Law Enforcement Accreditation

Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, Inc. (CALEA)

http://www.calea.org/newweb/PSCAP/PROGRAM.htm

I found this very interesting form of accreditation.
Are there unaccredited law enforcement Agencies and what is the ramification of such?


learner

 

Please clarify the relationship of this to accreditation or nonaccreditation of distance learning.

 

CALEA "accredits" law enforcement agencies as a whole. They review policies, procedures, rules, regulations, staffing, and other agency functions. While it sounds nice, most professional law enforcement agencies are “not” accredited by CALEA

It is a great buzz word so that some smaller affluent bedroom communities can brag their police department is "accredited". But the fact is that very few of the larger law enforcement agencies can afford the $12,000, the added expenses of compliance, the limitations and cover the salary of a full time accreditation officer.

If an agency is organizationally sound there is absolutely no need for it. If a law enforcement agency needs leadership and management rebuilding there are much more cost effective alternatives to consider. The structure of the law enforcement system is built through accountability so that oversight and reviews can always take place at the County, State and Federal Level without such a huge waste of tax dollars and salary.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the accreditation of distance learning. This is not the same as the accreditation of schools, colleges and universities. The accreditation of police agencies is very uncommon, expensive and just not practical.

 

Perhaps more figments of “Learner’s” very teeming imagination.

 

The concept of accrediting police departments came about around 1979 because there were no uniform standards at a nationwide level and because some agencies had pisspoor standards that lended credence to the notion that cops are uneducated idiots. By implementing certain standards, officer safety as well as public safety is improved, at least in theory.

Accreditation can include law enforcement, corrections, public safety communication centers (aka 911 centers) and academies. Accreditation can further be broken down into national accreditation or state accreditation (I am from Florida). What is the difference between national and state accreditation? National accreditation is notoriously expensive and is cost prohibitive for your average department. Subsequently, many states created their own statewide accrediting bodies to develop statewide standards at a fraction of the cost of national accreditation. The standards between national or state accreditation are the same or similar, but the cost difference is monumental. Most agencies in Florida stick with state accreditation, due to the cost factor.

Accreditation is not manditory, but now that state accreditation has been developed, it is now within the financial reach of many smaller agencies and many chiefs and sheriffs choose to seek state accreditation because it is politically vogue e.g. it's good for your political career and it makes the agency look good and it proves that minimum standards are met by your agency and, well, the list is endless.

 

Which one? The one that writes English perfectly or the one that is barely literate in English?

 

I would much prefer it if we could stick to discussing the issue at hand rather than lapsing back into sniping. Thanks.
Jack

 

Clarification,

UJ I'm driving toward HR hiring practice and how such accreditation of public or private organization including hospitals can make the agency or other business more responsible in hiring personnel.

Some of you are known to combat mills, one of the problems is that some employers or maybe HR departments do a poor job in screening, businesses can be accredited also and one way to keep accreditation is audit of HR departments and their hiring practices. if companies stop hiring people with bad or substandard credentials the need for such credential will decline.

Maybe all HR departments need to be accredited or certified.
The reason I selected law enforcement agency wasn't random.

Institutional, Industrial, private business accreditation can hold the key.

Also I was interested in this type of accreditation and thank very match to the persons that provided additional insight.

I think this will be of interest to some readers.

Regards,

Learner

 

Learner,

You raise some valid and very interesting points. But I believe UJ’s question was “What does this have to do with Distance Learning?” I think his key point is that users of this board as well as the tread itself would be better served if it was posted in the Off-Topic section instead.

 

I appreciate the clarifications. I also appreciate the watchfulness. My big concern here is with "other" uses of the word "accreditation". Why my concern?

You may recall the difficulties engendered (deliberately!) by that school in Newburgh advertising that it was "accredited" first by Liverpool and then by Canterbury.

One might have thought they were using the term in the sense of a subsidiary school doing the work and a degree-granting school actually issuing the diploma--a common practice in the UK, SA, and maybe elsewhere. This is a perfectly legit use of the word, as is our usual use of it.

Of course, they weren't; they just wanted people to THINK they were. In that case, less wasn't more, less was just less. A lot less.

So now that the entirely *non-education-sense* of the word "accredited" in this thread has been clarified, OK.

 

Lerner - Law enforcement agencies do extensive background checks on potential police officer candidates prior to hiring them. A detective or special unit often does this. Even so, it is very embarrassing when a diploma mill scandal surfaces in the law enforcement community.

Aside from spending over $12,000.00, an officer's salary and other expenses just to be "accredited"... It would be much more cost effective to ensure special training for law enforcement agency leadership, command staff, and the background investigators on the subject diploma mills and college/university accreditation. Better to deal with the issue straight on and train for it. I doubt agency accreditation provides training about diploma mills. Just my opinion.

Craig

 

I don't care which one as long as one of them answers my question about which states approve degrees from unaccredited schools for corrections officer positions.

Of course this presents a further problem, which one is more believable?

 

CALEA;

Cash

Accepted

from

Law

Enforcement

Agencies

Accreditation of law enforcement agencies is nothing but a money making scam.

 

Genious!!!

 

Whew!!!!! < 2 thumbs up > LOL

 

Let's all give it up for Bruce, the newly-crowned King of the Acronym!

 

Well said!

 

Our PD has decided to no longer seek CALEA accreditation, but we are still accredited through New York State. The reasons given were monetary as has been pointed out here. Nice job, Bruce

 

It's personal with me and CALEA.

When I was in the police academy, the department was going for accreditation, and we were used as slave labor to try to meet CALEA's standards. Every screw-up, real or imagined, by anyone in the class, and we had to report on the weekends for "extra duty". To add insult to injury, they finally abandoned the idea of accreditation, so all those wasted weekends were for nothing.

 

As always, Bruce hit the nail right on the head. For the past 20 years in the law enforcement community there has been a proliferation of "associations", "boards", commissions", "councils", etc. to provide some type of outside "service" that seem to have little or no value. The only thing they all have in common is that they generate money for the "non-profit" entity and never go away. A department that joins, becomes a member or uses their service (often "certification") rarely terminates the relationship and the list of departmental affiliations does nothing but get larger. IMO, the only upside to this bureaucratic nightmare is that it serves to reduce liability a bit. Whenever someone files a lawsuit, the departments' attorneys produce all types of certificates and reports showing that they met or exceeded some recognized standard by an "outside accrediting agency" and were therefore not "negligent" in their "practices and procedures."