Putting on a show.

Well the kids arrived from schools all over the County to see the brave boys and girls from the emergency services doing their bit at the County Emergency Services open day. Good for citizen focus and promoting the brand within the realms of those we can impress with our own style of portrayal of what we do in our efforts to make our part of the world a little bit safer for the population.

With members from the public service family strutting their stuff, the ambulance service, the fire service, search and rescue and various departments from the Policing fraternity putting on a show of truly momentous proportions to fly the flag and show exactly how good we are. Great entertainment for the kids, a break for the teachers and our talents embedded into a section of the community for all the right reasons. Its funny how many Police officers are happy to leave the security of their offices to come along and do their bit for the community in these circumstances without the risk of having to get involved in anything too risky, not even playing a bag snatcher. More of that later. 

The kids enjoyed the large fires, marvelled at the arrival, with all horns blazing, of the Fire Service and I must say that the plumes of smoke as the fires were extinguished was truly impressive.

Kids, being kids, seemed to enjoy all the exciting and gory stuff far more than the entertaining but informative stuff. A great narrative by the presenter describing how the exciting stuff happens, when it happens, is far more focus holding than the safety first but essentially boring things like how to approach a fire, or a good bandaging technique. These things were  lost once the real good things started to happen. Out with the boys toys to cut the top off a car, the ambulance evacuation of a heavily injured casualty (obviously simulated, blood and all, I hope) and the Police car chase around the large arena. All very exciting.

Not, however, as exciting as someone’s sniffer dog pissing on one of the brigade’s displays causing a large degree of cheering. After all they were only going to set fire to it so it didn’t matter. All of this was a mere trifle compared to the sight of a canine hot footing in pursuit of the handbag snatcher who had, by prior arrangement of course, robbed a lady teacher of her handbag and foolishly run off across the large open arena in an effort to escape the clutches of the good guys. Like a cartoon exaggeration of the archetypal pantomime baddie, the boo’s soon evaporated into muted cheers of expectation. Something was going to happen, these kids are not stupid. The National Curriculum must be working.

Enter stage left, trusty Police Dog handler, like some super hero but without the cape or underpants on the outside, large dog accompanied by even larger crown anticipation. The level of cheering increasing in a crescendo to match the closing gap between dog and bag snatcher, followed in due course by canine affixing to a body part of bag snatcher followed by enormous applause as bag snatcher hits the ground in a crumpled heap with canine on top of him. The mad man with the rather large and threatening stick got a great ovation, but only when submerged under 100lbs of determined canine attitude. I wonder how many sanctioned detections or at least NFA’s we might be able to get out of this lot ?

Give’em action every time. They can sit on bikes or in cars, climb ladders and try on helmets, they can talk on radios or be taken for a quick but safe spin in the trucks, turn on the horns and lights but nothing, and I mean nothing, nothing goes down better than one of the dogs chasing and nailing the fugitive. No amount of talking has the same effect. If only everything in life was this simple, the world would be a far better place. We were cooking, and the first bite is with the eye, as it were.

In addition to the above, the CTC Constabulary, in true Police Dogs tradition, is hosting the 15th No12 Region Dogs trials with competitors from Ruralshire Constabulary, Blandshire Constabulary and it is expected that PC Plod will be the only entrant from the Northern Sector or the Region in attendance. I haven’t had a reply from BP so don’t know if any representative will be coming from there.This is as long as they are free from all their excessive form filling and target hitting. It could be embarrassing with just the three of us but at least we can keep all the trophies. We will be doing the stuff at the weekend so there will be plenty of space to park in the car park. The budget has been cut for this so we will have to bring our own packed lunches and drinks for the dogs.

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