Officer Involved Shooting? Learn From Others' Mistakes

Come to our Investigators Conference, January 30-February 1, 2017

My agency has a team dedicated, full-time, to investigating Officer Use of Force incidents.

After my troops all received their Force Science Institute certifications, I sat down and started trying to find ongoing training for them.  I wasn't going to send them to Force Sciences over and over and AELE puts on a decent legal seminar, but that's more for my legal advisor.  There are a few traveling road shows by some detectives that have handled Officer Involved Shooting investigations, but my detectives have handled a fair amount of OIS cases themselves, and under rules that are not generally shared elsewhere.  I went to a couple of training conferences and found that many Detectives and Sergeants across the country really are kind of done with the "how" part of conducting these investigations and really are looking for tidbits that can help them in their own special rules and procedures. 

Homicide Investigator conferences are great. The problem is, spending time learning how to track things back to a suspect seems to eat 80% of the conferences while the technical information that would be more valuable for Officer Involved Shootings were bits of information here or there that could be applied sideways to our cases.

Several of my peers lamented the need for training that allows us to see what's new in technology and methods and where we could network and learn from each other's successes and missteps.  A few of us put together a non-profit membership organization that will allow for input from the membership and give us control of our own training conference where a homicide case study might not be as pertinent.  While our first conference is put together by the Board of Directors, an open period for future conferences will request input and surveys from the membership.

On top of our annual conference, we hope to provide additional training and member reviews of other training so that we can share our experience and knowledge with each other through our member-only web forum (under constructions at this moment).  Membership will also include a forceinvestigation.org email address and access to Google Apps for Work.  This benefit will allow you 30GB of cloud storage space (works with iPhone and Android and includes a phone camera PDF scanner) and video conferencing with up to 25 people online through Hangouts.  We're also building a member directory for direct access to other investigators that do what you do.

Membership is generally tax deductible as we are a 501(c)(3). We felt it important to be a non-profit educational association as we really didn't want to be perceived as biased or in it for some personal gain.  All monies received go toward trying to provide training for the investigator to improve investigations of use of force, a critically important field at this time in our history.  Just look at Albuquerque, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Seattle.  As funding sources become more consistent and as the association grows, we fully anticipate training costs for attendees will go down proportionally. 

Please take a moment to consider coming to our first conference.  It will be great and the networking alone is worth it.  To date, we will have attendees from: Seattle PD, LAPD, Baltimore PD, Arlington PD, Memphis PD, Nashville PD, Albuquerque PD, Las Vegas Metro, King County Sheriff, Salt Lake City PD, Sonoma County Sheriff, West Valley City PD, Unified PD of Greater Salt Lake, Vancouver PD BC, Washington State Patrol, Fairfield CA PD, Torrance CA PD, and others!