Article Highlights
Accreditation enables your law enforcement agency to operate more professionally, justify your protocols, and promote trust in your community. Before you can receive and maintain accreditation, however, you must show compliance with required standards during regular assessments. In this post, learn how PowerStandards, a compliance document management software, enables your organization to more easily and efficiently assess accreditation readiness.
Preparing for accreditation assessments is a complex process, requiring time and energy from both officers and administrative staff. A manual system only makes this process more challenging, with staff having to manage documents by hand, including:
The inability to quickly track policies and documents makes it more difficult to conduct an accreditation self-assessment and determine if your organization is maintaining compliance. Additionally, time spent tracking down documents means staff have fewer resources to commit to other important law enforcement work.
These challenges have ramifications beyond the police department accreditation process, too. Officers who aren’t up-to-date on current policies and procedures make more mistakes in the field. This not only contributes to subpar public safety practices and negative media coverage, but also introduces a higher liability risk to your agency and causes the community to lose trust in your agency.
PowerDMS’s accreditation software, PowerStandards, simplifies the police department accreditation process by providing:
Staff in your organization can prepare documentation for the accreditation process with PowerStandard’s digital highlighting and linking tools. You can highlight and label areas of a document that emphasize how your organization meets specific standards. Then, link policies to these standards and automatically receive notifications when a policy changes so you can quickly verify that your organization still meets all requirements.
You can also automate the self-assessment process by setting up one-time or auto-recurring tasks for users. Once identified, these tasks appear in your employees’ to-do list and inbox so they know to get started on their specific contributions. PowerStandards even notifies individuals of due dates so nothing falls through the cracks as you prepare for your assessment.
So your department is sufficiently prepared, you can also conduct an accreditation self-assessment before an onsite visit to ensure readiness. The PowerStandards accreditation software includes several tools that are particularly helpful for mock assessments, listed in the table below.
| Mock Assessment Tool |
Features of Tool |
| Reviewer and visitor tools |
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| Set statuses |
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| Dashboards and reports |
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As a cloud-based document management system, PowerStandards saves law enforcement agencies time and money. On average, agencies that use PowerDMS’s accreditation software reduce their assessment preparation time by 50% and save $11,000 in paper printing costs. Since accreditation software efficiently organizes your documents, assessors can spend less time reviewing for compliance during the accreditation assessment. As such, your organization saves money on the accreditation assessor’s travel expenses, too.
These savings mean your organization can dedicate more resources towards actual law enforcement work. By pursuing police department accreditation, your organization demonstrates that it is committed to maintaining compliance and fostering a culture of accountability. Accreditation software thus enables your agency to provide better services and build trust in your community.
To learn more about how PowerStandards can help your organization prepare for its upcoming assessment and attain police department accreditation, book a free demo today.