Does national police accreditation undermine local control?

One of the main roadblocks to increasing uptake of national police accreditation (i.e. accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA)) is concern among some in law enforcement that promoting national standards for policing would undermine local control. The purpose of this study is to assess whether CALEA-accredited police departments are more (or less) likely than non-CALEA-accredited police departments to utilize information from resident surveys to inform agency operations.

This study utilizes data from the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey and cardinality matching, a quasi-experimental approach, to estimate the relationship between CALEA accreditation status and utilization of information from resident surveys among municipal police departments.

We find that agencies that subscribe to national police accreditation are more likely to use resident surveys to prioritize crime/disorder problems, evaluate officer or agency performance, guide training and development and inform agency policies and procedures compared to matched agencies that do not subscribe to national police accreditation.

While there is research on the effects of national police accreditation on traditional policing outcomes, there is a paucity of research on whether national police accreditation undermines the ability of local residents to affect policing standards. The findings from this study suggest that national police accreditation may enhance the power of local residents to affect policing.