ABOVE: Boardman police Lt. Mike Sweeney, right, shakes hands with former FBI Director Christopher Wray during his graduation from the Bureau’s National Academy for law enforcement professionals in September. The 10-week course provided Sweeney with classes on law enforcement leadership, and put him through a grueling physical training program.

BOARDMAN — When police Lt. Mike Sweeney took 10 weeks away from home and work, it wasn’t to lie on a beach.

In fact, his reward for more than two months of study and intense physical training was the opportunity to run an intensive — and rather famous — obstacle course designed by the U.S. Marine Corps.

That obstacle course is called the Yellow-Brick Road and it’s part of the facilities at the FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, where the bureau’s special agents and intelligence analysts train. Graduates of the FBI’s National Academy for law enforcement professionals get to run the course upon completion of the curriculum.

The yellow brick Sweeney and several of his classmates received at the end bears the name of the academy and includes his class number: 291.

From July 6 through Sept. 12, Sweeney attended the academy where he focused on several classes designed to make him a better leader of his division and the department.

Promoted to lieutenant in November, the 20-year BPD veteran said the experience has done that and more.

“I’m not just a different cop; I’m a different person,” he said. “Not only my colleagues but my family have told me ‘you’re different than when you left.’ It’s a transformational experience.”

Sweeney, 49, has spent his entire professional career in law enforcement, including time on the Canfield City and Poland Village police forces, and as a military police officer in the Ohio Army National Guard from 1993 to 1999.

He joined Boardman as a patrolman 20 years ago, and had experience with the FBI back then, serving for four years as part of the FBI’s violent crimes task force starting in 2013, when he was assigned to Boardman’s detective division. In 2017, Sweeney was promoted to sergeant and took over the youth and family services division. Upon his promotion to lieutenant, he took over Boardman’s detective division, while Lt. Glenn Patton took over the juvenile division.

Sweeney completed the National Academy just before his promotion. He said it gave him the tools to be a better administrator and help his colleagues be more effective police officers and members of the community.

“They have a blend of classroom instruction and an intensive physical exercise program,” he said.

The classes, all graduate-level courses taught by professors at the University of Virginia, focus on leadership, crisis management and criminal law.

Sweeney selected five courses: managing organizational change, strategic communication for law enforcement executives, futuristics and law enforcement foreseeing, conflict resolution for law enforcement executives and legal issues impacting law enforcement operations.

He said he found lessons from the course on futuristics to be engaging and enlightening — and a little alarming.

“Part of what we studied was AI technology. How it will affect us as a nation, but also how law enforcement can utilize it, as well as why we should be wary of it and what to watch out for,” he said.

One advantage to AI, Sweeney said, is that it can help police to process and make use of all the video collected from officers’ body cameras.

“The amount of video taken on a daily basis is just massive, and as supervisors we’re really only able to review it when we’re told there’s a problem,” he said.

But new AI technology is now available that can process and analyze every second of body camera video.

“So we can look at it to assess patterns and isolate problems,” Sweeney said. “For example, maybe when officers say something inappropriate. But also when they’re doing a good job. We can make course corrections when necessary and also recognize officers for doing good work, which they are doing 99% of the time.”

Sweeney said it’s not just for administrators, but gives patrol officers a dashboard they can use to improve their own performance.

“It’s an amazing opportunity that’s just on the horizon right now, but I really think it may be commonplace in 10 years or so,” he said.

He said the department has consulted with a few companies to explore the feasibility of the technology but has not committed to anything yet. On the other side of the coin, Sweeney said some AI tech may pose problems police and courts do not need.

“Some AI tech we’re seeing now can be used to develop police reports, but the ability to develop those reports is based solely on body camera video,” he said. “It can generate a narrative based on what the body camera picked up on audio, and there’s some limits to that, to be honest. Is that going to be something you can testify to in court? Because a computer wrote it, not an officer.”

He said he also worries about personal information police collect during encounters with the public, like private financial information, addresses and Social Security numbers.

“I wonder if the AI program will know to keep that information separated from the public report, and if it does know that, then where does it store that data and is that information secure?”

Sweeney said his strategic communication course focused not just on how to work with media and brand the department, but also how to connect with the community.

“How do we get in front of things to build relationships with the community, and let them know what we’re doing and break down those barriers?” he said. “The community sees us in public and maybe doesn’t always know everything we do, and so we can look for opportunities to open different relationships.”

Beyond the classes and the information passed on by professors, Sweeney said he was so impressed with the futuristics class that he felt compelled to introduce his wife to that instructor at graduation. However, he also was impressed by what the students learned from one another.

“There were 259 of us, including 23 international partners from every corner of the world,” he said.

One class led to such a robust discussion among the attendees that the professor noted at the end that he had only spoken the 15 words that got the conversation started, Sweeney said.

“It becomes all about eliminating those borders and understanding how policing looks in other places, and bringing the best from everywhere back to your organization to hopefully make it better,” he said.

In the months since, those relationships have paid dividends in real ways.

“We’ve had some investigations that led to somewhere else in the country, and I have had the ability to call somebody from that agency,” Sweeney said. “You say you’re from NA Class 291 and there’s a warm reception right from the start on what is really a cold call, but we’ve been able to develop leads from that cooperation.”

A group text and an app for the NA graduates also lets them reach out to one another to see who else may have dealt with a particular problem or type of case, and learn from each other quickly.

That saves the department time and money, he said.

The experience was not all seminars and borderline abusive physical training, despite what signs on the Yellow Brick Road might say — “Hurt, Pain, Agony, Love-It.” Some fun was involved too.

The academy is free for all attendees. Boardman covered the cost of Sweeney’s salary during his time in Virginia, but the FBI covers room and board. Other activities came out of Sweeney’s own pocket, but he says they were “more than worth it.”

They took trips on weekends, including tours of New York City and the NYPD, Philadelphia Police Department, a guided VIP tour of the Pentagon, and a 16-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail as a team-building exercise.

One seminar played on one of the most famous films to feature the FBI — 1991 Oscar winner “The Silence of the Lambs” starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. The movie opens with Foster running through the 6.1-mile Yellow Brick Road obstacle course.

The movie was screened, and then the guest lecturer (from the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit featured in the movie) and students discussed some of the real-life killers whose crimes influenced Hopkins’ iconic character, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. That seminar was in the same room where Foster’s character, Clarice Starling, walks across the stage to receive her FBI graduation diploma at the end of the movie.

“I kept thinking ‘man, I just walked down those steps,’ or ‘I walked past that sign the other day,” Sweeney said of watching the movie in the place where it was filmed.

The National Academy has been operating since 1935, with more than 55,000 graduates. Sweeney said at least a handful of other Boardman officers have gone through it.