Police receive re-accreditation

EDMONDS – Last fall, the Edmonds Police Department’s Youth Services Division and Crime Prevention Unit were almost cut from the city budget.

This summer, those programs received high praise from a national accreditation organization as it awarded the Edmonds Police Department renewed accreditation status after having initially recognized the department in 2000. The department is one of only nine departments in the state to receive the accreditation.

After being told to make significant cuts in the department’s budget for 2003 in the wake of a revenue decline in city government, Chief David Stern put the programs on the chopping block out of necessity, not by choice.

“They’re excellent programs, but the issue we’re facing is they’re not mandatory programs,” Stern said. “You can’t stop 911 calls in favor of having an officer at the school.”

But testimony from citizens helped influence City Council members to find a way to work the budget to keep the programs funded for another year. In April, representatives of the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) – which provides accreditation services to departments in the United States and Canada – spent nearly four days in Edmonds going over the city’s records and observing some operations. On July 12, the two programs were lauded in the report from the assessment team to the full commission.

To receive accreditation, a department must comply with all of 343 mandatory CALEA standards and 80 percent of another 101 optional standards. To show compliance, a department must keep meticulous records in all the categories – they include organization and administration, allocation of personnel, crime analysis, fiscal management, internal affairs, victim-witness assistance, patrol, investigation, drug enforcement, holding cells recordkeeping, to name just a few.

The records are kept “to be sure we do what our policies say we do,” said Administrative Sgt. Jeff Jones, who has been in charge of the recordkeeping process since May 2002.

Sometimes actual cases are included in the reports, other times it’s simply explaining how a procedure was followed, or both, Jones said. For example, if an assistant chief sends out a memo saying a certain amount has to be cut from the budget, records of how this directive was followed must be kept, Jones said.

He kept “proof files” to show how procedures were followed in the various categories. Sometimes, he would request more information from officers or detectives on a particular issue.

“It’s laborious,” he said with a laugh.

In April the CALEA investigators went through the records and observed some procedures, such as the holding cells and management of the property room.

The value of the accreditation is threefold, Stern said. One is that “I think it’s good to test yourself as an organization and this (accreditation process) provides you with an opportunity to do that and a set of criteria to do it against.”

Another is liability, that insurance carriers know the department is doing things correctly, Stern said. And next, but not least, is public confidence.

“They can be confident in the fact that all our procedures and operational directives and so forth have been reviewed by an outside entity and meet the highest standards,” he said.