OUR MISSION

Semper Veritas Police Training and Consulting, LLC was founded by two of South Florida’s most respected law enforcement officers and investigators, Rick Sessions and Zack Scott.  Together, they have more than 60 years of experience conducting and supervising criminal investigations in some of the busiest and most violent areas of South Florida.  They have both spent the majority of their careers in the Criminal Investigations Division assigned to the Homicide Unit and the Cold Case Homicide Unit.  During their careers, Rick and Zack have supervised and participated in several hundred death investigations, to include homicides, suicides, serial killer cases, several mass casualty incident cases such as plane crashes and one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. History that took place on February 14th, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida where a total of 17 victims were shot and killed and 17 other victims were shot but thankfully survived.  

 

In addition to those aforementioned types of investigations, Rick and Zack and the Subject Matter Experts at Semper Veritas Police Training and Consulting, LLC have also investigated, analyzed and made recommendations on more than 100 Officer Involved Shooting Cases and In-Custody Deaths.  The investigative, legal, and personal lessons that have been learned from all of these intense and heavily scrutinized investigations are simply invaluable.  In addition to their extensive experience, Rick and Zack are also extremely passionate about wanting to help the next generation of law enforcement officers.  For nearly two decades, Rick and Zack have shared their knowledge and unique experiences by instructing and training thousands of Federal, State and Local Law Enforcement Officers and members of the military across the country on a wide variety of topics.  The founders of Semper Veritas Police Training and Consulting, LLC and their Subject Matter Experts have been profiled and their cases have been featured on numerous television shows such as Dateline, The First 48, COPS, Out for Justice, Open and Unsolved and many more. 

 

At Semper Veritas Police Training and Consulting, LLC, we believe that there are three distinct things that separate our company and our teaching methods from all other police training companies:

1. Due to our many years of investigative experience and networking, we have developed valuable relationships with numerous subject matter experts in various fields who have all agreed to assist us as guest speakers in the different training classes that we offer.  These experts include the Chief Prosecutor of the Homicide Trial Unit at the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, the Chief Prosecutor of the Cybercrime Unit at the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, additional Homicide Prosecutors who have handled numerous high-profile cases, Command Staff Members from various law enforcement agencies who have supervised Internal Affairs Units, Circuit Court Judges, Medical Examiners, Defense Attorneys with extensive experience handling Capital Cases, Crime Scene Reconstruction Experts and more.  For many of the law enforcement officers who attend our classes, this will likely be the only time in their careers that they will be able to get honest and unfiltered answers from these subject matter experts to the questions that they have always been curious about. At Semper Veritas Police Training and Consulting, LLC., we genuinely want to help our fellow law enforcement officers succeed both professionally and personally.

 

2. Our training is extremely interactive, realistic and practical.  We have all attended training classes during our careers where the instructor simply reads a bunch of PowerPoint slides aloud to the students.  We do not believe in the style of training that is often referred to as “Death by PowerPoint.”  We passionately believe that law enforcement officers learn by doing the job, not by listening to somebody read to you how to do the job.  We bring our students into real crime scenes by showing them numerous photos and videos from cases that we have personally investigated through the years as well as providing them with instruction on interesting cases that have recently taken place around the country.  As we discuss these investigations, we put our students in the “Hot Seat” and give them the opportunity to function as the lead detective and make decisions based upon their observations.  We then analyze those decisions and provide the students with constructive feedback on how those decisions would impact the case on both a short-term and long-term basis.  The feedback that we provide to our students comes from important lessons that we have personally learned from our own mistakes, the mistakes of others, and countless hours of research on current case law and best practices.  Our teaching style and beliefs can be summed up by the famous quote from Eleanor Roosevelt who stated “Learn from the mistakes of others.  You cannot live long enough to make them all yourself.”  We believe that if the participants who attend our training classes are going to make mistakes, we would rather have them make their mistakes in a positive learning environment, like the classroom, and not out in the field on an actual case where they could potentially victimize a grieving family a second time by conducting a less than thorough, fair, impartial and evidence-based investigation.    

 

3. We train our students on how to increase the possibility of solving their cases by teaching them how to utilize the most up to date technology, crime-scene investigation tools, resources, open-source databases and investigative techniques available.  During our training classes, we make sure that we fill up our students’ “toolboxes” with lots of new tools for them to use as they conduct their investigations moving forward.  It is not the 1980’s, 1990’s or even the early 2000’s anymore.  The profession of law enforcement, the investigative techniques that are available, the expectations that juries have during a trial, the strategies for jury selection and presenting a case to a jury and the laws themselves are always changing.  As law enforcement professionals, we must keep up with these changes and that is what we specialize in at Semper Veritas Police Training and Consulting, LLC.  We also provide our students with the state statutes and relevant case law to support our material.   

 

Our mission at Semper Veritas Police Training and Consulting, LLC. is to be the best training company for law enforcement officers in the world.  We strongly believe that in addition to increasing a law enforcement officer’s knowledge and awareness, police training should also be fun, interesting, and entertaining.  At Semper Veritas Police Training and Consulting, LLC., we understand that your time is valuable.  That is why we are committed to making sure that the students who attend our training classes walk away with an experience that leaves them with the ability to immediately apply the knowledge and concepts that they learned and that they are motivated and excited to come back and attend more of our classes.