Former local police chief helps create online police training
WEAKLEY COUNTY, Tenn. — One local business is working to change the way law enforcement is trained all over the country to keep your community safe.
“I’m an advocate that we need to train constantly, as many cutting edge areas of law enforcement as we can,” former Martin Police Chief David Moore said. “The best jobs I ever had were as a training officer, and I have always been a passionate trainer. I like to deliver as much training, quality training, to my officers as I can.”
He left the Martin Police Department in 2015 to create a more efficient way of training law enforcement officers.
“All you have to do is turn on the local news and find out that there’s a training issue somewhere in the company as it relates to law enforcement almost daily,” he said.
Moore is now the vice president of the V-Academy, an online training academy for law enforcement. More than 50 percent of Tennessee agencies and departments in 14 states use the V-Academy in some capacity.
“It’s not that there is a lack of training — it’s the lack of availability to training, and we have bridged that gap with the academy,” Moore said. “We have taken the best trainers in the world and delivered them in the capacity that everyone in the world should be able to have.”
Capt. Phillip Kemper is a training officer with the Jackson Police Department. He said they have been using the V-Academy since October 2014.
“It opens up the door for us to get a lot of training from top-notch instructors across the country that otherwise we would not be able to afford or have access to send our people to,” Kemper said.
Kemper said they started to use the online learning system to cut down on their training time. For example, he said it would take almost four months to train the entire Jackson Police Department through one 40-hour, weeklong course, whereas with the V-Academy the officers can learn at their own pace in a fraction of the time.
“It has definitely helped us increase our efficiency, and economically it has impacted our training a great deal,” Kemper said.
Kemper said the virtual academy does not take away from the rest of their training and that officers still have in-person classes and training for driving, shooting and defensive tactics.
“Not all training can be delivered online, and we concentrate on those types of training that are best delivered online,” Moore said. “At the same time, we are making advances every day in the types of expansive training that we can deliver.”
Moore said they are working to add firefighter and EMS training this year.
