CALEA: What's the point, what's it cost, and is it worth it?

For the last 5 years EHPD has been working towards Accreditation from CALEA (Commission for Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies.), and over the last 12 months or so the Administration has made a massive push to get the effort over the finish line. The issue we have with it is that this effort has at times come at the expense of the actual Law Enforcement function of our Department as funds and personnel have been cut from operational and investigatory purposes to allow Accreditation to have a blank check book. So the questions have to be asked, what is Accreditation, how much has it cost us, and how can it help the average employee do their job? We're going to try and break down the answers to those questions here in this post.

So first off, what is CALEA? It's a privately run organization under the umbrella of the IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police.) that's run by a Commission of 21 members, only half of whom actually have Law Enforcement experience. This Commission is supposed to develop policies that are considered "best practices" and then convince Police Departments to adopt their policies and give the Commission money for the right to call themselves "accredited" and put a plaque in their lobby and stickers on their cruisers. According to their website, for an Agency the size of ours, the initial Accreditation fee is currently $11,450, with an annual charge of $4,065 every year thereafter, plus the cost of airfare, lodging, transportation, and stipend for the CALEA certified assessors to do their on site reviews. That may not sound like a ton of money, but it's more than we have budgeted to be spent this year on criminal investigation technology (who needs technology anyway?), and almost as much as we have budgeted for SWAT protective equipment for our team that's wearing ill fitting hand me down uniforms if they have uniforms at all.

While we're on the topic of money, let's look at how much this project has cost the Agency overall. Everyone working at EHPD over the last few years has become familiar with our motto, no not the Serving with Pride and Integrity one, but the real one you hear every time you actually need something to do your job, that's right; "There's no money in the budget." But somehow despite this Admin mantra, money has always been found to keep the Accreditation Department going at full steam.

So let's do some rough math, for about 5 years now, we've had one full time Officer assigned to Accreditation, let's assume an average base salary there of around $71,500 over that time period, that comes out to about $357,500. They've also hired a part time clerk to assist with Accreditation who's been there for at least 4 years I believe, at an average base salary of about $30,000, which comes out to another $120,000. About a year ago they also hired on another full time civilian "Research Analyst" to assist at a base salary of $73,160. There's also a Deputy Chief tasked with overseeing the entire process at $99,915. Additionally there have been several Lieutenants in and out of the process as well through the years at varying degrees of involvement, each one making around $90,000 average base salary over this time period. Now let's not forget that for several months before the on site visit this past June the Administration also pulled an Officer from Patrol and an Investigator from our Narcotics unit to work in Accreditation full time, each one pulling a base salary of $73,474 and $74,146 respectively.

So just looking at these rough figures you can see we are easily in the hole to this process for between $500,000 and 1 million dollars over the last 5 years. And that's without calculating overtime (which has been substantial.) or benefits, or all the other employees who were pulled from their main jobs to help out with Accreditation here and there over the last five years. 

Additionally many Departments who obtain Accreditation have to keep someone on staff full time as a compliance Officer, whose sole purpose is to ensure the Agency stays up to date with the latest from the Commission and prepares everything for the triannual re-certifications and walk throughs. I assume we would keep the full time Officer we already have in that role at a base salary of $74,209, which brings the annual cost of maintaining Accreditation with CALEA fees to $78,274 plus benefits. If they choose to also keep the part time clerk on staff at his current base salary of $31,861, that raises the annual cost to $110,135, which coincidentally is $10,135 more than we currently have budgeted for overtime for the Criminal Investigations Division to actually work on cases.

Now the real issue here isn't that the Administration is spending inordinate amounts of money on this pet project, it's that while this money is being spent other parts of the Department are rotting on the vine due to a lack of funding. For example; Patrol Officers are no longer all issued cameras for taking crime scene photos, instead only a handful have them. Our SWAT vehicle caught on fire and burned up due to neglect and disrepair and now years later it still hasn't been replaced. Our Evidence truck leaks and has mold issues and hasn't been fixed. Live fire handgun and rifle training has been cut down to only once a year, and I'm constantly hearing from employees that they are denied access to outside training courses they need to advance their careers and subsequently, the quality of the Agency. The worst of all in my opinion is our Detectives and Investigators being denied overtime they need to follow up on cases and come out to crime scenes to investigate serious crimes that occur in their off hours. Our Detectives want to come out and work these cases, but often times they haven't been allowed, why? Because "there's no money in the budget." These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

These are real issues that not only negatively affect us as employees, but also the people of the Town who are losing out on better quality Police Services. I think having a properly trained and equipped Patrol Division and SWAT team ready to protect you, or an actual trained Detective on scene to investigate when you're a victim of a crime is more important to the average East Hartford resident than being able to say their local Police Department is accredited by a Commission no one outside of Law Enforcement has ever heard of.

This brings us to our final points, how can CALEA Accreditation help us as employees, and what's the purpose? We've seen the constant raft of new policies come down with CALEA citations over the years, sometimes they're minor changes to existing policies, and other times entirely new ones. In some cases we've gotten new and useful training we didn't previously have because CALEA required it, like CPR and Defensive Tactics, other times, it's a complete waste, like having the entire membership sit through an All Hazards training class where the material really only applied to Supervisors. It's been a bit of a mixed bag but overall there hasn't really been anything yet that completely changes the way we do our job, we've pretty much carried on as we have been for decades. So I'd argue Accreditation really hasn't done much at all to improve working conditions, or give new resources to solve cases for the average employee. What it has done however, is sap monetary resources from things that could have improved the Agency more substantially.

Here is where I have a really crazy idea, if CALEA Accreditation is really about bettering the Agency by enacting these new policies, then why not just put the policies in place, but forego the costly Accreditation process completely? There's nothing stopping the Department from doing this, and as an added benefit, they could choose to enact the policies we like and that would actually benefit us, and ignore the ones that don't. And they'd be free to modify any of them as they see fit to make them work better without having to conform to CALEA's strict standards. Under this method, we'd get all of the benefits of Accreditation without any of the cost or other downsides. The Agency would be improved and a substantial amount of money would be saved, which is important for a Department that's always struggling for funding.

Of course this won't happen, because Accreditation was never about bettering the Agency. It's about padding resumes for the handful of people at the top involved with it, and it's about earning clout within the IACP, presumably help set certain individuals up for their next jobs after EHPD. That's why they don't care about how the Department is actually running on the ground floor, so long as they can slap a CALEA sticker on it and say "look what I did" before they walk away, all at the taxpayer's expense.