To avoid these kinds of incidents my experience leads me to recommend lots of off/lead hide and seek games as the foundation for the Police Dog training. The dog learns to work freely and being in the woods his capacity to discriminate between friendly victims and aggressive felons is very easy for him. We used other officers, colleagues, willing civilians and even my own children as lost “victims” and never had an incident. I also recommend the hold-at-bay protocol so dog can work freely and out of sight of handler and has a deep metered bark t0 fall back on instead of biting if he were to find a passive person be it criminal or civilian. Then we did the intense post up on elastic lead bite training to maximize bite capacity, but this was always complemented by the deep, metered bark and I never had a dog fail to discriminate between a civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time, or a fleeing felon. Temperament is a truly-splendored thing and that’s what we need to emphasize to have a most reliable Police Service dog whose highest calling is finding the missing child, the lost elderly and the occasional bad guy.

Coming up on @ABC11_WTVD at 5 and 6 – A grandmother in Henderson says her grandson was bit on his face and legs by a police K9, after she called authorities to help find him pic.twitter.com/UrpjdFFFJC

— Michael Perchick (@MichaelPerchick) April 4, 2018