{"id":7523,"date":"2026-08-03T14:38:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T14:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/?p=7523"},"modified":"2026-08-03T14:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T14:40:08","slug":"two-years-from-now-can-you-prove-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/2026\/08\/03\/two-years-from-now-can-you-prove-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Years From Now, Can You Prove It?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/span><\/div>
<\/div>

The deposition is on Tuesday. The shooting was twenty-six months ago. It was a good shoot, and everybody in the room knows it. The grand jury cleared it, the department cleared it, and none of that is why the plaintiff’s attorney is here.<\/p>\n

He is here because the civil case is still alive, and civil cases are rarely about the four seconds of the incident. They are about the ten years that came before it. So, he slides a legal pad across the table, looks up, and asks his first real question.<\/p>\n

“When did you last qualify with your duty weapon before the incident?”<\/p>\n

“That spring, I think. March, maybe April.”<\/p>\n

“You think. Is there a record?”<\/p>\n

And right there, in a conference room that smells like burnt coffee, the whole thing turns. Not on anything the officer did that night. On what somebody did or did not write down two years earlier.<\/p>\n

I have watched versions of that scene play out more than once, and it always lands the same way. The officer was trained. The officer was current. The officer did the reps. But being trained and being able to prove you were trained are two different things, and only one of them helps you when a lawyer is doing the asking.<\/p>\n

So here is an argument that does not get made to the rank and file nearly enough. Your training record is not the department’s paperwork. It is yours. It is personal protective equipment, the same as your vest<\/em><\/strong>, and most officers never give it a thought until the day they need it more than anything else in the building.<\/p>\n

The record is yours, even when it isn’t<\/h2>\n

We usually talk about training records as an agency problem. Compliance, audits, the chief’s headache. Fine. Now flip it around and look at it from the seat you actually sit in.<\/p>\n

When a use of force ends up in litigation, and plenty of them do now, the other side goes straight through your training history. Were you qualified. Were you current. Had you been trained on the tactic you used, the de-escalation you attempted, the weapon you carried. Their whole game is finding the gap. A missed qualification. A course you supposedly took that nobody can produce. A quiet six month stretch where your file says nothing at all. They do not need to prove you were dangerous. They only need to make twelve people wonder why the records are so thin.<\/p>\n

A complete, dated, signed training history takes that entire line of attack off the table. It turns “that spring, I think” into “March 14th, duty qualification, 96 percent, this drill, this instructor, my signature at the bottom.” One of those answers ends the conversation. The other one keeps it going for another hour, and every minute of that hour is bad for you.<\/p>\n

It is not just civil suits, either. Internal affairs interviews. Disciplinary hearings. Promotional boards. Brady lists. Every one of those goes better for the officer with a clean, complete record of what they did and when they did it. And here is the part that matters to anyone who has ever watched an investigation get rushed: a good record cuts both ways. It protects you from the department too. When the paper trail is honest and complete, it is much harder for anyone to rewrite the story later.<\/p>\n

If that is not a union issue, I do not know what is.<\/p>\n

nt, by law enforcement. Learn more at brassops.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>

<\/div>
<\/span><\/div>
<\/div>

Most training files are held together with tape<\/h2>\n

Now the uncomfortable part. In a lot of agencies, the “training record” is a sign in sheet in a binder, a spreadsheet on the rangemaster’s laptop, and a healthy amount of institutional memory that retires the same day he does. Scores live on scratch paper until somebody gets around to typing them in. Qualification dates live in someone’s head. And the officer, the person with the most skin in the game, usually cannot see any of it. If you left your department tomorrow, could you reconstruct your own training history? Most cops could not. Someday that might be the most expensive gap in your career.<\/p>\n

Take our quick assessment quiz now to see how vulnerable you and your agency are.<\/a><\/p>\n

None of this happens because anyone is lazy. It happens because documentation is the least interesting part of the job and the tools most agencies provide are miserable. When the right way and the easy way are two different ways, the easy way wins. Every single time.<\/p>\n

What good actually looks like<\/h2>\n

Good documentation is boring, and boring is the goal. Every live fire session tied to the officer who shot it, with the date, the drill, the score, the pass or fail, the weapon, and the instructor who ran the line. Qualifications tracked against your department’s actual standard, not a guess. Remediation documented when it happens, so the improvement is on paper too. And the officer able to pull up their own history any time, without asking permission or waiting on a records clerk.<\/p>\n

The reason I bring this up at all is that this is finally a solved problem. There are platforms built specifically for firearms training records now, the same way CAD and RMS eventually replaced paper logs. The one I know best is called BrassOps<\/a>, and full disclosure, I am involved with it, so weigh my opinion accordingly. But it is a fair example of what the current generation of tools does, and of why the difference matters.<\/p>\n

Sessions get logged at the range, on a phone or a tablet, and the history builds itself. The system watches the calendar. If your qualification is coming due, or you have quietly slipped out of compliance on a weapon you carry, it flags you and it flags your instructor before it becomes a finding. That sounds small. It is not. Most compliance gaps are not defiance, they are forgetting, and software does not forget.<\/p>\n

The features that won me over, though, are the ones that put the record in the officer’s own hands. A court ready training history for one officer, every session, every qual, every signature, comes out in about a minute. Policy acknowledgments are e-signed and time stamped, so “nobody ever told me” and “I never signed that” both stop being arguments. There is a full audit trail, which means your history cannot quietly change six months down the road. It will even analyze a photo of your target and coach your shot group, which is genuinely useful, but the boring records are the part that will save you.<\/p>\n

One more thing, because it always comes up and it should. Some of these platforms, BrassOps<\/a> included, use AI to help draft after action reports. The fair question is whether your name and your scores are being shipped off to some tech company. In this case they are not. Officer identities are swapped for placeholders before anything leaves the agency and swapped back after, so the AI never sees a real name or a badge number. For a union audience, that detail is not fine print. It is the whole point.<\/p>\n

Treat it like gear<\/h2>\n

You check your vest. You press check your sidearm. You count magazines you have already counted. Nobody has to remind you, because you know the one day you skip it is the day it matters. Your firearms training record deserves a spot in that same routine<\/a>. It just fails silently, which is why it is so easy to ignore right up until the Tuesday afternoon with the burnt coffee.<\/p>\n

None of this is legal advice, and the rules vary by state and by contract, so talk to your association rep and your own attorney about the specifics. But the general truth holds everywhere. Sooner or later, somebody is going to sit across a table and ask you to prove it. The officers who can, will have a short, easy afternoon. The officers who cannot will remember that room for years. Take our quick assessment quiz now to see how vulnerable you and your agency are.<\/a><\/p>\n

Be the first kind.<\/p>\n

About the author: Rich O\u2019Brien is an active Law Enforcement Officer and Supervising Firearms Instructor and the founder of BrassOps, the firearms training and qualification records platform of the future, built for law enforcement, by law enforcement. Learn more at brassops.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7525,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-iupa-briefing-room"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7523"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7527,"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7523\/revisions\/7527"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iupa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}