Hinted at in the Metro article ("Breeders in the UK only care about looks"), it's also true in the US that hip displasia is common to the breed, making them useless for police work.
So police in the US have been importing dogs from Eastern Europe for years.
It's only fair. The dogs had to learn the German words, too.
Cute photo.
I live in a small town in the U.S., and our local police dog is trained to respond to German commands. His trainer wasn't "forced" to learn them (I don't know why the article is so up-in-arms about this), it was simply a part of the training process... Besides, it's a safety measure for the police officer: If the dog only responds to German commands, then the "bad guys" can't yell out counter-commands to it in English.
GSDs rule!! Cuties.
I have to commit, that the command for bite is "fass".
And the translation of bite is beißen (beissen) not bissen 
Personally, I don't care where the dogs come from if they're the best for the job.
Cheers for the info John, I hadn't realised that.
Fair point andiscandis! Heh heh.
Hi again KansasCow! I'm not sure the article is 'up in arms', it's just the 'newspaper' I chose to link to, The Metro, is a tabloid freebie in the real world, so it's a bit lowest common denominator in its style of journalism. It was also the first UK paper website to run this story and the first link I found. Later on all the nationals and the BBC ran the story.
Re the different language being a safety measure, I'd never thought about that before. Great thinking!
Hi Lisa.
Heh heh, many thanks for your translation justme! 
I cannot let my spelling error go uncorrected: it's dysplasia, not displasia
http://www.offa.org/hipstatbreed.html
Heh heh, I'm like that as well. I hate making typos/spelling mistakes.
Cheers for that John!
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