Article Highlights
- The problem: Demonstrating your commitment to quality public safety services
- The solution: PowerDMS’s accreditation management software, PowerStandards
- The benefits: Promote transparency, ensure accreditation preparation, and maintain compliance
Holding law enforcement accreditation is a great way to show the community that your organization holds its officers to a high standard of service. Accreditation not only demonstrates accountability within your agency but also improves the quality of your public safety services and increases public trust in your police department. PowerStandards, an accreditation management software by PowerDMS, helps you achieve the benefits of accreditation by tracking, managing, and updating the policies and procedures that ensure your organization maintains compliance.
The problem: Showing commitment to excellence
It can be challenging to showcase the numerous actions your law enforcement agency takes to commit to excellent service. Accreditation can serve as a proxy measure for excellence; however, obtaining or maintaining accreditation is by no means a simple process. Among all of your other important day-to-day tasks, many police departments struggle to find the time and resources required to prepare for accreditation.
To attain accreditation, your agency must track and update its standards and policies to ensure consistency within your organization and alignment with the community’s expectations. You must also remain compliant with standards over time, even when an accreditor updates or changes its standards. This can be difficult amidst budget cuts, which make it harder to find sufficient financial resources to staff these efforts – especially if you haven’t received law enforcement grant funding for accreditation efforts.
These challenges impede more than the accreditation process. If you’re unable to prove compliance, you can put your agency at risk of liability issues, including lawsuits. Not only is this harmful to your community, but it also results in a negative public perception of policing. Over time, ignoring the importance of compliance monitoring erodes public trust in law enforcement and makes it increasingly difficult for your police department to demonstrate excellence.
The solution: Accreditation management software
PowerStandards is an accreditation management software that simplifies the compliance monitoring and management process. Rather than manually completing accreditation assessment prep and updating policies for your agency, you can rely on several key features within the PowerStandards compliance monitoring software.
In particular, PowerStandards automates notifications so that your organization is informed whenever an accreditation agency makes a change to a standard that might affect your policies and compliance documents. Likewise, you can set up alerts for staff so they are notified about any items that require their attention, such as the need to review policies or new document version releases.
Our accreditation management software also makes it easy to manage tasks and collaborate with others on your team. You can create recurring tasks associated with specific standards, then assign to-do items for relevant staff to complete, including uploading narratives or evidence of compliance for accreditation.
PowerStandards also has policy review tools that allow law enforcement agencies to create automated reminders when it’s time to begin working on accreditation-related tasks, such as gathering signed policies. Doing so helps you ensure your staff are always up-to-date with essential guidelines and your department is prepared for accreditation, reducing the threat of noncompliance and liability issues.
The benefits of compliance monitoring software
The benefits of law enforcement accreditation are many, and using accreditation management software makes it even easier to enjoy them. Compliance monitoring software helps:
- Protect your reputation
- Build community trust
- Save time and money
By improving accountability across the organization to maintain compliance, you avoid liability issues and ensure you’re continually providing the best public safety services possible to improve community trust. PowerStandards also saves your law enforcement agency time and money by preventing costly lawsuits and reducing accreditation prep time by an average of 50% – allowing officers to focus on the important work of keeping a community safe.
Ready to learn more?
Book a free demo today to learn more about how PowerStandards can help your agency showcase its commitment to excellence and reap the benefits of law enforcement accreditation.