Article Highlights
- The problem: Maintaining accreditation and compliance
- The solution: PowerStandards compliance software
- The benefits of law enforcement accreditation software
Avoiding liability risk is a common concern for all law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement accreditation provides a set of policies, standard operating procedures, and best practices that agencies must follow to demonstrate their quality services to the community.
Agencies that meet law enforcement accreditation requirements lower the chances of non-compliance and field errors, which helps reduce liability insurance costs and improve community relations. In doing so, departments can restore trust and communication with their local community. But maintaining police department accreditation is ongoing and requires effective policy and procedure management at all levels of the department – responsibilities made easier by policy compliance tracking software.
The problem: Maintaining accreditation and compliance
Achieving and maintaining compliance is time-consuming. But trying to keep police department accreditation using a paper-based system wastes time and money, and drains valuable department resources. With these traditional, manual processes, you have to update, print, and distribute paper policies across the entire department each time a change is made. Then, you have to distribute the most recent version and ensure everyone removes and replaces the old policies from their binders.
The paper method has a negative impact on law enforcement staff and operations and the community at large. Inefficient processes where staffing and resources are already limited lead to increased stress, overworked staff, and lower agency morale. These expose the department to greater liability risks and negative media coverage if someone makes a mistake or cannot maintain compliance. This can further reduce your department's effectiveness by decreasing the efficiency of your public safety services – thus harming local perception in your community.
The solution: PowerStandards compliance software
PowerDMS’s policy compliance tracking software, PowerStandards, is made specifically to support police department accreditation. We partner with more than 60 accrediting bodies, including every state and national law enforcement body, to keep law enforcement agencies informed about standards requirements and changes. Because of this, PowerStandards includes policy-to-standards mapping capabilities, which can be used to upload policies, procedures, and other proofs of compliance (documents, videos, images) to standards to complete self-assessment and link policies to those standards.
You can also digitally highlight and label areas of a document to draw attention to the section during accreditation assessments and emphasize how it meets the standards. Furthermore, the system's policy review tools deliver automated alerts when a policy or standard changes or it’s time to review them so you can ensure compliance for accreditation. To keep from forgetting or missing any important policy updates, PowerStandards also allows you to create one-time or recurring tasks associated with standards and assign them to relevant staff in the department.
The PowerStandards compliance software even enables your police department to conduct mock self-assessments to ensure preparedness before accreditation. This allows reviewers to leave comments and upload documentation so agencies can make necessary changes before or after the assessment. Plus, assessors can review documentation before arrival to reduce the duration – and cost – of onsite assessments. And throughout the process, your agency can track self-assessment progress and view task and status reports by standard with our dashboards and special reports.
The benefits of law enforcement accreditation software
Policy compliance tracking software makes police department accreditation more manageable and efficient by eliminating manual paper processes from your system. On average, PowerStandards can reduce your assessment preparation time by as much as 50% and update policies four times faster than paper methods.
It also helps reduce your police department’s paper costs and assessment costs. Fewer staff hours required to maintain and review policies means lower overtime expenses for preparation. And fewer days for assessment means lower costs since most agencies cover the assessor's travel expenses.
Finally, you can better protect both your department and the community by proving compliance with law enforcement accreditation requirements. Showing compliance through accreditation fosters trust, supports effective public safety, and improves relations with your community.
Get started
PowerStandards can not only help your agency maintain compliance, but also save time when preparing for accreditation, lower liability risks, and foster positive narratives among local citizens. Schedule a demo to learn how PowerDMS’ software for police departments can benefit you.