CSI dog that can sniff sperm recruited to help find sex offenders

By Izzy Hawksworth via SWNS

A police force is hoping its latest canine recruit will help put more sex offenders behind bars by sniffing out sperm.

The Cheshire and North Wales Police Alliance Dog Unit in the UK have welcomed April to the force, a specially trained dog who is trained to only detect seminal fluid.

She is one of only three dogs in the UK that is trained to detect the male bodily fluid - with the hope that it puts more sexual offenders behind bars.

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

Her nose is so sharp that she can detect as little as 0.016ml (2.25 fluid ounces) of semen, sometimes years after it has been deposited.

The training is part of a successful forensic search dog project by Derbyshire Constabulary and crime scene investigators (CSI).

And after just 36 hours of completing her six-week training, April and her handler PC Dunn were asked to assist CSI after a 10-year-old girl had allegedly been assaulted.

Chief Inspector Simon Newe said: “This is an early example of how this pairing of PD April and PC Steve Gunn will be a massive 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 offense 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."

PC Allen Dean, who trained April, 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 learned 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 offense 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."