After months of drilling and exercises, Winkler Police Service's Constable Sean O'Brien and Police Service Dog Juno have successfully completed training. 

"The tools Juno and I bring to the community are a huge benefit to our police service and our city," O'Brien says. "We have a very specialized tool that can do a lot of things to reduce crime in Winkler and the surrounding area."

While O'Brien was paired up with Juno over a year ago, for the past four months he's been travelling to Winnipeg four days a week for training.

"It went really well," he says, adding the challenge is working with a high-energy dog. "It takes time to figure out how you work together, and what cues the handler needs to give to the dog... it's an interesting concept and took the longest to learn."

While O'Brien says he was prepared for the amount of work ahead of him, the four-month training to become certified was intense, "it was a lot, it wasn't just four days a week, we are always out in the community training... there's always more to it than you think."

Juno is able to follow a scent over a kilometre and a half with multiple turns while tracking persons of interest or items, as well as apprehending suspects. Juno can now also track through residential environments, navigating backyards and even able to jump over fences.

O'Brien notes tracking is essentially searching for an environmental disturbance. "As someone runs or, or walks, whatever their feet are hitting is causing a disturbance in the ground. So what we've trained the dogs to do is basically read the ground disturbance by scent, They use that scent in order to get to a reward. So she always gets to play at the end."

While it sounds like a serious life for a dog, O'Brien explains the training is essentially a game for the high-energy Belgian Malinois. "We always make it fun, it's all positive during our tracks."

Along with being a police asset, Juno has already been a great way to connect with the community. O'Brien notes they've visited almost every school in the area. "It's opened a lot of doors for our service and people have reached out to us as well."

Winkler's first police service dog, Tika, was retired in 2017 after serving the community for seven years. The K-9 unit was renewed thanks to an $87,000 grant from the province's criminal property forfeiture fund.