The Experts podcast - Season 3 Episode 4: Barking up the right tree - transcript

People and dogs have amazing bonds but for handlers in the Victoria Police Dog Squad, who work and live alongside their canine colleagues, that bond runs even deeper.

Hear from three of our elite handlers who, alongside their four-legged partners, dedicate themselves to catching crooks and sniffing out drugs and firearms.

Listen to this episode and other episodes of Victoria Police's official podcast, Police Life: The Experts.

Transcript of Police Life: The Experts podcast, Season 3 Episode 4: Barking up the right tree

Voiceover: You’re listening to Police Life: The Experts, a Victoria Police podcast shining a light on our people and their extraordinary skills.

Police Dog Archer, who is mentioned in this episode, has since passed away and is now at rest after a battle with illness. This podcast episode is dedicated to Archer and all the dogs who have faithfully served Victoria Police and the community for the past 50 years.

Voiceover: This podcast episode contains references to mental health issues and other potentially distressing content. Listener discretion is advised.

[Upbeat dramatic music with audio of dog barking and police yelling ‘Get on the ground’.]

Leading Senior Constable Cail Tuckerman: There’s no ego in dog handling. If you’ve got a big ego, you’ll get found out pretty quickly. One of our other trainers here has got a great saying, he says ‘Nice story, now show me your dog’.

[Audio of car cage opening and closing and sound of dog barking.]

Leading Senior Constable Cail Tuckerman: Come. Good girl.

[Suspenseful music.]

Voiceover: Dogs and humans have coexisted for at least fifteen thousand years, but it wasn’t until much more recently that modern police dogs began service. In 1889, London police used two bloodhounds to track serial killer Jack the Ripper. That was highly unsuccessful. One of the dogs bit the Commissioner and both later ran off.

Despite this early setback, dogs have become integral to law enforcement - in tracking offenders and missing persons, detecting contraband, and avoiding loss of life.

[Audio of dog barking and music changes to soft guitar music.]

Today, we take you inside the Victoria Police Dog Squad, celebrating its fiftieth year in 2025, to show you the work of the canine units and the handlers who devote their lives to them.

[Audio of dog barking.]

Leading Senior Constable Michelle Dench: Yeah, Devil dog, you’re a good boy, I know.

Leading Senior Constable Michelle Dench: This is Devil, he’s eight, nearly eight and a half. I’ve had him since he was eight weeks of age. He’s a Belgian shepherd, a Malinois, which is something new to the squad, and he’s just a brilliant police dog.

My name’s Michelle Dench, I’m a leading senior constable. I’ve been in the police force for 28 years now. It feels like yesterday I went in. And I’m a dog handler at the Victoria Police Dog Squad.

We both love catching crooks. We’re both obsessed with it. It’s um, I think it’s a healthy obsession, but it’s something that I think once you start doing and you know that you’re catching someone that would otherwise probably get away with the crime, it’s a little bit addictive, cause I could spend all day telling you it’s the best job in the world.

It’s, a GP is for general purpose and that means the dogs that find people. So my dogs are trained to track, to search, to subdue, which means to bite someone, and also to find property and missing people. So there’s never a, never a day that is the same, there’s never a dull day. There’s always something happening and it’s full on.

Leading Senior Constable Matt Steele: My name is Matt Steele, I’m a leading senior constable attached to the Victoria Police Dog Squad. I joined the police force in 1987, I’ll say that down low. This is my 38th year in the police force, 20 years this year at the Dog Squad so I was nearly 18 years in the job before I came to the Dog Squad.

And day one at the Dog Squad I thought, ‘Well yeah I’m done’, there is no promotion, no promotion for me, they can carry me out in a box, this is the best job in the world – love it.

My current partner is X, just the letter X, they gave me something I can spell. He’s a four-year-old Labrador. He’s had his, like me, he’s had his challenges in life. He was told he’d never be a working dog, he’s ah, he was useless.

X had every possible environmental problem you can imagine. So he was scared of people, other dogs, not just scared of water, wouldn’t even walk on wet grass, let alone try and get him to swim, wouldn’t go in cars. So off to a good start with this police dog.

And he was my first narcotics and firearms detection dog, so my first job was to try and cure all these massive environmental problems he had. And I think they tried to sack him three or four times.

Leading Senior Constable Cail Tuckerman: We take the dog’s natural abilities and ask it to do an unnatural thing and that’s regardless of the discipline that the dog is functioning, be it detection, be it general purpose, which I do.

My name’s Cail Tuckerman and I’m a leading senior constable. I’m currently at the Dog Squad. I joined Victoria Police in March of 1999. I’ve been at Dog Squad for 16 and a half years.

I wear two hats. I’m a general purpose handler so I’m still operational, I still respond to tasks, I’ve got a qualified dog, I’m training another dog to replace that dog that I’ve currently got.

But I also do training, and so part of my training involves certification. So we have standards that the dogs have to meet throughout the year. You don’t just qualify a police dog and you head off into the night and work it until it retires. You have to make qualifications and meet standards.

For dogs, their natural prey is not humans but most of the time, with general purpose work, you’re searching for people. So we’re taking the inherent abilities that the dogs has, using its nose discipline, its ability to discriminate scent, to locate scent. And when we’re apprehending people who are non-compliant, they’re biting people, that’s not a natural ability of the dog.

And I like to say, yeah, you take the movie Gladiator, and you see the Roman’s dogs getting stuck into the German hordes. There’s not much difference to the attributes that the dogs were using back in those days as to what we’re doing today. We’re still using those same core characteristics.

[Soft guitar music plays behind voiceover.]

Voiceover: The Victoria Police Dog Squad began with six dogs in 1975, and has grown to more than 50 active dogs across both the general purpose and detection disciplines. The dogs and handlers are together night and day, building the bond they need for successful partnerships.

[Audio sting and music cuts out.]

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: It’s the strongest bond, you can’t compare it. Pet owners have amazing bonds with their dogs, and I didn’t think you could get any better than that. But when you work with them, you know, 24 seven and they fight for you, they don’t care if they get hurt, they don’t consider their own safety. They put everything, their heart and soul into the work. Yeah, you can’t break that bond. it’s hard to describe.

We had a job once where there was an armed offender, he had a loaded shotgun in a vehicle in the streets of Narre Warren, and I was in the armoured vehicle with the Critical Incident Response Team.

And the car had its tyre spiked, so it was driving at 5Ks an hour and we were behind it. It eventually came to a stop

So he gets out of car, the shotgun’s in the front seat. They said, yeah, let’s send in the dog. So I got out, and pretty much as soon as I got out, and when I’m at the back of the bear cat, the armoured vehicle, I can’t see, I’m blinded.

So I just have to release the dog hoping that he’s far enough away from the car.

[Dramatic suspenseful music starts to play behind speaking.]

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: So they yelled out, dog, I’ve released Devil. I then stuck my head around so I could see what was happening. I saw Devil go on the bite. It was great, no hesitation, bit him as he’s standing at the car door.

And he’s then grabbed the shotgun and he’s trying to turn it to my dog. And he is hitting, because it was such a, you know, long shotgun, the muzzle kept hitting the door frame, so he couldn’t quite get it around.

So I made a decision to run in. I thought ‘If I don’t do this, he’s either going to shoot my dog, the CIRT member up the top of the armoured vehicle is going to shoot him, may shoot my dog in the process’.

So I made the decision to run in, grabbed his arm, which was, the shotgun was still in the car, but he had a hand on it, trying to get it around. And I’ve just pinned it to the, to the front seat of the car sort of with the muzzle facing into a park where I knew that there was no one at that time.

So with that, the CIRT members have had to run in and help me. Meanwhile, Devil is still on the bite the whole time. He didn’t budge, he did a great job. And they’ve you know grabbed this guy, pushed him to the ground. He’s managed to let go of the shotgun.

A job like that doesn’t come around very often, but you have to have the right dog that’s not gonna falter because under so much pressure, so much noise, so much yelling.

Any use of a dog in regards to a dog bite is a significant use of force. So we, and myself as a handler, is very careful as to when I deploy the dog for a bite because it gets scrutinized, and rightly so.

[Audio sting and music fades out.]

Ldg Sen Const Cail Tuckerman: One of the great things about our dogs is how their presence can generate compliance in circumstances where people are confrontational and non-compliant with the guys and girls who are on the van.

And you can turn up, times you don’t even need to get the dog out of the car. The dog barks and they’re like, ‘Well jeez, there’s a dog here’ and it’s a primal response, I think, for a lot of people that we don’t want to get bitten by dogs.

And anytime you can get compliance with non-compliant people without having to go hands-on, it’s the best possible result because, number one, our members are safe and the members of the public are safe, and then the offender is not hurt either.

[Audio sting and dramatic music plays.]

Voiceover: Handlers will work with multiple dogs over their career. But Matt took a while to strike his first successful partnership.

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: So I had like six different dogs and I was, my course lasted nearly 12 months before I hit the road. And we just ran out of dogs and a dog was donated to the office, Bozo. And Bozo used to guard a fish and chip shop in Reservoir. And the people there decided that the burglars were preferable to owning Bozo, they’d rather have the burglars than this dog.

It was just aggressive, hated the world and everyone in it. Guys used to joke saying ‘We’re gonna get an intervention order between you two because you’re always fighting each other’. So I just had to win him over.

It took me six solid weeks. Like I would go and sit in his run and not do anything, just sit in his run and let him come up to me every now and then and initiate the contact. I never tried to force a contact, and he would come up to me. And eventually he would just come up or he’d sit down next to me, and I didn’t try and push it, I’d give him a little bit of food.

Most handlers can get out the job with their dog and walk up to the people saying, ‘Yeah, what’s going on?’ ‘Oh yeah, the offender got out of the car and ran this way.’ I had to leave him in the car and the whole car was just rocking from side to side you know ‘Rah rah rah rah’, and I’d get out, ‘Which way did the crook go? OK, everyone stand back, I’m getting the dog out’.

In my mind you know, a police dog should be called Titan, Legend, Hammer of Thor, or something, you know it’s a police thing, you don’t call him Bozo and so the office gave me permission to change Bozo’s name if I wanted to.

[Suspenseful plays behind speaking.]

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: So I was trying to think of a good name for Bozo and I got called to a job in, I think it was over Clayton way, and it was a guy who had smashed a guy’s head in with a hammer. Very serious offence and he was on the run. And I got Bozo out and I was tracking and the description of this guy, who’d attacked the guy, he was an Islander, apparently quite large, very aggressive.

You know I’ve tracked him to this backyard behind a shed, and I actually thought the crook was in the shed at one stage. But he was actually under this black weed matting, he’d pulled that over the top of him, I couldn’t see him and Bozo’s barking. I’m going, ‘Police with a dog come out’ and then the weed matting starting moving. And this guy stood up and up and up and up and it was almost like, ‘Is he gonna stop growing?’ And I thought, ‘Oh god, he’s a big boy’.

But luckily for me, he was also scared of dogs and he just puts his hands in the air and goes, ‘Oh, your dog’s not gonna bite me, is he, bro?’ and I’ve gone, all good, he’s compliant, I said ‘Mate if you do exactly what you’re told, the dog’s not gonna bite you, come out’.

So I had to wait and the members got there and it took two sets of handcuffs to put this guy’s hands behind his back. And anyway, they marched him out to the front and they set him down on the ground while we’re waiting for the van to be ready.

And like most Polynesian, most Islander people, they’re actually really polite and he’s looking at me and he was sort of resigned to his fate, he looks at me and he goes, ‘Oh, what’s your dog’s name?’ and I said, ‘Oh, it’s Bozo’ and he goes, ‘Oh shit bro, I got caught by a dog called Bozo’. And it was at that moment I went, ‘That’s hilarious’. I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, you got caught by a Bozo’. So I actually decided that day I’m gonna keep the name Bozo and I loved working that dog.

Ldg Sen Const Cail Tuckerman: In general purpose work the dogs are made dangerous dogs by the nature of their training and that’s according to legislation. But dogs don’t ask to do that, we take those dogs and we train them to do those specific things. So therefore, we have an obligation on those dogs to look after them, to care for them, not just when they’re working, but when they are retired as well.

And, you know, hand on heart, I can say I’m very proud to be part of an organisation that really looks after its dogs. We sit at the apex, like think of an ethical pyramid in the way that animals should be treated, Victoria Police sits at the top of that ethical pyramid.

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: It’s intense and especially being a siege handler, you see a lot of stuff. I live off the adrenaline that the job gives me and you know the thrill of the chase, which is addictive, and sometimes that probably isn’t a good thing because I do crave it and that builds up over time.

Voiceover: While Michelle was brilliant at catching crooks, in 2015, she was focused on career progression and gained promotion to sergeant, which took her off the road into a leadership and admin role. But, soon after, she made an incredibly rare decision.

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: I think I did it for maybe 18 months. My dogs were in the back of the car, and I was getting phone calls to triage jobs across Victoria sending other handlers.

You know, there’d be a fantastic hot job somewhere and I’d have to ring such and such and go, ‘Oh, can you go to that job, please?’, I’m like, ‘I wanna go myself. Why am I doing this?’. So I just became a little bit miserable and took the step and decided to hand back my sergeant’s rank and go back to leading senior constable.

Ldg Sen Const Cail Tuckerman: Look it’s fair to say that she’s the yardstick by which we all measure ourselves and most of us come up short. She’s been the best tactical handler in Australia, or sorry in Australasia, so Australia and New Zealand, she’s probably been the best tactical handler for 10 plus years, she’s unbelievable.

If we have problems, we go to her, we ask her questions, she’s ah yeah, she’s just a phenomenal dog handler, a phenomenal trainer and a phenomenal person. She probably won’t like me saying that, though.

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: That’s very kind of them to say that. Look, I think I’ve had a significant impact on the squad in bringing us into modern dog training techniques. When I got there, we were a little bit old school, if I’m being honest, and food was never used, clickers or markers were never used. Those things were just sort of foreign to everyone.

And I was a dog trainer before I got to the dog squad, I’d done a cert III in dog training and behaviour. And it’s funny, I actually put that on my application form knowing that if they read that, they probably won’t be too happy because they wanted to train you from scratch.

You know, I went to them and said, there are better ways we can be doing things. We can be using food, we can use less compulsion, less corrections, get the dog to love what they’re doing, which works. You’ve got happier dogs, you’ve got dogs that work for you, you got better bonds with handlers and dogs. So I’m pretty proud of what I could bring to the office in that respect and thankfully this unit is very open to change and modernising dog training.

B every dog’s different. There’s no book that says this is how you train a police dog because the way that I’ve trained all my dogs across the years has been very different.

[Upbeat music plays behind voice over.]

Voiceover: Every dog is different, but all the dogs are trained to work, and if necessary, to fight for their handlers. Matt thought Bozo was the perfect police dog until he met his very next partner.

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: They gave me a dog called Nat, which was a rottweiler. You know, I was still bitter about losing Bozo. I still didn’t realise that he wasn’t the ideal police dog, but in my mind he was. And they said, oh, you’re getting this rottweiler. So I got Nat and I was really resentful. You know, ‘Why have I got this dog?’ Well, that rottweiler ended up being, probably to this day, still has the most arrests of any police dog – he made me look good. There’s one occasion I’m convinced the dog absolutely saved my life.

Voiceover: It was a sunny Sunday, and Matt assumed the shift would be a quiet one.

[Audio sting, music changes to suspenseful.]

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: You know, I’ll go to the office, do a bit of training, use the gym, that sort of thing. So then I was backing the car down my driveway and the operator goes, ‘Yeah, good timing, we were just about to call out for a dog. We’ve just had an armed robbery in Reservoir with a serious stabbing’.

And they gave me the address, I’ve put the lights and sirens on, taken off. And as I’m getting close to the job, the information’s coming back ‘This is far more serious than we realised. Looks like the person who’s been stabbed is not gonna make it’.

And so I got the initial information from the scene. The most important thing is ‘Which way did the offender go? What’s the description? Is he still armed?’. He’d been walking down the street and he had a knife concealed in a bag of fish and chips and he’d approached these people who were out for a Sunday walk. So they didn’t have their wallets or phones or anything like that, so they had nothing on them because they were just on a Sunday walk.

And he’d come up and ask them for their phone and their money and they’ve said, well, we haven’t got anything. And literally, not even an exchange, he just pulled out his big knife and just plunged into this guy’s neck and then just put it back in his fish and chip shop bag and took off.

So I got Nat out and I’m looking around the scene going, ‘How do I find a track amongst all this mayhem?’. There’s blood, there’s people, there’s a, like a cricket oval nearby and there was a whole stack of people playing cricket on the oval. And it was a dog handler’s nightmare from the point of view that ‘Where do you pick up the track?’.

So the only thing that can tell me the difference between Joe Citizen and an offender is any anomalies on the track. If the track takes a diversion that you kind of go, that’s not a normal diversion, that tells me that’s someone who’s trying to stay out of view or something like that. So I’m casting Nat around, and he picks up a track.

And then the dog makes a hard left and just hugs the fence line through these bushes. And second he did that, I went, ‘I’ve got the crook, this is the crook’s track, that’s, that’s not a normal track’.

So now I’m going from ‘Yeah, good boy’, to ‘Yeah, good boy! Good boy!’. The dog really feeds off you, so you’ve got to go, ‘Yeah, good boy, mate! That’s the way, that’s the way!’ And we’re tracking.

So over Nat goes, picks up a track, we go to the next fence. And so it’s just the same thing over and over again. Next fence, ‘Sit. Down’, whatever position you want to put them in, check over the fence, over we go. Problem with this though is you tend to go through backyards and things like that, so you lose track where you are and you try and tell D24 as best as possible.

Now I get into one of the yards and I see the fish and chip bag in the backyard and that’s great. So I’m able to give Nat a big, ‘Yeah, well done, mate, good boy! We’re on the right track?’. I rip open the chip bag, there’s no knife in there, so straight away I know I’m still dealing with an armed offender.

Then we go over another couple of fences and I finally get into a yard and it’s a really large shed. And he shows a bit of interest around this shed and I thought, ‘OK, well, I’ll clear this one as well’. What I didn’t know is if, and this is often the case, if the offenders can hear us coming over the fences and the offender knew I was coming and he hid himself right in the corner of a doorway at that shed and he was waiting to ambush me.

So I’ve popped open the shed door and I’ve sent Nat in and Nat was still on his tracking line and he’s gone in and I stepped in behind Nat, and Nat’s continued all the way in. And just luckily for me, in the peripheral, I could see him at the left-hand side of my peripheral and he’s plunged this knife down. I managed to grab, I dropped the tracking line and I grabbed both hands onto his arm and the knife’s hit me on the shoulder and he was trying to plunge it into my neck and now I’m holding on for dear life. And to this day, I still don’t know how it’s occurred, I’d somehow pressed the duress alarm on my radio. I still didn’t know I’ve done it.

And so the duress alarm has gone off and the air’s gone quiet and all they can hear is me wrestling with this crook over the air and I’m screaming out for ‘Nat, Nat!’. And he is pushing that knife as hard as he can. I can’t, I can’t even grab my firearm, I can’t do anything because I think ‘If I let go of this arm, this guy’s gonna kill me’. And he was definitely trying to do that.

And then I hear this clunking and banging, and suddenly the crook’s, almost like his legs disappeared from underneath him, this rottweiler has come in, just hit him so hard and just wrenched him, literally off his feet and dragged him to the ground, but he still had the knife. So I’ve managed to get on top, kneeling on top of his arm with the knife, and I’ve managed to get the knife out of his hand and kick it away. But he’s still fighting, even with this dog on him.

So I literally grabbed Nat by the tracking line and I have dragged the crook out of the shed with a dog attached to his leg, that’s how strong this dog was. And he’s reaching, I remember him reaching back trying to grab the knife and I’m worried now if he gets the knife, he’s gonna start stabbing my dog.

So I’m pulling as hard as I can with this dog attached to him. And while this whole mess is going on, this screaming and yelling, I have no idea where I am. And this lady, this lady comes out of her house into her backyard to see this copper with a rottweiler with an offender attached to it being dragged out of her shed and all the screaming and yelling. And I turn around to her and I’m screaming at her going, ‘What’s your address? What’s your address?’

And she starts yelling out what her address is and I’m going, ‘What street?’ and she was yelling out the street name and D24 was hearing this over the air, the street name. Anyway, the members came in and you know, I had to actually say to them, stay back, stay back until I get the dog off. Because once the dog comes off, I’ve got to be clear because Nat will be in such high drive that he would just, anyone who comes near us now is, as far as he’s concerned, is a threat. ‘Just stay back, stay back’.

So I get Nat off, they come in, they handcuff him. I literally collapsed back into the backyard on the fence. I had such an adrenaline dump. And while they’re actually handcuffing I started throwing up. And I remembered going back to the car and putting Nat in the car. And then he, and sitting on the tailgate of the car and Nat coming out and putting his head on my shoulder and I was just hugging him and I was kissing him and I was actually saying, ‘I love you, Nat. I freaking love you, mate’. And he had no idea what he’d done, he just did what he was supposed to do.

Voiceover: Every day is a training opportunity for dog and handler. Cail’s first dog was Angel, a German shepherd. One of their early jobs was a search for an elderly man missing from a nursing home.

Ldg Sen Const Cail Tuckerman: He’d been gone for several hours by the time that we got called. And so we didn’t have a direction of travel, we didn’t know where he was, just that he’d gone from this particular nursing home. And it was a job where initially you think, ‘What am I going to do?” Because I’ve got no way of tracking this person due to the time frames, I’m just going to be guessing.

It was dark at the time, it was in the evening, so I took her out the back, took her outta the car and let her off because I knew that she’d need the toilet because she’d been in the back at the car. She goes and does her thing and all of a sudden, gone, outta sight. And my first reaction is, ‘Oh this is embarrassing’.

And our dogs are taught what’s called a bark and hold. So when they find someone, they work the scent cone to source. Scent cone is basically the scent that emanates off a person when they’re hiding somewhere or when they are static. If you think about an inverted ice cream cone, as you’re sitting there, the scent is going away from you. The point of the ice cream cones is where you are. The end of it, or the funnel, you could say, spreads out.

So the dogs work that cone, they serpentine into the source and then they’ll bark. So I hadn’t seen Angel for a minute or so and I was calling her, had the torch out, all of a sudden I hear her barking. There was like a ravine down to the creek and when I shined the torch down, there’s Angel down the bottom of the creek and I could see in the torch light there was the guy in the water.

And it took us a bit to get the guy out of the creek. And I just remember the members, obviously I called the members down, and they got him out. He was unconscious. But by the time I finished dealing with Angel, he was in the ambulance. His family were all around. The family, I remember one of them approached me and wanted to know whether she could buy a burger from McDonald’s as a reward. All she wanted was her two tennis balls. In terms of training that dog, she was tennis ball mad.

Voiceover: After Nat retired, Matt was paired with rocky, a German shepherd, and continued to achieve at a high level, even though the constant high-pressure police work was proving tough.

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: Rocky didn’t quite make it to critical incidents standard, but probably the best police dog I’ve ever worked.

So I went to obviously more jobs after that. I got shot at over in Balwyn, they fired two shots at me and it’s a lot to then have those shots fired and then you get on with the track knowing someone’s still waiting to shoot at you – it’s terrifying. So back then you would do that sort of job, and they would literally roll you off to the next job and you would go from critical incident to critical incident you didn’t realise how unwell I was becoming. And because I was having so much success, it was just roll you off to the next job, roll you off to the next job. There’s another stabbing, there’s another shooting. You go to more critical incidents than any other unit in the police force.

Voiceover: In time, Matt was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety, which had built up over many years. But he wasn’t yet done with the work he loved, pairing up with a detection dog for a break from critical incidents.

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: With a lot of help and a lot of work I managed to get back through the doors of the Dog Squad. Then X dropped into my lap and I thought, “He’s, he’s like a, he’s a Labrador version of where I’m at. He’s just broken, he has no trust, he doesn’t, he scared of everything. But he’s capable of so much more, but he doesn’t realise it’. And I think that’s where I connected with him. And I was so determined to get this dog up and working.

I had to strip that dog right back, so he wouldn’t even get in the car. So every morning was me running to try and find my dog who was hiding somewhere because he didn’t want to go to work. Then there was me walking down my steps with this dog wriggling in my arms because he did want to get out to the car and sort of pushing off the cage. So I had to like strip that car down, pull the cage out of the back.

So I realised one of the driving factors behind this dog is his food drive was next level. So I pulled the cage out of the back of the car and every time he went near the cage, he got a little bit of food. He started seeing positives in the cage. Every time we went near another person, he got a little, just a tiny bit of food. So he started seeing all these positives in the environment. And because his food drive was so high, he started taking to it really quickly. Like if I can’t find him, he’ll be in the car, that’s how much he loves the car now.

[Suspenseful audio builds behind voiceover]

Voiceover: X has become one of Victoria Police’s top detection dogs, trained to locate various drugs, firearms, ammunition and cash. To test X’s nose, we hid a bullet in the room where we recorded this podcast, and he found it in less than ten seconds.

[Sound of door opening.]

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: X. That a boy, get on.

[Sound of dog sniffing around.]

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: Show me. Yep! Good boy!

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: X is kind of like Valium, surrounded by fur. And he just, he goes into the job and he just goes at his own pace and he sort of walks up to a desk and goes, ‘Yeah, there’s some cocaine in there’. And then he’ll sit down and get his feed and he’ll walk off to the next one and go, ‘Oh, there is a gun under there’.

He even found a gun in a wall. It was actually cemented into a wall, and he kept indicating. I said to the investigators, ‘I think there’s something behind this cement sheeting’. And the investigator just goes, ‘Oh yeah’, picks up a big screwdriver and just goes chunk into this wall. I think, ‘Oh my god, there better be something there’. And they’ve just smashed the wall and opened it up and there’s a shotgun there. As far as he’s concerned, gunshot residues means ‘I’m getting a feed’.

This day and age, guns are the new black for us, there’s so many guns out there. We had one crook who boasted that the police had missed two firearms at his warrant. So we got X, and X went there and he’s indicating on this tool chest and we tip all the tools out and, yeah, sure enough there’s a pen pistol and a slam gun in there that I was looking at. And I actually said to them, I said, ‘These are probably guns because X is indicating on them’ and sure enough, yeah, there was a live shotgun round in the slam gun and a 22-calibre pen pistol.

So X recovered a firearm that was used in a triple murder. It was a double murder, I say it’s a triple murder because they shot a dog as well. And as far as he was concerned, that was just worth a handful of kibbles so, you know, that’s value for money.

Voiceover: Like all policing jobs, the path to the Dog Squad begins on the divisional van.

[Upbeat music.]

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: So I joined when I was 18 and a half, or just, yeah, I turned 19 in the Academy. I was so young. I was so young. I laugh at, I laugh at how I got through because I really knew nothing. I was going to these domestics as a 19-year-old trying to tell people how to, you know, control their household and do all that, and I had no idea. I think you grow up quickly though, in this job.

I worked my younger years at Preston then Northcote. Went to Organised Crime and the Stolen Motor Vehicle Squad as a detective. Did three years there, then three years at Richmond CI or Yarra CI as a detective. That wasn’t for me. I did it for six years and I just thought oh, I don’t think I was a great detective, I just got bored. I sort of felt like I was behind a computer too much and I just wanted to be out there in the action.

So I sort of was a little bit miserable at work and – I worked with some great people, mind you – and then the Dog Squad came up and it was always in the back of my mind that that’s what I wanted to do and I applied.

There weren’t too many females at that point at the Dog Squad. And I thought, ‘All right, this is for a GP spot, general purpose, you’ve got to be really fit. I need to be the fittest applicant to get to this role’.

You know, I was told ‘There’s no way they’re gonna select you, you’re just, you’re wasting your time’. I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna prove you wrong’.

Voiceover: Michelle hired a trainer that worked with Special Operations Group hopefuls when they need to achieve peak fitness.

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: He came up with this brilliant programme and I worked my backside off for months and months and months to get as fit as I possibly could. And yeah, I got selected, I think, I think it was the number one out of 60. I was the first one to get here out of 60 applicants, which was pretty amazing. And, yeah, I’m very grateful that, you know, they gave me an opportunity and, yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever looked back.

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: I was a trainee constable at Cheltenham Police Station in ’87 and I remember being involved in this pursuit. And we lost the vehicle and literally got it back 20 seconds, 30 seconds after we lost it. And door was open, industrial area in Cheltenham, crook gone, no idea. Did he go left, did he go right? Did he, was he taken up by aliens? I have no idea and I remember wanting to jump out of the car and the old senior connie in the car saying, ‘Nah, nah, stay, we’ll call for a dog’.

And I remember the dog handler arriving. And it was the ‘80s, so he got out with his sideburns and his moustache and walked over to the car and goes, ‘Oh, where have you guys walked?’ and the senior connie goes, ‘Nah, nah, we haven’t walked anywhere. We found the car, we left it’. It was about three o’clock in the morning. And he goes, ‘Yep, no problems’. He goes back to the car and he gets out this German shepherd and this German shepherd is just an amazing looking animal. Gets out and he harnesses it up and he comes over and he looks at me and he goes, ‘You wanna come for a run?’ And I’m going, ‘Oh, OK’.

And he had just simple little commands. He goes, ‘Stay close to me and don’t step on my bloody tracking line’. And I had no idea what this guy was doing. Like, he starts casting this dog around so I’m just trying to stay as close to him as possible. And I didn’t see what he was seeing and suddenly he just goes, ‘Yeah, good boy, good, boy’ and off we go. And it went for what seemed forever and then we’d stop and he’d do his magic again. And suddenly he’d ‘Good boy’ and we’re off again.

We ended up at an old disused school. And as we get to the school, he’s actually turned me, he goes, ‘Yeah, we got him, we got him’. And the dog starts running up and down the bottom of the school and he’s going ‘Yeah he’s under the school’. He opens up a little trap door on the side of the school and the dog just starts barking and he goes ‘Mate either you come out the dog’s coming in’ and I just hear this voice going ‘Yeah all right I’m coming out’. And I’m going ‘What is this voodoo? What is, what have you just done?’ and you know we’re kilometres away from where the stolen car was. You know, for me, it was just this magic invisible trail that this dog had followed at three o’clock in the morning.

And the crook came crawling out and I handcuffed him and the dog was barking. You know you just knew and you felt 10 foot tall because this crook’s not gonna fight you, he’s not going to do anything because this dog is scary. I’m scared of the dog. And yeah, handcuffed him and then he just says to the crook, ‘What’s your name?’ and crook tells him his name, he writes it down and then he goes. You know, and I waited there for the van to turn up so we could put this guy in the van. And I’m going, ‘Oh my God, I want that job’.

I went to CIs and Surveillance and I spent 12 years doing Surveillance, which actually, I believe helped me become a better handler because it was always, Surveillance was almost like a study in crooks. Dog Squad was always in the back of my mind, always wanted to go there. And then I had kids and that sort of put things on hold for a little bit and there was other things in my life and my wife’s occupation and things she wanted to do. And then, I think I was working for the National Crime Authority at the time and an opportunity came up to go to the Dog Squad. And I was doing some work up in Sydney and I just went, this is it, this the time.

I was 37 years old and probably the fittest I’d ever been in my life, believe it or not, at 37. I lost track of the amount of kilometres I’d run and the push-ups I did and the fences I jumped and you’re constantly competing with everybody there. At the end of the day, they go, ‘Oh, by the way, we want a 1,000 word essay’, and they give you a topic, and you need to go home, write it, and deliver it tomorrow. So you couldn’t just go home and sleep.

And so when they would give you this thing to write at the end of the day, they go, ‘Well, how badly do you want this job? Are you prepared to stay up and write this essay and come back and deliver it? Or are you the kind of person go, ‘Well, this is stupid, this is not needed’’. There were reasons behind that sort of thing. They were trying to find out your psychology, because you get there, they’ll give you a dog, they’ll give your car and you’re your own boss.

Voiceover: It took Cail ten years to achieve his place in the Dog Squad after learning his policing trade on the divisional van. There’s a long queue of applicants but there’s one attribute common to those who succeed.

Ldg Sen Const Cail Tuckerman: I’d say passion. Passion for the job and really wanting to get the best out of your performance. Never being satisfied with anything. That’s the other really important thing. Dog handlers, you never know everything about the game. We consider it an apprenticeship really. Your first four years you’re learning this craft, learning the game, then you start getting a little bit better and you start feeling comfortable at the jobs you go to, but you’d never know everything.

So you’ve got to actually problem solve, not just the issue with, potential training issue with your dog, but it’s where might that offender that you’re looking for have run. So middle of the night, stolen car that’s abandoned, you might not be getting a track straight away, you’re having a look at, what’s the likelihood? Where would that person go? Having that ability to problem solve, that ability to focus on multiple tasks if you can do that.

Because you’ve got to be able to look at your dog, maintain your situational awareness, talk on the radio, know where you’re going, provide updates, control your security, all those types of things. Those are all the attributes that make up a good handler.

There’s no ego in dog handling. If you’ve got a big ego, you’ll get found out pretty quickly. One of our other trainers here has got a great saying, ‘He says, nice story, now show me your dog’. And that’s very true about dog handling. You can talk, you can talk a big game, you can talk about how wonderful it is, but until you get out there and do it and show people. And we’ve all mucked up jobs, we’ve all contaminated tracks and missed crooks that we think we should have caught and so forth.

Voiceover: And it’s the dog that often brings handlers down to earth.

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: I’ve been bitten, oh, my dog bites me all the time. It’s a love bite, but he gets very frustrated when I don’t release him. And especially if he can see the suspect, he just gives me little nips.

Voiceover: Being a police dog handler is a 24 hour a day job. The canine partner becomes a part of the family.

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: There’s an old school thought, ‘Oh, your dog’s a tool of the trade’. And yeah, Victoria Police owns my dogs, and they are a tool of the trade, but at home, they’re my family. And I think, you know, most of the guys and girls here would say that too, because my dogs are part of the family. I don’t have kids, so maybe there’s maybe a deeper connection there, I’m not sure.

But when they’re at home they’re inside at times with me. You know, I believe that that’s a really important part of being a dog handler, is you need to teach them to relax, so my dogs have time when they come inside and they’re relaxed. The younger one’s in a crate to teach him to relax, then they’ll go out and sleep in their runs and everything, because at the end of the day they’re working dogs.

Ldg Sen Const Cail Tuckerman: I have three dogs. So I have a retired dog, an operational dog, and the dog I’m training, so I have lot of dog focus throughout my life. My wife puts her foot down and insists on at least one block of leave a year where I put the dogs in kennels here at Attwood for at least a week and if we’re not going away or anything. But I at least have a week without the dogs at home throughout the year and that’s a good pressure release as well.

I always tell people who want to come to the Dog Squad that your family, if you’ve got a family, having them on board is just vital for you be a successful dog handler. Because the dog is so integral to your working life but also your home life that unless it’s accepted by your family you’re going to have dramas because you can’t just, it’s not like a pet, you can’t leave the dog at home overnight or you can’t go away for the weekend and have the neighbour come over and let the dog out and feed the dog.

Voiceover: Cail’s now retired dog Jet would also occasionally put the bite on his handler.

Ldg Sen Const Cail Tuckerman: He was an equal opportunity biter, he bit me as much as he bit other people. Yeah, he was a bit of a redirector that boy.

Voiceover: Jet left a few scars on his handler but finished his career with Cail and now he’s retired to the Tuckerman family home.

Ldg Sen Const Cail Tuckerman: Oh he’s nearly 12, so yeah, no, he’s good value. Loves my wife now more than he loves me. So he’s as big as a house because she feeds him pizzas and bloomin’ cheese toasties and so forth. He’s slowing down. He’s got, you know, he’s got arthritis and the issues that caused him to be retired were some back-end problems. And yeah so he spends a lot of time in a crate inside home now, just living his best life and growling at me when I walk past because I’m not giving him food and the wife is.

Voiceover: Some handlers have multiple dogs on the go. They care for their retired dog, and an operational dog while training the next generation.

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: My puppy is 16 months, Grizzly, and he’s barely ever been corrected, because it’s all getting him to do what he loves to do through food, through games, through bite games, you know, biting the wedge, biting the ball. So he just thinks the world is one big game at the moment. Now there will be a time that I may need to add a little bit of compulsion, but most of it, 95 per cent of it is positive techniques.

And we’re getting more through, so dogs that we may have previously sacked are now passing because we’ve got so many tools in our toolbox to be able to train these dogs. So we’re getting better results and better trained dogs. Like the dogs that were put out on the road now are far better than the dogs we were putting out on the road 10 years ago, and far better that the dogs we were putting out on the road 20 years ago.

Voiceover: Officers tend to stay in the Dog Squad as long as they can meet the physical and psychological demands.

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: I’d be a GP handler until I was 60 if I can. I can’t give it up. As I said before, it’s an addiction of mine. I just love it.

So my plan going forward is, I’ll get Grizzly qualified, my current dog in training and work the road with him for hopefully a significant amount of time, for as long as my body will hold up because I’m 47. And I just want to do it for as long as I can and then maybe half way through Grizzly’s career I’ll slowly transition to the training role, training wing and go down that space because I do enjoy the training side of it and I’m involved with the training sort of from an operational field I guess.

Ldg Sen Const Cail Tuckerman: Worst day at the dog squad? Probably when you have to put your dog down.

One of the guys years ago, his dog, when his dog had to be euthanised, what they did was they got one of our bite sleeves, because the dog loved, all the dogs love biting, love biting the sleeves. The vets put in a really long line into the dog, and they took the dog outside, the dog was on the bite, put him to sleep. Beautiful. Best way for a dog to go.

Ldg Sen Const Michelle Dench: That’s the worst day of this job is when you lose your partner, and I struggle to talk about it because, yeah I’ve only, sorry, I’ve only lost one. And I’ve got my old boy Archer who’s not far off, but it’s, yeah, it’s a hard day. And when I lose this dog, Devil, phew, I don’t think you’ll see me for a month, because, yeah, you just.. Yeah, that bond as we spoke about earlier, it’s just irreplaceable when they put their backside on the line for you. They give you everything, you spend more time with your dog than you do your own partner, cause, you know, you go to work with them as well – it’s pretty special.

So yeah, I’ve been very fortunate to, I’ve only lost one and yeah, I know my old boy Archer’s not too far off. And that’s where animals are just, not just police dogs, but all animals, you know, they’re amazing. They’re so tough, they don’t tell you, they don’t complain like we would, they just live until they tell you that they can’t do it any longer.

Voiceover: Despite the heartbreak that comes with losing a valued companion, the handlers know its part and parcel of the job they love so much.

Ldg Sen Const Matt Steele: I remember when I first got to the Dog Squad, one of the people said to me, ‘Oh, do you feel you need to love dogs?’. And it was almost like a trick question. One of the older, old style handlers, ‘Do you feel you need love dogs to be here?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t feel that, I think it would certainly help’. And they sort of laughed and said, ‘No, no they’re just tools. They’re just tools’. This was the old mentality with the dogs, ‘They’re just tools, you don’t need to love them’.

And I, to this day, I disagree with that statement. If you absolutely love that animal, they will work harder for you. Yeah you don’t need to love the dog to work with the Dog Squad, but I reckon that absolutely helps that partnership. And, you know, we talk about our bosses and if you love your boss, you’ll work hard for your boss. And I hope that, I say I’m the dog’s boss, technically I am. But I’d like to think that they work hard for me because they love me, and they love what they do.

Voiceover: A reminder that if any of the themes in this episode have had an impact on you, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14. If life is in danger, call Triple Zero (000).

Voiceover: Police Life: The Experts is a Victoria Police production.

Your host is Belinda Batty.

It was written by Adam Shand.

It was produced by Adam Shand, Jesse Wray-McCann and Danielle Ford.

The senior producer was Ros Jaguar.

Audio production and original music by Mat Dwyer.

Theme song by Veaceslav Draganov.

Executive produced by Beck Angel.

This podcast was created by the Media, Communications and Engagement Department at Victoria Police.