Police dog handler Mark Davidson retires after 50 years of service

Mark Davidson remembers his first police callout well: a drunk and disorderly incident in Christchurch’s square. He was ready to get stuck in.

There was just one small problem - he was too young to arrest the offender. Though he was a sworn police officer, the law in the early 1970s withheld powers of arrest from officers until they were 19. Davidson was 18.

“I was on the beat in Christchurch, very proud of my white helmet, looking in the shop window to make sure my white helmet was on properly and that I looked cool,” he said.

“I had to arrest a guy in the square . . . I needed to do something but I knew I had no power of arrest, so I had to ask a chap that was walking past if he could help me by doing a citizen’s arrest on this person - and he was only too happy to do that.”

Senior Sergeant Mark Davidson retired at a farewell parade in Wellington today. Photo / Jed Bradley

The member of public later told Davidson “I’ve got the best lunchtime story of anybody.”

Looking back this week over 50 years of service in the New Zealand Police, Davidson, now a 68-year-old Senior Sergeant, can point to many things that have changed in the way police operate.

For one, back when Davidson wanted to join the dog squad it was generally accepted the officer had to be married first.

One of the founding members of the New Zealand Police dog section, Colin Guppy, told Davidson he needed to find a wife if he wanted to join the squad.

“Dog handlers had to be married to be a dog handler back then . . . their view was that the dog needed a stable environment.”

This meant the dog should be in a family home, rather than a flatting situation, he said.

The rule makes it easier for Davidson to remember anniversaries – as he joined the dog squad just one month after marrying his wife in 1978.

Other things that had changed included police “walking the beat” and attending every job that was called in.

Where now the standard police roster has officers doing two night shifts at a time, in Davidson’s earlier days officers would do seven night shifts in a row.

“In that seven days, we owned Wellington,” he said.

Young police dog handler Mark Davidson in the 1970s. Photo / Supplied

“Nothing moved or breathed that we couldn’t take care of, solve, look after or do something about. If a burglary happened on your night shift you took it personally. It meant you weren’t doing your job.”

Officers on the night shift were expected to spend their evenings checking doors and windows to make sure buildings were secure against intruders.

“If you didn’t find an insecure building you were in trouble.”

Davidson remembered a sergeant saying if they couldn’t find a building that was unsecured, it meant they weren’t working hard enough.

The result was beat cops climbing fire escapes and rattling windows to make sure they’d found a building to secure before the end of their shift.

Police walking the beat during the day should be interacting with the public as much as possible, he said.

It’s different to how things are run now, as the number of people in the national headquarters continues to rise and the number of officers on frontline duties fails to keep up.

“We are a different organisation [now]. Sometimes I think we’re pulling away from the very people that support us. We don’t attend jobs now, we get people to phone some 105 number, which immediately tells people we aren’t that interested.”

Police used to attend every job, no matter how minor, he said.

Senior Sergeant Mark Davidson at his farewell parade in Wellington today. Photo / Jed Bradley

But now frontline staff were often swamped with paperwork and there was a need to “triage” jobs.

“You still can’t help but think that the 90 per cent of New Zealanders who love us, they still expect that when they phone, a police officer is going to turn up and listen and be attentive.”

He felt the “blue uniforms just got sucked away”.

Crime has changed too, with numbers of car thefts, family violence matters and gang-initiated incidents climbing.

Even the offenders were different, with Davidson describing what was previously an “almost gentlemanly” understanding between offenders and police.

“It was like ‘these are the rules’ ... if you caught them, it was fair catch. They would generally not run if they thought you could catch them. It was honour amongst thieves.

“Nowadays it’s dog-eat-dog. If you hit the ground, you can expect to be kicked in the head and severely injured. People won’t give up if they think there’s ever a chance of getting away.”

‘They give you so much’

Thankfully, there are some things that haven’t changed all that much, he said.

For example, despite new techniques and methods, training a police dog would always follow the same basic idea: build affinity, show the dog what you wanted it to do and give it genuine praise when it succeeded.

Being a dog handler was a special experience, he said. It’s you and the dog versus the world.

“They give you so much. Those days where you spend the night out [while tracking], just you and the dog and the dog lying on top of you to get some heat ... special times. They’re pretty special animals.”

New Zealand’s dog section is unlike many others in the world in that its primary focus remains on tracking.

In countries with bigger, more densely populated urban areas, it was far more difficult for dogs to track, he said.

Tracking aside, police dogs offer options that other tools simply can’t replicate.

Dogs can be used from a greater distance, around corners, through barricades, and could “think a wee bit” and use their senses – something that tasers, guns, pepper spray and other appointments can’t do.

“There will be a dog section here in Wellington in 50 years,” Davidson said, confident that the need for dogs in the police would not go away.

He said the dogs’ capacity to learn continued to amaze him.

“Every time you think you’ve reached the end of what we can get a German Shepherd to do, they confound you by accepting something else. You think that the dog has reached its limit in terms of learning but in actual fact you can keep pushing the boundaries.”

Senior Sergeant Mark Davidson and police dog Ike at Auckland Pride Parade, behind him is Sergeant Brett Marley. Photo / Supplied

Davidson had been tasked with training some of the police dogs in avalanche search and rescue work, something which he was sent to Alaska and Canada to study.

He took a dog up to help in an avalanche on Mt Ruapehu, after humans had spent hours searching. The dog found somebody in the snow within 30 seconds, he said.

Then there was their resilience and determination; dogs tracked for hours upon hours through bush and other terrain to find a missing person or escaped offender.

“You sit there having a bloody good old game with the dog, half the time you’ve forgotten about the offender, the dog is just the centre of your life. I’ve had an offender say ‘Jesus, mate, have you forgotten I’m here?’

“‘Nah, but the dog needs a pat.’”

Davidson has countless fond memories of jobs he’s attended where “but for the dog, you wouldn’t have got anywhere”.

On one occasion he and his dog had been tracking an offender for hours through the bush behind Wainuiomata.

When they finally found him, the man had an unusual response to being caught by police.

“He said ‘thank God you’re here, I’m lost’” Davidson said.

“I said ‘mate, I don’t even know where we are either!’”

The pair followed the dog, who brought them back out exactly where the police van was parked.

New Zealand Police Ted Hotham Cadet Wing – Mark Davidson was in training from 1972-1973 at Trentham Camp. Photo / Supplied

Proving their worth

For those who grew up after New Zealand developed its dog section, it can be strange to imagine the country not having police dogs.

But Davidson remembers a time when officers had to prove the worth of the section to convince police bosses to continue putting money into an admittedly “expensive” branch.

“I’m the last of the old ones,” he said.

Colin Guppy told Davidson how hard they had to work to justify their existence at the beginning.

“They had to steal everything from different police stations ... everything from furniture to typewriters to vehicles. The department gave the dog section very little.”

He recalls Guppy telling him about a job he’d done where a child had gone missing in Karori. The handlers and their dogs found the child within about one and a half hours, but were told afterwards if they hadn’t done it within two hours, the dog section would have been scrapped.

“The department needs to get good value from that and we need to constantly be reminding them of the value that we have out there.”

There is a photo on Davidson’s office wall which he said was “deeply significant” to the dog section nationally.

Senior Sergeant Mark Davidson with dog Ike at a parade at Parliament for the 75th anniversary of Women in Policing. Photo / Supplied

The photo shows another founding dog squad member, Alan Symes, who was also Davidson’s first instructor, coming through the trees while in the foreground a police dog stands over the form of a small, crying boy.

The dog in the promotional picture is Dante, one of the country’s first police dogs, whose handler was Guppy. The child in the picture is Guppy’s son, now Upper Hutt Mayor Wayne Guppy.

Davidson has handled nine dogs since joining the dog squad and said each one was the favourite until the next one was.

He joked about getting a young, new dog to train and going home at the end of the day to complain to the old dog about its replacement.

“You get home to your old dog and say “oh mate, good to see you”.

Farewell for Senior Sergeant Mark Davidson

Davidson retired with a farewell parade today, having reached the position of officer in charge of both the Wellington dog squad and the Wellington Armed Offenders Squad.

He has been slowly emptying his office of photos, keepsakes and memorabilia from his time on the job.

He said someone came in recently and asked him what his favourite thing in the room was, and Davidson “burst into tears”.

“Everything in this room is special. Every photo, every stun grenade – every single piece reminds me of something that I’ve done or the people that I’ve done things with, and it’s hard to separate that,” he said.

He described himself as a “bawly, old man” as he approached his final day on the job.

Dog handler Alan Symes with police dog Dante stand over a young Wayne Guppy (now Upper Hutt mayor) in a promotional police photo.

Davidson warned his bosses well in advance that he was planning to retire, as it would take some time to find and train replacements for his roles.

“I gave up the AOS role before Christmas ... since then it’s been in some respects a long goodbye, which has been a death by a thousand cuts.”

The past few months have been full of “lasts”. Last time on call for the AOS, last job, last debrief, last goodbyes with colleagues.

His AOS teammates have been playfully reminding him of the times he would show up to an urgent job still in his slippers because he didn’t have time to change.

“We used to laugh about the boss showing up in his tactical slippers.”

Other jobs haven’t been so light-hearted. Davidson received the Charles Upham Award for one incident in 1981 where a patient in Wellington Hospital had escaped the psychiatric ward and climbed a fire escape to the roof.

When Davidson reached the roof, it was “blowing a gale”, and the person was dangling from the rooftop by his hands.

“I was able to sort of dive across, grab his arms, and I just squatted and held him for a while.”

Saving the man’s life also earned him the Royal Humane Society bronze medal.

In 1991, he overpowered a man who had shot and killed a person in Lower Hutt. For that, he earned the New Zealand Police Gold Merit Award.

Over his career, he earned another gold merit award, a Queen’s Service Medal, and a long service award.

Davidson doesn’t know what to expect of retirement – he’s never taken more than 10 days off work at a time throughout his career.

He leads a busy life and is a skipper for the Coastguard in his spare time, so is waiting to see how retirement feels before deciding what to do.

He says he will miss the people in the job the most, as they were like a family to him. He had been speaking to many colleagues lately who reminded him about times he had “saved their bacon” on a job.

“It’s just been a fantastic ride and you get through all of that, I would still say that it’s the most fantastic job out there if you’re in the right area, which I’m lucky to have been. It’s just an adrenaline rush.”