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By Abby Patkin
Following allegations of police officers fast-forwarding through online in-service trainings, the state’s Municipal Police Training Committee now says hundreds of officers throughout Massachusetts finished some part of their training too quickly.
In a statement Monday, the agency said it recently notified 152 departments that one or more of their officers “completed some portion of one or more online in-service trainings in less than the expected run time.”
There were 487 officers whose departments were notified, the MPTC said. That tally was first reported by WBZ’s Louisa Moller.
Responsible for the development and delivery of police training standards, the MPTC suspended its online courses last month amid an investigation into “instances where some officers circumvented online training requirements,” the agency said at the time. In a Nov. 13 letter to the state’s police chiefs, MPTC Executive Director Jeff Farnsworth said some officers were “using technologies that override controls meant to prevent fast-forwarding through the training.”
According to Farnsworth, state officials “discovered instances where trainings that should take hours to complete are finished in a matter of minutes.” He said officers who completed an online course in less than the minimum runtime would forfeit the ability to do online training and be required to complete their in-service training in person.
“Any officer that has failed to complete any required training in its entirety will be required to attend in-person training and their names will be forwarded to [the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission] for failure to successfully complete in-service training,” Farnsworth wrote in his letter.
However, an MPTC spokesperson clarified Monday, “No determination has been made as to whether any of these [487] officers have failed to complete any portion of mandatory online in-service training.”
Abby Patkin is a general assignment news reporter whose work touches on public transit, crime, health, and everything in between.
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