OLR Report 2014-R-0125 answers the questions: What is meant by lateral transfer and lateral certification with regard to the Police Officer Standards and Training Council (POST)? What steps has the legislature taken to address the lateral certification issue?
POST establishes minimum qualifications for municipal police officers (among others) in the state and enforces professional standards for certifying and decertifying them.
POST certifies new municipal police officers and police officers who move to another department (“lateral certification”), regardless of when they were last certified. Under existing law and current POST regulations, POST-certified police officers who move to another department must generally meet all the council’s entry-level requirements for new recruits, except the physical fitness test.
Under the council’s regulations in effect in 2011, POST-certified police officers who moved to another department within two years after being certified had to be certified anew in the same manner as recruits. Thus, they had to meet the council’s entry-level requirements, which include drug, polygraph, physical fitness, and psychological tests, and retake the police basic training program, even if they were recently certified. It is unclear whether the intent of the two-year rule was to (1) deter officers from smaller departments that had incurred costs to train them from moving to bigger and wealthier departments or (2) ensure that the original hiring department recouped some of its investment in training the officers.
A 2003 bill, which did not pass, would have imposed a financial penalty on municipalities that hired a POST-certified police officer from another law enforcement unit within two years of certification. It would have required such municipalities to reimburse the original department the cost of certification as follows: full cost, if the hiring took place within the first year after certification and two-thirds of the cost if the hiring took place between one and two years after certification.
In 2011, the legislature introduced a bill that would have allowed police officers to move from one department to another and not repeat the basic training program or meet entry-level requirements. Many police chiefs, and others, opposed the bill on the grounds that entry-level requirements, such as drug screening, criminal history record check, and polygraph examination, were necessary to weed out unqualified and corrupt police officers. They labelled the bill the “bad cop” bill. In response, the House removed the entry-level provision from the bill and passed the amended bill, which became PA 11-251. It allows POST-certified police officers to move to another Connecticut police department without having to repeat minimum basic training. But the officers must still meet all of the council’s entry-level requirements. A 2012 bill sought to exempt officers from the physical testing portion of the entry-level requirements. The bill did not pass, but POST subsequently changed its regulations to create this exemption.
For more information, read the full report.
