A CANINE COVER-UP
Police handler whose dog bit runner cleared because force didn’t tell him it was dangerous
A POLICE dog that bit a runner training for the 2016 Olympics did so after it was allowed back on duty when a previous attack was covered up.
Handler Paul Youll, 42, was accused of being in charge of a dangerous police dog after his German shepherd Ilko – described as a ‘ticking time bomb’ – attacked Jonathan Taylor as he ran in a park.
The officer had been due to stand trial last week but the case was thrown out when a court heard he was unaware the dog had been declared unsuita-ble for general police work after an attack five years earlier.
After the first incident in October 2011, West Mercia Police deemed Ilko ‘unpredict-able’ and removed him from service, yet three days later sold him to Cleveland Police for a cut-price £1,200.
Cleveland Police was given only some details of the attack and Ilko was put into general purpose training before being licensed for duty.
PC Youll, an experienced han-dler, was not told anything about the previous blot on his charge’s record.
Dismissing the case, the judge said it would be an ‘affront to the justice system’ if the officer were to be prosecuted for fail-ings by the two forces.
PC Youll’s barrister Selvaraju Ramasamy told Newcastle Crown Court: ‘We submit this dog was a ticking time bomb and should never have been licensed. This is not the fault of PC Youll but the fault of the state collectively.’
He said the handler would have acted to ‘mitigate the risks’ had he known of Ilko’s past.
Judge Stephen Earl was told in legal submissions about the 2011 attack when a police observer was put in hospital with deep wounds during a training exercise.
A safety assessment by West Mercia Police concluded: ‘The dog has shown it can bite with-out provocation. It would not be appropriate to offer a licence for this dog.’
Emails from the force showed that it needed to sell Ilko – considered a ‘good attack dog’ – to fund a replacement and Cleveland bought him for £1,200, discounted from a £2,000 asking price.
The court heard Cleveland Police Superintendent Bev Gill agreed the purchase but she said West Mercia Police was ‘remiss’ in the information her force received.
She knew of the earlier inci-dent but was not aware of the severity of the injuries and wrongly believed a handler had been bitten.
Ilko’s records were also requested by the Cleveland force but ‘not received’.
A prosecution expert witness, with more than 20 years’ expe-rience with police dogs, con-cluded: ‘I can see no rationale for purchasing a dog of this nature – it is too unpredictable for police work.’
Yet Ilko was put to work in Teesside and in June 2016 PC Youll took him to Ormesby Hall, a National Trust Georgian man-sion with parkland.
Mr Taylor, then 28, was there on a training run in the hope of qualifying for the Great Britain Olympic team when he was attacked by the dog.
Mr Taylor, who was an inter-national 5,000m runner and is now a sports scientist with Mid-dlesbrough Football Club, suf-fered severe puncture wounds to his arms and upper body.
Ilko, who had failed to respond to his handler’s commands after being let off his lead, was put down shortly afterwards.
Cleveland Police said: ‘Les-sons have been learnt.’
West Mercia Police said an Independent Office of Police Conduct investigation made ‘ no recommendations… in respect of the conduct of West Mercia Police’.