Twenty-five cops were caught cheating on a promotional exam. Nobody got fired. Some still got promoted.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – It was the fourth time that the deputy had taken the highly competitive investigator exam, and most likely, the fourth time she had failed. After 12 years on the bottom rung of the sheriff’s department, the coveted promotion from deputy to investigator – which meant more money, more respect and more important work – remained tantalizingly out of her reach.

But the deputy did not plan on giving up. When the exam was over, she rushed back to her desk and began typing out the test questions, anxious to make a new study guide while her memory was still fresh. The deputy racked her brain, trying to remember every question exactly as it had been asked.

Soon, there was a veteran cop peeking over her shoulder, asking for a copy. The deputy knew she wasn’t supposed to discuss the exam with anyone – test-takers were ordered to keep the questions confidential – but this guy was already an investigator. He had been with the department for two decades, and the deputy saw him as the kind of cop she wanted to be someday. What was the harm of letting him peek?

She printed out the questions and left them face-up on his desk.

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“I should have grabbed the paper, but I didn’t. I left it with him,” the deputy said two days later, stuck in an interview room on the wrong side of an internal affairs investigation. Leaked exam questions had spread through the sheriff’s department like a virus. She was patient zero.

“Did he tell you what he was going to do with the questions?” an internal affairs investigator asked.

“I didn’t ask,” the deputy responded, adding later: “But I should have grabbed my frickin’ questions back.”

Two and a half years ago, an internal investigation at the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department uncovered that 25 employees attempted to cheat their way to a higher rank by sharing questions and answers from what was supposed to be a confidential promotional exam, according to a Desert Sun review of agency documents and more than 15 hours of interview recordings obtained by the newspaper. The cheating was believed to be so widespread that the sheriff’s department voided the test, requiring more than 200 employees to retake a portion of the 2015 investigator exam.

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This cheating scandal, revealed to the public for the first time in this article, should be concerning for at least two reasons. First, the possibility of broad and longstanding cheating calls into question if the most qualified deputies are promoted into the position of investigator, where they take responsibility for solving complex crimes like murders and rapes. Second, the scandal casts a lasting shadow on the police officers’ integrity and qualifications, which could be used to attack their credibility in the courtroom, making them less useful as witnesses and therefore less effective at convicting criminals.

The documents and recordings obtained by The Desert Sun come from an internal, confidential investigation that is barely known outside of the sheriff’s department. California’s laws on police privacy are so restrictive the basic details of the investigation are kept secret, not just from the public, but also from the District Attorney’s Office, which depends on the police officers to testify in court. Scandals like this one would be disclosed to prosecutors only after they introduce one of these deputies as a witness, meaning they might build an entire case on the testimony of a deputy whose integrity could crumble during cross-examination.

“It should be a significant concern for the local prosecutors,” said Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe, a criminal law professor at UC Davis who was briefed on the scandal by The Desert Sun. “The integrity of the criminal justice process depends on police officers who practice their profession morally. And if you can’t rely on the police officers as the foundational element of the process, it taints everything that follows.”

Despite the alarming findings of the internal affairs investigation, it does not appear that any sheriff’s department employees were demoted or fired as a result of the cheating scandal. It is unclear if they were suspended or disciplined in another way.

All discipline taken against sheriff’s department employees is confidential because of California’s Peace Officer Bill of Rights, one of the strictest police privacy laws in the nation. However, public staffing records reveal that everyone who was interviewed in the cheating investigation has either maintained the same rank or been promoted since the scandal. Four employees who were accused of or admitted to sharing or receiving test materials in 2015 were still promoted to investigator after another testing cycle in 2017.

The Desert Sun has also obtained a list of all sheriff’s department employees who have been fired in the past 10 years. None of the employees investigated in the cheating scandal appear on that list.

The Desert Sun is not identifying most of the employees who were implicated in the cheating scandal because the internal affairs documents obtained by the newspaper are incomplete. The documents summarize the investigation but do not include the conclusions as to each employee, so it is not definitively clear which employees were found to have violated sheriff’s department policies and which were not.

Regardless, the documents show the cheating in 2015 was pervasive in the western half of Riverside County, mostly at the sheriff’s personnel office and the police stations in Moreno Valley, Perris and Lake Elsinore. Leaked test questions and answers were shared by friends and partners through a web of phone calls, emails, text messages and hushed conversations. One corporal, who admitted that he received and shared test answers but said he did not believe that he had cheated, worked as a training officer who oversees the entry exams for new recruits.

Cheating was so common that four deputies received information about the exam from three separate co-workers, each, within three days of the start of testing.

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The internal records also reveal that the cheating scandal was likely bigger than what was uncovered. In one interview, a veteran employee at the center of the scandal said deputies had a longstanding “culture” of sharing test questions, and that the practice was so common that he didn’t even realize it was forbidden. Another suspect who was grilled in a two-hour interview initially said internal affairs would “have to talk to a lot of people” to unravel the cheating scandal, but later claimed he was just joking and said he couldn’t remember the names of any of the co-workers he had studied with.

And finally, at least five more deputies told internal affairs they had heard a rumor that someone had taken a picture of the exam questions, then shared it throughout the Moreno Valley station. It does not appear that internal affairs ever found that photo or identified that person, if they exist.

“Everybody is talking about it,” a deputy told internal affairs when asked about the rumor, according to an audio recording of his interview. “Somebody sent out an email, and then sent some text messages in reference to the questions, and then it spread like wildfire.”

In a statement released to The Desert Sun, the sheriff’s department confirmed the existence of the cheating investigation, which was described as “thorough” and led to “appropriate action taken with respect to all involved personnel.” The department said it had added safeguards to make employee testing more secure, but would not comment on the specific safeguards to protect the “integrity of future testing.”

The department also said it was confident it “did not have a culture of cheating," and that the 2015 investigation should not make the public concerned about the qualifications of investigators.

“We are extremely proud of the members of our department and the public should feel absolutely confident that it is receiving nothing but the finest law enforcement services from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department,” the statement said.

Preserving ‘the competitive process’

The investigator exam, held every two years, has the power to make or break a cop’s career.

The exam determines which deputies and corporals are promoted to the rank of investigator, a position more commonly known as detective in many other police agencies. The promotion is the major milestone, separating the suit-wearing sleuths who solve crimes from the uniformed cops who spend most of their shifts on patrol or responding to routine calls for help.

The test consists of a 100-question written exam, a 50-question computer exam and an oral exam during which deputies must explain how a detective should respond to example scenarios that change every year. In 2015, applicants were asked to explain how they would handle four scenarios: the death of an infant; a missing dementia patient; prioritizing a heavy caseload; and a case involving an elected official who had reported a theft, but also appeared to be under the influence of drugs. (That last scenario appears to be based on the 2014 arrest of Perris City Councilman Julio Rodriguez, who later pleaded guilty to a drug charge and resigned.)

Employees are forbidden from discussing or distributing these questions by a standing order from the sheriff’s department, but in reality, sharing the questions is easy to do. The oral exams are conducted over a four-day span, so anyone who took the test on the first day can give the questions to co-workers who haven’t tested yet. Employees are told during every test not to discuss the exam with anyone to “maintain a competitive process.”

In 2015, that “competitive process” lasted only about 90 minutes.

That was how long it took from the start of the oral exam for the deputy at the beginning of this story to take her test, return to her desk, type out the questions and then give a printout to her colleague, Investigator Lance Colmer.

Colmer, who didn’t need the questions for himself because he had passed the exam years ago, then shared the questions with two other deputies, according to the internal affairs records. The two deputies shared the questions with two more deputies, then one of those deputies shared the question with yet another deputy, records state.

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When confronted by internal affairs, Colmer said that all of this was normal, insisting that deputies were only cheating if they shared the test answers, not the test questions. In two decades with the department, Colmer said, he had seen deputies openly discuss and share questions so frequently he “assumed it was OK.”

It was no different when he passed the test back in 2008, he said.

“There has been this culture and a practice in this department of sharing the questions, and sharing the answers, and preparing our friends and co-workers to do well on the exams,” Colmer said during his interview.

“You don’t think that’s cheating if you give them a copy of the actual questions?” an investigator responded.

“I didn’t think that it was cheating – no,” Colmer said.

Colmer did not respond to emails sent to him or requests to interview him submitted through the sheriff’s department.

The Desert Sun also received no response from Stephen Chulak, an attorney for the deputies’ union who represented Colmer and six other employees who were implicated in the cheating investigation. Chulak and internal affairs often clashed during employee interviews and at one point the attorney accused an investigator of “bullying” deputies.

The rest of the employees spoke to internal affairs without a lawyer.

Many of those deputies responded similarly to Colmer, arguing that they had not technically cheated because of the specific phrasing in the department’s testing policy.

The standing policy – called a “general order” – forbids employees from distributing any test information that would “give another testing candidate an unfair advantage.” The deputies said they didn’t violate this policy because the test materials weren’t actually helpful enough to give an advantage.

For example, some employees who shared the test topics said they didn’t give anyone an advantage because they weren’t the specific test questions. Some employees who shared the questions said they didn’t get an advantage because they didn’t have the actual test answers. And employees who got a bulleted list of the answers said they still didn’t have an advantage because they didn’t realize what the document was, or because they didn’t study the list exclusively, or because they already knew the answers anyway.

In one of the most extreme cases, a deputy received the exam questions from two different two co-workers, then was emailed an answer list by a senior detective and then specifically focused his studies on those questions and answers.

He said he still did not believe he had cheated.

“I never asked anyone to send me anything,” the deputy told internal affairs investigators. “If they are going to send it, they are going to send it. I can’t do anything about that.”

This deputy is one of the four cheating suspects who was promoted to the rank of investigator in 2017. The sheriff's department declined to discuss why these employees were promoted, saying it was prohibited by law from commenting on the personnel matters of any individual employee.

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Beyond the implication of cheating, the internal affairs records obtained by The Desert Sun also reveal numerous instances in which deputies appeared to lie to investigators – a fireable offense. Two deputies were so evasive or unbelievable during their interviews that officials immediately expanded the investigation to include allegations of dishonesty. Another deputy claimed he never sent test information to anyone, then admitted minutes later that he had actually written each question on loose leaf paper then texted photos of the papers to another deputy who was a close friend.

Four other employees made statements that were directly contradicted by another employee in a different interview, suggesting that one of them wasn’t telling the truth.

But none of these employees were ever proven to be lying, according to the sheriff's department. In its written statement, the department said that "no charges of dishonesty were sustained or supported by the evidence" during the cheating investigation.

Peter Johnson, a federal criminal defense attorney and adjunct professor of law at UCLA, said any deceit by the deputies would compound the potential damage of the cheating scandal, giving defense attorneys an even stronger argument if they try to attack the cops' credibility in court.

Cheating is essentially lying, and lying about cheating is just stacking lies on lies, Johnson said,

“If you are willing to cheat to get the job, I think it’s reasonable that you would be willing to cheat to keep the job,” Johnson said. “I think this would really go to the issue of integrity in any case where an officer has to make a statement that needs to be relied upon by the public, or a judge, or a prosecutor.”

“We all know that you are not supposed to cheat on an exam, and there is a certain trust we put into people not to do it. Just like how we need to trust that when an officer writes a report that he should not know that he is not supposed to make false statements. Those two things fall in line together.”

An email full of answers

The subject line of the email read “Study Materials,” but inside there was much more than that.

“Assure a critical incident log is started,” the email said.

“See if the person has a cell phone and have it pinged,” it added later.

“Make sure a neighborhood canvass is done and all statements are tape recorded.”

These were just a few of more than 70 answers suggested by Robert Cornett, an investigator at the Lake Elsinore station who received the investigator exam questions on the first day of the 2015 testing cycle, then emailed a list of suggested answers to employees who hadn’t taken the test yet, according to internal documents and recorded interviews. Throughout the sheriff’s department, cheating had given plenty of employees a sneak peek of the exam questions, giving them the advantage of knowing where to focus their studies. But Cornett’s email went a step further. It didn’t just tell-test takers what topics to study. It told them what to say.

Cornett’s email went to three deputies and a corporal. They shared the information with three more deputies and two more corporals. Eventually, the email ended up in the hands of internal affairs, who then backtracked the email chain to Cornett.

When questioned, Cornett said he didn’t realize what he was doing.

Cornett said he sent the email because a deputy called him and asked for advice on how to respond to four hypothetical scenarios – a baby death, a missing dementia patient, a heavy caseload and the arrest of a prominent person. The deputy never explained these scenarios were the same topics on the investigator’s exam. Cornett didn’t ask either.

Internal affairs then questioned that deputy, who confirmed that she did ask Cornett for advice on those four specific scenarios but said she had no idea these were the actual test questions.

Internal affairs appeared to doubt the truthfulness of both stories.

During an interview, an internal investigator said it was “unreasonable” to believe that the deputy had called Cornett asking about “four random topics” that just happened to be the four topics on the exam.

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However, internal affairs was also suspicious of why Cornett distributed the answer sheet exclusively through personal email accounts, which deputies admitted they rarely use to communicate.

Cornett also wrote the perfect title at the top of his answer sheet – “Investigator Questions 2015.”

“It just seems odd that you would call it ‘investigator questions’ – and that’s exactly what they were – but you didn’t know that at the time,” an investigator told Cornett. “Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Sure,” Cornett answered, saying nothing else.

The cheating scandal does not appear to have disrupted Cornett's career in the sheriff’s department. He was promoted to the rank of master investigator in 2016. Earlier that same year, he was given an award for “investigative excellence” by the Riverside County Law Enforcement Appreciation Committee.

The sheriff's department declined to comment on Cornett's promotion, again citing police privacy laws. Cornett did not respond to emails sent to him or requests to interview him submitted through the sheriff’s department.

Despite the widespread sharing of questions in the sheriff’s department, and rumors of even broader cheating, it appears that only one employee reported the employees to their supervisors.

That whistleblower, a deputy who was offered the exam questions, reported the cheating to a lieutenant, launching the internal investigation. The deputy later broke into tears while being interviewed for the internal investigation, saying they had been cornered by a terrible choice.

If the deputy did nothing, cheating would continue unchecked, and only employees who cheated would have a real chance at being promoted. But, if the deputy reporting the cheating to a supervisor, they risked being ostracized by their colleagues and becoming an outcast in the department.

“I battled with myself because I’m human,” the deputy said, now sobbing. “It was obvious what the right thing was to do, but I thought ‘everyone else is doing it. They are all going to cheat and get promoted. I should just do it too. It would be so much easier.’”

“I had to make this decision. I knew it was the right one, and I was so mad at myself because I was tested and I didn’t make the choice instantly. It took me time. My dad taught me better than that.”

“Well,” an investigator a responded. “You are the only one who passed that test.”

Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached by phone at (760) 778-4642, by email at brett.kelman@desertsun.com, or on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman