Trained dogs are valuable partners for Turkish law enforcement officers, performing a number of tasks from searching for missing persons to riot control, from detection of explosives to sniffing out drugs.
Throughout their dangerous tasks, they accompany fellow police officers and their handlers who benefit from their sharp senses and harmony with human beings.
Just like non-canine officers, dogs undergo an elimination process before they are enlisted with the force. Most are recruited while they are still puppies and after a selection process, start their strict training. Like their human counterparts, they are separated into different classes of the police force, based on their skills and the traits determined by their breed. Every dog is coupled with a trainer who also receives training at a school for police dog handlers in the capital Ankara before they are partnered with their canine buddies.
In Istanbul, dogs work as "official personnel" of riot police, counter-narcotics police, bomb disposal units and public order branches, and each has a police ID just like their human partners.
A veteran police dog handler of more than two decades recounted the partnership and praised the skills of his canine partner working at the Istanbul Airport. The handler, who did not disclose his name, said dogs undergo a 14-week training program before they are formally assigned to police tasks, but their training continues even as they work. He said every dog starts their day with health checks and care before they are given "free time" when they can rest or play. Later, they engage in their daily training, finding materials hidden by fellow officers by sniffing them out.
"We are like a family to them. They are truly our friends like other colleagues. I have two kids and my dog became my third son," the handler said about his partner. He says that in counter-narcotics operations, dogs were very valuable as they can "do a task that would take hundreds of other police officers to do," and easily detect things "you may overlook." "It can take us days to find hidden stashes. But I remember one day that it took only one sniff for the dog to find drugs hidden inside a shipment of stone blocks," he said.
Elsewhere, bomb sniffer dogs are credited with playing an instrumental role in facilitating the work of the police. Along with responding to potential bomb alerts, dogs are employed to search for explosives in crowded venues for scheduled political rallies or searching venues of events attended by high-profile figures, from the president to ministers.
In the Missing Persons branch of the Public Order department, sniffer dogs are central to searching for the missing or at least, their bodies. Their keen olfactory memory helps officers track down the missing people by simply getting the dog to sniff a piece of cloth or other material belonging or touched by the wanted person. They are also helpful in locating bodies, and their training helps them focus on and identify body odors. Their natural skills help them in distinguishing the odor of human corpses from animal carcasses.
As part of their training, the dogs are asked to find surgical masks worn by trainers and hidden in a vast land, or find a frozen wet tissue with the odor of a dead body that is buried under the soil. It takes only minutes for them to locate both, a task that would otherwise take a dozen police officers and a whole day of constant digging.
Soner Varlı, handler for a dog from the Missing Persons branch, said though each person has a distinct smell, all cadavers have the same odor and this facilitates the job of dogs. Varlı said that the dogs not only work on locating the bodies of people who died as a result of criminal acts but also in disaster zones. "We use them in flood-hit areas, in other disaster-hit areas to find the missing," Varlı said. "They can search anywhere, no matter the geography, remoteness or general condition of the location, except in water," he added.