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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   867 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 18, 2026

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I've been watching a lot of bodycam videos, many of which involve police dogs, and yeah, the image we're given in the media is that they are extremely smart and obedient, but it seems quite different from that in application. You see the officer yelling at the suspect, seemingly getting the dog excited and riled up, releasing the dog after giving a verbal order to bite in another language (I've seen german often) and then once the dog bites the suspect the handler tries to get him to stop with varying degrees of success. At the very least it takes several seconds, a lot of pulling and repeated yelling in german. The dog almost always look too excited to listen or care about orders and in multiple videos I've seen it switch to biting nearby officers when they assist in securing the suspect.

Now I'm sure the distinction is not because no one thought of training obedient, smart police dogs, or that such dogs are impossible. Seeing eye dogs are capable of calmly completing rather complex (for a dog) tasks in a much more controlled way, but maybe there's something about the expected duty that makes excitable, chaos monster dogs more suited for the job, maybe they're less easily convinced or redirected by the suspect? Maybe the police likes the intimidation factor of a very eager dog vs one that seems completely tamed; they want the suspect to think of what damage the dog the cops barely seem to be able to control will do rather than think of the damage a dog that will immediately stop when asked to can do.

I think most of that is on purpose. The German (or in some cases Dutch) is deliberate as if you train the dog in English, the perp could easily give commands in English that the dog would understand. As a bonus it can’t be confused by other English chatter. The dog isn’t listening for the English words “no” “down” or “stop”, all of which a person might shout when a dog is running at them ready to attack. They listen for “nein” and “fuss”. And having the dog trained to obey anyone on scene is likewise a problem as you don’t want crooks to be able to simply Duolingo some German and tell your police dog to go away.

Yes, the talking in German I understand and it makes sense. It's the "dog isn't trained to be able to stop immediately on-command (in German by its handler)" part that is less straightforward and less true to the image of smart and obedient police dogs the public has.

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