The District of Columbia’s police department spent tens of thousands of public dollars and countless hours readying itself for a critical outside accreditation — only to pull the plug at the last minute because the department failed to adequately prepare for the review.
Accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies Inc. had been the decades-long goal of police leadership. But when the commission sent staff to inspect the police department in late March — after years of meetings, test runs and policy changes from within the police department — D.C. police officials hadn’t finished paperwork for the test.
That failure kept examiners from answering nagging questions about the department’s key responsibilities to curb violence and handle evidence properly, a final report from CALEA showed.
New Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier initially pulled extra officers off the city’s streets to try and finish the paperwork so that the inspection could continue, but changed her mind on April 4, the report states.
“Chief Lanier thanked the assessors for their hard work and said it would be a waste of time for them to continue,” said the report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Commission accreditation helps departments recruit top-notch challenge and ward off civil suits. Being accredited by CALEA is admissible evidence that departments are training and managing their staffs properly. The city’s police department has coveted such status to show it has improved from a checkered past.
In the late 1990s, the Department of Justice threatened to put the D.C. police force into receivership because its officers led the nation in shooting civilians. Former Chief Charles H. Ramsey, who made CALEA accreditation one of the missions of his regime, saw it as a way of getting out of the monitoring.
D.C. police spent nearly $50,000 in annual dues to the commission from 2000 until 2007, city records show. They also paid a full-time inspector and several full-time officers, along with numerous outside consultants, to bring the department up to the commission’s standards.
The D.C. inspector charged with getting CALEA accreditation, Ethel Jones, has since retired and her staff has been reassigned to the city’s streets.
Police spokeswoman Traci L. Hughes downplayed the significance of the department’s failure, saying that many large police departments do their work without commission accreditation.
“It doesn’t suggest in any way at all that D.C. police is not doing their job,” she said. “The department has comes leaps and bounds from where it was in the late 1990s.”
Police union chair Kristopher K. Baumann said the commission debacle is another embarrassment for Ramsey, who is now being considered for the chief’s job in Baltimore.
“We have more wasted money and we haven’t gotten anywhere,” Baumann told The Examiner, adding that he hoped the police department would spend time focusing on “setting our own standards of excellence.”
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