The Recruit With 32 Missing Hours and a Third Firearms Attempt

No - not if the director wants to sign a truthful certificate of completion.

A POST-certified basic course is approved as a package: a specified curriculum, specified performance objectives, specified hours, specified instructor qualifications, and specified evaluation methods. The hours are not bookkeeping - they are the delivery of the approved content. Waiving 24 hours means either that content was not delivered or that someone is certifying it was when it was not.

The downstream consequences are concrete:

• The recruit: his certification rests on a completion document that misstates what he did. If POST learns of it, the certificate is at risk, and so is his employment.
• The academy: the course certification itself is exposed, along with every other graduate of the class whose records are now suspect.
• The agency: it deploys an officer whose basic training record does not withstand scrutiny, which is a liability and a discovery problem in any case he touches.

Documented illness and a court subpoena are legitimate reasons for absence, and none of this is punishment. The remedy is make-up, not waiver: supervised sessions covering the same objectives with a certified instructor, an extension of the class, or graduation with the next cycle. What the director can do is build a written make-up plan with dates, hours, content, and instructor sign-off, and give the sponsoring agency a realistic graduation date. "He aced the written exam" is evidence he can learn the material; it is not evidence the material was delivered as the certified course requires.

Probably yes, but the record is what makes it defensible. Remediation and re-testing are normal in a basic academy, and this case has the elements that matter: the failures are documented, four hours of one-on-one instruction with a certified firearms instructor came between the second failure and the pass, and the passing score (88%) was earned on the approved qualification course rather than on a modified or easier version.

What the file must contain:

• Every attempt, with date, score, course of fire, and the name of the instructor administering it
• The remediation plan: what deficiency was identified (grip, trigger control, draw stroke, decision-making under the qualification course), what was taught, and how many hours
• Instructor certification credentials for anyone who scored the qualification
• The academy's written remediation policy, showing the third attempt fell inside it

The weak point in this scenario is the policy itself. If the academy has no written cap on attempts and no required remediation between attempts, an outside reviewer can argue the recruit simply kept shooting until he passed. That is a validity problem for the whole class. A short written policy - mandatory remediation between attempts, a documented skills demonstration before re-test, and a defined maximum number of attempts before the recruit is recycled - fixes the exposure. The director should write it now, even mid-cycle, and apply it prospectively.

Separate the two issues and answer both in writing.

The standard does not move. The uniform order and the patrol slot are the agency's planning decisions, made before it had a graduation date. The director's obligation is to deliver the certified course and to certify only what was completed. Framing it as "helping the recruit out" misses the point: graduating Tate with a false record does him the most harm of anyone, because it is his certificate that gets pulled years later when he is established and has a family depending on the job.

Give the agency a real date and real options. If Tate's remaining requirement is 32 hours of make-up plus the defensive-tactics practical, the director can often schedule make-up sessions in the final two weeks and administer the practical at the next scheduled offering. If that cannot be done before the class graduates, the options are: graduate with the next cycle after completing the requirements, or complete make-up under a written plan and be certified on a documented later date. The video assignment is not one of the options - watching a defensive-tactics demonstration is not the defensive-tactics practical, and no certified instructor can sign off on it.

Document the conversation. A short memo to the sponsoring agency's training lieutenant stating the missing hours, the make-up plan, the projected completion date, and the director's refusal to waive requirements protects the academy and gives the agency something to plan against. Pressure from a customer agency is not a training standard, and every academy director in the state will eventually be asked to bend one.