Law enforcement accreditation: A national comparison of accredited vs. nonaccredited agencies

Since the implementation of the Commission on Accreditation for Law-Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) in the early 1980s, numerous works have been dedicated to the discussion of police accreditation. Unfortunately, most of those works have been merely discussion of accreditation or empirical evaluations of officers' perceptions on the accreditation process. This study provides a comparison of specific agency characteristics between accredited and nonaccredited law-enforcement agencies. The research approach used in this study involved the use of secondary data in a cross-sectional design. Data were collected from the Law-Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics, 1993: Data for Individual State and Local Agencies with 100 or More Officers (LEMAS) and CALEA's April 1998 list of accredited agencies. Results identified five variables which were significantly different in accredited vs. nonaccredited agencies. Those variables were field training hours, minimum educational requirements for starting officers, policy for drug-testing-sworn police applicants, the operation of a special drug unit, and the operation of a special child-abuse unit.