Police diving
Police diving is a branch of professional diving carried out by police services. Police divers are usually professional police officers, and may either be employed full-time as divers or as general water police officers, or be volunteers who usually serve in other units but are called in if their diving services are required.
The duties carried out by police divers include rescue diving for underwater casualties, under the general classification of public safety diving, and forensic diving, which is search and recovery diving for evidence and bodies.
Scope
Police diving includes forensic diving – the recovery of evidence from underwater – and public safety diving. Police diving work may include:- Underwater searches
- Evidence recovery
- Submerged body recoveries
- Anti-narcotics operations
- Anti-terrorism operations
- Search and rescue operations
- Other maritime law enforcement
- Removal of Motor Vehicles submerged in water
- Air-Sea rescue operations
Forensic diving
Submerged evidence can have similar forensic value to evidence found above the water. Items recovered from immersion have been used as evidence in many cases where they have provided identifiable blood traces, fingerprints, hair and fibers, and other trace evidence. There are advantages to having a regional underwater investigation team available, but doing it well requires planning, administration, an adequate budget and due consideration of occupational health and safety issues. The working environment for underwater investigation includes a range of contaminated and inhospitable sites. Depending on the location and local procedural requirements, the teams may contain volunteers, firefighting and rescue personnel, or law enforcement personnel, and in some cases a collaboration of all of these. It is preferable that all members of an agency dive team be full-time, trained members of that agency for reasons of liability, training, policy and procedures. In some jurisdictions the required minimum certification is a recreational certification, in others an occupational qualification and registration may be stipulated. All members should be medically fit to dive, properly trained and competent to perform the tasks they may be assigned, and trained in matters of crime scene documentation and evidence handling and processing in an underwater environment.
Public safety diving
"Public safety diving" is a term coined by Steven J Linton in the 1970s to describe underwater rescue, underwater recovery and underwater investigation conducted by divers working for or under the authority of municipal, state or federal agencies. These divers are typically members of police departments, sheriff's offices, fire rescue agencies, search and rescue teams or providers of emergency medical services. Public safety divers can be paid by the agencies employing them, or be non-paid volunteers.Conditions
Due to the conditions in which accidents may happen, or where criminals may choose to dispose of evidence or their victims, police divers might need to dive under hostile environmental conditions which can include:- In canals and rivers with strong flow
- In harbors and shipping lanes
- In intake pipes, sewers, culverts, and other enclosed spaces
- In bodies of water requiring high angle rope access
- In water towers with potable water
- Sludge, mud, debris or thick vegetation
- Under ice and in frigid water
- At night or with low visibility
- In rough seas and weather
- In water contaminated with toxins or parasites
Qualifications and training
For professional police diving, the diver would in most cases be expected to be trained as a professional public safety diver, with specialized training in handling underwater forensic work. All the principles of land-based law enforcement work preserving and collecting evidence apply underwater.More specialized training, depending on local requirements, may include airborne deployment of divers and gear, climbing and rappelling, cold water and ice diving, firearms training, night diving, operation of a recompression chamber, search management, surface-supplied air diving and diving voice communication systems, hazmat diving, and penetration diving.
United States
In the US, diving training agencies such as Emergency Response Diving International, Special Response Diving International, formally the National Academy of Police Diving, Team Lifeguard Systems, and Underwater Criminal Investigators have courses to train divers in public safety diving.UCI was founded in 1987 to provide professional underwater criminal investigations training to the public safety diving community.
Special Response Diving International was formed in 1988 by a group of police divers to create a national standard for police and public safety diver training and certification in the US. It has helped provide public safety diver training for police officers, fire departments, military divers, and environmental investigators in the following locations: North America, Central America, Russia, Australia, and the Caribbean.