Inside the Police Scotland dog unit finding missing people

Police Dog Nova has picked up the scent of a "missing person" and she's using her powerful sense of smell to track them down.

Her handler, PC Heather Porter, has been in the Police Scotland dog unit working with PD Nova for five years.

And in that time they have found dozens of missing persons, a part of the role Heather says leaves her with a sense of "unbelievable elation".

The Glasgow Times has joined the dog unit on a training exercise in Ayrshire where we see PD Nova show off her incredible tracking skills.

Heather said: "She astounds me sometimes, some of the things she does." 

While the dogs are used in a variety of incidents, tracing missing persons is a huge part of the role.

Heather remembers two incidents in particular that stay with her.

One did not have a happy outcome but, she says, it is important to get people home to their loved ones and give them a sense of "closure".

She said: "We were in an area that had already been searched and I was asked to concentrate more on the wooded side of the area.

"But she kept taking me to the water and I kept saying, 'no, it's the woods, go to the woods', but she kept continually going back to this area of bushes.

"I got on my hands and knees with my torch and I shined the light down and there he was.

"It's a massive result for the family because it gives them closure."

In another search, a young man had been in a taxi queue but had suffered a head injury, wandered off and vanished.

Local officers had already patrolled a nearby cemetery but hadn't found the man.

Heather thought she and PD Nova, a six-year-old Belgium malinois, would take another look – and they found him.

She said: "He only had one shoe, he was soaked through, really disorientated, so the potential was that if I hadn't got him it would have been a not a good outcome.

"I was really pleased with her for that."

Heather's colleague Sergeant Barry Stokes has been in the police for 20 years but in the dog unit for just 12 weeks.

While he's adjusting to being the new kid on the block, despite two decades of experience, he values the work the unit carries out.

Barry said: "I've had dogs all my life but never working dogs and for the first few weeks I couldn't tell you what end was the teeth and what end was the tail.

"But I've learned so much about what the dogs can do. What they bring to the organisation is massive and totally underrated.

"It's brilliant to come to your work to do something you enjoy while also making a massive difference. 

"Finding vulnerable people, there probably isn't any higher satisfaction than finding someone with dementia at 3am."

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Offices will have a general purpose dog and a specialist dog so Heather has Nova but also Kodi, a sprocker spaniel with a drugs and firearms speciality. 

PC Gordon Mitchell, who heads up the unit, is overseeing the training exercise. 

He explains that the dog unit will take a call from divisional officers who alert them to a missing person and give them a location to search.

As long as that area is "relatively sterile", Gordon says, a dog will be able to pick up a scent.

The police dogs are on a long harness and they lead the way.

We watch as PD Nova sniffs the air and searches around but as soon as she finds a track her ears change, her body shape changes and her nose goes down to follow the scent. 

She is tracking the footsteps laid earlier by Gordon and she will keep going until the end.

If the dogs find a piece of property from a missing person then they will lie down next to it, as Nova does, while others will bark or stand over the property.

They are trained to find items but the handler has no control over how they indicate the find - and each dog will do something different.

The dogs live with their handlers and are trained by them from puppies.

Gordon describes how they are taught to follow a scent trail by their handlers creating a footstep trail and putting food on it so the dog equates food to picking up a scent.

The area used for creating the scent square must be completely sterile so Gordon borrowed his neighbour's unused back garden for training his dog.

Eventually food is replaced with a favourite toy, the tracks becomes longer and dogs are trained on different surfaces such as tarmac or woodland.

The dogs can even track across water such as a burn and they can travel following a scent trail for miles at a time.    

Gordon said: "At the moment as we stand here all the scent we're producing, it could be the dead skin, make-up, perfume, aftershave, if you've not showered it's yesterday's aftershave that's flaking off.

"And if you can imagine you've got a tiny hose coming out of the top of your head and that is emitting scent constantly.

"The scent falls down, across you and on to the ground.

"We can't see it and it's highly unlikely we will ever be able to smell it but the dogs' noses are so finely tuned they pretty much will smell your aftershave and what kind of boots you were wearing, their noses are that sensitive." 

Although it's a scene common in film and television, it's a fallacy that dogs are given an item from the missing person to sniff to help them find a trail.

Gordon said: "I might have three different aftershaves I wear, I might have used a different show gel, I might have bought a different item of clothing.

"I need to know how a person smells right now."

Handlers and dogs build up incredibly close relationships and Gordon become emotional when he talks about his former dog, Vinnie, who died from cancer before he could finish his service.

READ MORE: Police Scotland uses drones to seach for missing persons

He talks of one incident where an 82-year-old grandad with dementia had gone missing from his Ayrshire home in torrential rain.

Gordon said: "The weather was absolutely horrendous. I took myself out for a walk and let my dog go with the command, 'find him'.

"The dog started sniffing about and indicated to something - it was a pair of shoes laid out like someone had just stepped out of them.

"I set my dog off to the woods and he took off. 

"My dog was usually very responsive and they are trained to come back on command but he wasn't coming back.

"I shouted several times and he didn't come back so I thought, 'there's something not right'."

Gordon went in to the "misty, wet and dark" woods to investigate why PD Vinnie was failing to return. 

He added: "And then I just saw the tops of his ears pointing up above the top of a ditch and I looked over and he was actually cuddled in to the gentleman.

"Vinnie was a big German shepherd and the man was holding him and Vinnie was cuddled in. 

"Until I retire it's going to be one of the moments in my service that I remember."

The dog unit chooses "robust" breeds with a drive to work, such as German shepherds.

Dutch herders and Belgium malinois are favoured by the dog unit and they undergo 13 weeks of training.  

These can be intimidating dogs yet, Gordon says, they have an empathy that cannot be trained.

He added: "We train the dogs to bite bad guys and the dogs are trained not to bite unless they're told.

"Vinnie was an intimidating dog, he was 40kg and a big, strong boy but on the occasions that he has found missing persons it was bizarre because he always changed his demeanour.

"He wouldn't bark and he would cuddle up to people - and we don't train that but it's almost like they've got another sense within them."