SnapGlow.TV: Modern Gems Galore! How difficult is the routine test that Pennsylvania's 23,000 municipal cops take to maintain their police certification?
Think of the GEICO car insurance commercial: "So easy, a caveman could do it."
Yet, more than a dozen Delaware County police officers - some, veterans with decades of experience - may lose their jobs for allegedly cheating in February on the Act 180 exam administered by the Municipal Police Officers' Education and Training Commission.
Amid the ongoing state police probe, at least 17 officers recently received letters informing them that they could be decertified, police sources said. The officers can appeal, but, if that fails, they won't be able to work as a municipal police officer in the state.
"When you take somebody's certification number, you take their job," said one officer familiar with the investigation. "When you take their job, you take their livelihood."
Maj. John Gallaher, executive director of the training commission, declined to confirm how many officers were facing decertification, but he said that the problem appears to be "regional," not statewide. He added that the probe is continuing.
"There's not a line drawn, even though we have sent some letters out to people," Gallaher said.
Sources told the Daily News that the cops involved include a high-ranking officer in Nether Providence, a longtime officer in Brookhaven, up to four cops each in Darby Borough and Marcus Hook, as well as officers in Trainer, Upland and Ridley Park. At least one Delaware County police chief may be under investigation.
The local police community has been abuzz for months over the looming scandal, which sources said began when one cop obtained the answers to the 10-question exam and began e-mailing them to colleagues.
"It went through the county like wildfire," one police officer said. "A lot of cops just received the e-mail; they never forwarded it. Most of them deleted it."
But some of those who used the answers were caught when the training commission switched the test and they failed miserably, sources said.
"This is going to turn into a huge thing. I know cops that are in their 40s and have kids" who are facing permanent decertification, an officer said.
Cpl. Lynette Quinn, a state police spokeswoman, declined to comment on the scope of the probe. She said that no officers have been formally decertified yet.
Cops are angered by the severity of the punishment - suggesting that a suspension would be more appropriate - and perplexed that anyone would bother to cheat on the test. Officers who fail to answer seven of the 10 questions correctly get to retake the exam to maintain their certification.
"It's as close to an open-book test as you can possibly get," one officer said, adding that the instructor essentially tells cops what is going to be on the exam during a course that immediately precedes it.
"It's a shame these guys are going down for something stupid like this," he said. "If you're going to go down, go down for something good, something worthwhile. This is something that a middle-schooler could pass, and you're losing your career over this?"
"It's not somebody going for a master's degree," another officer said. "This is pretty straightforward, fill-in-the-blanks."
On Domelights.com, a Web site on which cops vent, the word "idiot" is used more than once to describe the alleged cheaters.
"The hardest thing . . . is spelling your name right and filling in the correct date," one poster wrote.
This year, the test included questions about stress awareness, best practices, crisis management and off-duty decision-making.
"This is a bad situation as far as lapses of integrity of police officers," Maj. Gallaher said.
"It will run its course," he said of the probe. "It will go where it goes, and officers that we take action against will be entitled to an administrative hearing."
Officers who fail to get the ruling overturned on appeal would probably have to find another line of work, but even that could be difficult, one cop lamented.
"I don't know how many bosses would hire a guy that got caught cheating and was fired," he said. "There are a lot of good guys involved, but it's stupidity." *
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