ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, the SEARCH Group, Inc., under the leadership of Steve Kolodney (and afterwards, Gary Cooper), perceived a need for training law enforcement managers in information management systems. Fortunately, the SEARCH Group also had two outstanding pioneers in the field of training police officers in computers-Fred Cotton and Bill Spernow, who began one of our nation’s first outreach efforts in training municipal and state police in this important area. The contributions that both Fred Cotton and Bill Spernow have made in this field are measured by the esteem in which their professional colleagues held them. The contribution of the SEARCH Group is also evident in that during the entire decade of 1980 to 1990 they provided the only Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) instruction to law enforcement officers in the state of California. Indeed, another major deficit of our nation’s ability to address computer crime centered on the fact that virtually every one of our states’ training agencies provided no training at all to their law enforcement agencies in computer crime. In fact, until the early 1990s, state POST agencies were not offering even occasional training courses or instruction in this area.
