The Peace Officers' Standards and Training (POST) line item is responsible for the basic training in some form of all Utah peace officers. To fulfill this responsibility, POST operates and coordinates all basic recruit training programs for prospective law enforcement officers and an in-service training program for existing law enforcement officers.
During the 2015 General Session, the Legislature appropriated for Fiscal Year 2016, $4,136,500 from all sources for Peace Officers' Standards and Training. This is an 18.3 percent reduction from Fiscal Year 2015 revised estimated amounts from all sources. The total includes $123,700 from the General/Education Funds, a reduction of 75.3 percent from revised Fiscal Year 2015 estimates.
In addition to statewide compensation and internal service fund cost increases, the following appropriation adjustments were made during the 2015 General Session:
The bulk of the funding for this program comes from the General Fund Restricted - Public Safety Support Account. The revenue comes from the criminal surcharge. Surcharge collections have dropped by about 5% in this last year. Operations may be affected in the case there is not supplemental funding in FY 2014. This fund has not collected as much as anticipated in recent years and was short an estimated $400,000 for each of the past 2 years there may be an issue of long-term reduced collections to the account which would lead to reducued available revenue to operate the program.
For measuring performance, the Peace Officers' Standards and Training (POST) investigates incidents of misconduct by POST certified officers and strives to ensure that all POST certified officers are trained as required by statute. There are two metrics to measure these activities. They are respectively: (1) POST Council ratification and (2) the officer training hours statute compliance rate. Measurements are included below.
![DPS - POST](media/POST.jpg)
The POST Council, which includes representatives from a broad spectrum of law enforcement interests, sets the standards for peace officer certification and review. The restricted funds that support POST training are from the Public Safety Support Fund, which is financed by surcharges on criminal fines.
POST was created to ensure uniform and high quality standards and training for Utah law enforcement officers. POST also certifies certain academic and other agencies to provide training under programs reviewed and certified by POST.
COBI contains unaudited data as presented to the Legislature by state agencies at the time of publication. For audited financial data see the State of Utah's Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports.