WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) today announced a partnership with the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board (AZPOST) to promote free training.

AZPOST has agreed to award continuous training (in-service) credit for all certificate-awarding courses on the COPS Training Portal in recognition of the high quality of the eLearning courses developed by the COPS Office. Arizona is the first state to guarantee credit for these courses, and has agreed to continue to award credit for all new courses launched on the COPS Training Portal in the future.

“A partnership with AZPOST increases the awareness and value of eLearning courses offered through the COPS Training Portal,” said Robert Chapman, Acting Director of the COPS Office. “The Portal is a cornerstone of our training program. It exists to directly support agency training efforts by providing a no-cost means for entire law enforcement organizations, training academies, and individual officers to access high-quality and engaging materials and information to enhance the training already being conducted at the local level. I applaud the leadership demonstrated by Matt Giordano, AZPOST’s Executive Director, as he works to provide peace officers throughout Arizona options for training on diverse and timely topics. The COPS Office looks forward to working with other POSTs across the country to bring these courses to law enforcement officers who need them.”

The COPS Training Portal (copstrainingportal.org) was launched in 2017, and now boasts 27 training courses and more than a dozen resources on a wide variety of law enforcement topics, with more trainings constantly in development. The COPS Office is dedicated to providing high-quality training to the field as part of its mission to advance the practice of community policing in the United States.

The COPS Office is the federal component of the Department of Justice responsible for advancing community policing nationwide. The only Department of Justice agency with policing in its name, the COPS Office was established in 1994 and has been the cornerstone of the nation’s crime fighting strategy with grants, a variety of knowledge resource products, and training and technical assistance. Through the years, the COPS Office has become the go-to organization for law enforcement agencies across the country and continues to listen to the field and provide the resources that are needed to reduce crime and build trust between law enforcement and the communities served. The COPS Office has invested more than $14 billion to advance community policing, including grants awarded to more than 13,000 state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies to fund the hiring and redeployment of more than 135,000 officers.

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