Anyone hear anything or know anything about the reform bill in regards to part time officers. Hearing things like they are not going to have them anymore (eliminating the use of them), to some sort of training to get them on par with FT requirements / hours... Information online from Scheft is vague.
I would assume it would be like other states with a POST system. NH for example limits the amount of total hours a PT officer can work in a year.
There are some depts in the Comm where the whole dept is part time including the chief. There are other such as my own that relies heavily on them to cover patrol shifts IE if a FT guy wants a day off we page it out to the part-timers first if there are no takers it gets offered to FT as over time if there are no takers the request in declined.
As I said in the other thread, in PA they have a POST system (called MPOETC there) and both part and full time academies have the same amount of hours, with PT academy stretched out over a longer period of time. I believe Florida does the same thing. In PA, this hasn't changed the fact that the vast, vast majority of PDs, including the ones surrounding big cities like Philly and Pittsburgh, heavily utilize part time officers. Like in MA, there are some PDs where everybody, including the chief, is part time. But because everybody has the same training, everybody is on the same level of their full time counterparts.
If the information is vague, that is because neither the Senate nor the House Bill is clear. The provisions in one or the other or both may not even make it into the actual law. The Senate version seems to be least likely to continue the current system of part time training. (And, as PG1911 said above, some states have gone to requiring full and part time officers to attend the same "full time" academy.) The House version seems to talk about a standard for part time training among the four or five standards discussed. But BOTH bills contain a section saying that part time academy trained officers will be INITIALLY certified, and during that first certified period will be required to attend additional training that is not described, but will be designed by the training agency. So, some decisions seem as though they will be made by the training agency and the new certification authority, and we don't even know what that training agency and the certification authority will be, much less what decisions they will make. That is, I assure you, as much as can be understood at this point from these two bills. They were written by legislators who are not intimately familiar with our current part time training system (if you can call it a system) in which the state's police training agency has not actually trained any part time officers for a decade or two, but has left the job instead to regional chiefs' groups and private enterprises.
