police welcome new four legged colleague

He’s only just 13-weeks-old but Police Dog Buddy has well and truly been finding his feet with his new canine cop friends after he was welcomed to the force at the end of May.

The Labrador pup is at the very beginning of his policing career, where the aim is for him to master the skills to become a passive drugs dog.

Buddy has been funded by Nottinghamshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner Caroline Henry who agreed to pick up the £24,775 costs of PD Buddy’s training.

Commissioner Henry said: “There’s a very good reason we’re expanding our canine team – they’re absolutely brilliant at what they do.

“I’ve no doubt Buddy will serve Nottinghamshire with every bit of passion and dedication as our officers and we cannot wait to see him develop and flourish.

“Passive drugs dogs are a huge asset to the force and are already disrupting the activities of organised criminals and helping to bring more offenders to justice.”

As part of this role, he will have the very important task of detecting a host of illegal substances. This means that, once qualified, he will be out across the county with his handler both responding to incidents and as part of proactive work ongoing by various local teams.

This includes pre-planned operations, such as patrols with Operation Guardian officers in the city centre where he’ll scan people, drugs warrants where he’ll need to search houses and gardens, as well as urgent callouts where he could be asked to search a variety of vehicles.

Once he turns one, Buddy will be enrolled on a six-week drugs dog course where he’ll be trained to detect a wide range of drugs, scan people and search a variety of different environments that he may be faced with once he is a fully-fledged police dog.

His current handler, PC James Sills, says he’s already showing some promising traits.

He said: “Buddy is super active and a massively sociable dog. He just seems really keen and interested in everything around him, which to us is a really positive trait when thinking about training a dog to detect drugs.