Millersville warned last year that six reserve officers lacked training documentation that qualifies them as officers

Millersville, Tenn. (WSMV) - On Facebook posts, Mark Loy looks the part of a Millersville police officer. Pictures show him in uniform marked “Millersville police” and wearing a bulletproof vest reading “police.”

But last summer, Loy was among five reserve police officers in Millersville missing files containing the necessary training hours needed to be a reserve police officer.

The discovery was made by the Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission (POST).

Bryant Kroll, Millersville city attorney, said an audit launched after the terminations of several city leaders uncovered the POST document, but it is unclear if the prior administration of the police department took any action.

The POST report on the missing files indicates that the six reserve officers should have never been granted commission cards, which identify them as reserve officers for the city.

“It’s a violation of the public trust,” Kroll said.

The report from POST — confirmed to be authentic to the state Department of Commerce and Insurance — has no date but references July 20, 2023, as the date when POST investigator Kevin Krieb picked up six files from the Millersville Police Department for all the reserve officers in the department.

It is unclear who was police chief at the time POST sent the documentation of the missing files, as word of former police chief Melvin Brown’s resignation occurred last July, but his resignation letter was effective on Aug. 4, 2023.

WSMV4 Investigates’ attempts to reach Brown for comment have not been successful.

In the POST document, Mark Loy — and other reserve officers — was found to have no documentation of the initial 80 hours of training. While the POST report shows Loy completed a required 40-hour training on July 15, 2022, there are no records of in-service training for 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

POST requires all reserve officers in the state to receive 80 hours of training the year of the hearing and 40 hours of in-service training each calendar year.

Loy, a reserve officer since 2018, told WSMV4 Investigates that he had all the training necessary.

“I’ve done my hours,” Loy said. “I’ve done my qualifications on firearms. I’ve done everything that you had to do to hold a commission card. If files are missing, that’s on the city.”

Last week, Kroll said in a news conference that all reserve commission cards were to be returned following the termination of the fire chief and his connection to the cards.

Following that announcement, WSMV4 Investigates filed an open records request to see what POST had shared with the city about the commission cards.

“There still has been cards that are issued to people who should never have had them,” Kroll said. “We’re still trying to ascertain what happened because of [the Post report.]”

Kroll said the city’s new administration is grappling with the reality that police commission cards were given to people who do not have the required police training.

“Having someone impersonate a police officer is very dangerous to citizens,” Kroll said. “It lowers the citizen’s guard. They think this person is a police officer. I have to respond to them. I have to stop or I might get arrested,” Kroll said.

WSMV4 Investigates reached out to all of the six reserve officers, but only Loy and former city manager Scott Avery agreed to answer our questions on the record. Loy said he became a reserve officer to assist the city when an extra reserve officer was needed but turned in his reserve card last year.

“Why did you turn in your reserve (police commission) card?” asked WSMV4 Investigates.

“When all this stuff happened with the police department getting on the news, I didn’t feel comfortable with what things were going on,” Loy said. “I just turned my stuff in. I just quit being a reserve.”

The POST report shows that Avery appeared to become a reserve officer in late 2022, and there are no training or firearm qualification records in his file.

The POST report also stated that there is a waiver request in the file dated December 2022 signed by Chief Brown, but there are no records that it was ever submitted to or approved by the POST Commission.

Avery said he didn’t start as a reserve officer until January 2023 and was in the process of getting his 80-hour training completed when he was terminated in January 2024. He also said he did complete training and firearm qualifications, and that the PDFs of those trainings were sent to a sergeant in the police department.

Avery did say he deleted those PDFs, as they were being stored on a shared training laptop, and figured they had been placed in his file. He said he’s confused as to why those training records are not in his file.

“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what file they have,” Avery said. “The training records are at the police department. Or they were. I’m not saying they’re still there. But I’ve seen them before because I had to fill out my serial number for my gun and put them on the firearms record.”

Avery said when he was city manager, he had no idea that POST had identified that he and five others were missing training files.

Kroll said the city has received some of the commission cards back, but not all of them.

“Without the background checks, without the psychological (evaluations), you don’t know who this is that’s carrying that card,” Kroll said.

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