Meet the police dog who is changing the way sex crimes are investigated

Police Dog April went straight into action 36 hours after returning from six weeks of training to assist an investigation into an allegation of a sexual assault on a young girl in Cheshire.

PD April is part of the Cheshire and North Wales Police Alliance Dog Unit and she is one of only three dogs in the UK to be trained to detect seminal fluid only, which police hope will help put more sexual offenders behind bars.

North Wales Police, which covers the Wrexham area, believes it has "changed the way sexual offences are investigated." PD April is known as a sexual crime scene search dog.

PD April's nose is so sharp that she can detect as little as 0.016ml of semen, sometimes years after it has been deposited.

The training is part of a highly successful forensic search dog project, pioneered by Derbyshire Constabulary and developed by its dog section and Crime Scene Investigators (CSI).

PD April, a 15-month-old Golden Labrador, can now pinpoint tiny amounts of sexual fluid without being distracted by other scents.

Chief Inspector Simon Newell – head of alliance policing responsible for armed policing and police dogs for Cheshire and North Wales, said: “This is an early example of how this pairing of PD April and her handler PC Steve Gunn will be a huge asset to the Alliance, helping both Cheshire and North Wales to prosecute sexual predators and safeguard victims.

“It shows how the skills of the dogs and their handlers play a vitally important role during sexual offence investigations, in scenes where traditional methods wouldn’t work.

“The introduction of this specialist search dog capability within the Alliance provides exciting opportunities to demonstrate how we can contribute towards tackling Force priorities”.

The Alliance Dog Unit, established in 2015, provides the capability to respond dynamically to incidents requiring police dog response across Cheshire and North Wales.

Derbyshire’s lead trainer, PC Dean Allen, said: “It’s fantastic to welcome April to the team. Their training as seminal fluid dogs has been extremely thorough to test and prove their ability so they can best assist CSI.

“In the last six weeks they’ve learnt to identify and search for that scent in numerous scenarios that we’ve set up for them: indoors, outdoors, in vehicles, on grass, tarmac, and materials such as bedding and clothing.

“The result is we can catch sexual offenders that we may not have been able to otherwise due to the very difficult nature of some sexual offence scenes.

“The dogs can indicate the presence of seminal fluid in places traditional kits can’t detect it and, once they’ve identified the scent, that piece of material or vegetation can be sent away and the extracted DNA profiled, leading to more prosecutions and offenders behind bars."