3 Columbia police officers caught cheating on mandatory training amid SC-wide scandal
Three Columbia police officers cheated on mandatory training by speeding up videos that taught them how to respond to domestic violence calls and updated them on laws, according to an audit done by the state’s criminal justice academy.
One Columbia officer sped through a video on domestic violence and the other two sped through a video on updated laws, Criminal Justice Academy Director Jackie Swindler said. Officers are required to go through both kinds of training each year.
The Columbia Police Department said that since being notified by the academy of the officers cheating through the video, all of the officers have watched the videos in their entirety.
“An internal investigation is underway and the officers will face disciplinary action that follows a progressive discipline model,” the department’s spokesperson Jennifer Timmons said.
The audit found that officers in 20 police agencies across the state were speeding up the videos, Swindler said. The criminal justice academy learned about the cheating after an officer posted about it on a Facebook group.
The officers cheated by watching training videos on cell phones and tablets where they could be sped up. Normally, an officer would view the videos on a desk or laptop computer. The criminal justice academy tracked how long officers watched the training videos and found that some weren’t spending the correct amount of time viewing them.
“We did not know you can do this,” Swindler said.
He informed the police agencies about the cheating officers and asked chiefs and sheriffs to “find out how they did it and why they did it and take some kind of corrective measure.”
The cheating scandal was first reported by WPDE in Florence. Other new outlets have since reported on it.
If cheating is discovered again, the academy could strip officers of their policing certification, meaning they couldn’t be officers in South Carolina.
Following the cheating scandal, videos will say at the end that if an officer didn’t not properly view the training video, they could be charged with a certification misconduct and their policing license could be stripped.
“This is an isolated incident we hope,” Swindler said.
The domestic violence training is particularly important in South Carolina, which has long struggled with a disproportionate amount of those cases compared to other states. In the 2010s, South Carolina ranked as on of the worst states for the rate of men who killed women.
South Carolina also has a alarming amount of violence against women by police officers. In April, The State published a story on the shocking number of officers who were arrested for domestic violence against women in the last decade. The investigation found that on average, nine police officers a year are accused of violence against women, but that number likely doesn’t show the actually amount of violence because women don’t report violence out of fear.
This story was originally published December 9, 2021 at 4:02 PM.