On the Job 

Officials at the Ohio Peace Officer Training Commission (OPOTC) are documenting who among Ohio’s 33,340 law enforcement officers have completed statutorily mandated training and reminding those who haven’t that the deadline for doing so is next year.

In 2016, OPOTC voted to change the administrative rule so that training topics mandated by the Ohio Legislature would have to be completed within two years of the mandate.

In the past, when the Legislature made new mandates, anyone going through basic training from that point forward would have to take those courses.  If someone was already an officer, he or she would not be required to take those topics unless they had a break in service of a year or more. The commission, however, decided the topics were important for all officers and set a deadline of Dec. 31, 2018, for completion.

The mandated courses, which are offered through eOPOTA, cover missing children, child abuse and neglect, missing persons, domestic violence, human trafficking, crisis intervention for rape victims, and companion animal encounters.

In February 2017, OPOTC mailed packets out to Ohio’s 951 law enforcement agencies; 448 of them responded. From those responses, academy officials are entering class-completion data into officers’ files. OPOTC will make two more queries in February and September 2018.

The chiefs and sheriffs need to report peace officers’ class completions to OPOTC by Jan. 31, 2019. Officers who don’t complete the courses on time will be in a “cease function” status effective Jan. 1, 2019.

All of the courses are available free on eOPOTA.