On Nov. 21, the Department of Campus Safety (DCS) received accreditation from The Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) after attending a final meeting with the company. DCS celebrated the accreditation on Feb. 4 in Mary Reed.
According to CALEA’s website, the accreditation program is to improve public safety services through standards that they determine as the industry’s best. “The process [to receive the CALEA accreditation] took just over two years,” said Community Partnerships and Training Coordinator Sergeant James Johnston.
Safety was one of the biggest reasons DCS chose to pursue the CALEA accreditation. “Accreditation is a tool to ensure officer safety,” said Assistant Director and Accreditation Manager Jennifer Kogovsek. “As our organization continues to advance, we wanted to ensure officer safety. Through accreditation, we have built a management framework to reduce liability for our staff and increase the level of service that we provide to the DU community.”
“To me, CALEA accreditation is validation that what we do here follows the industry’s best practices,” said Director of Campus Safety Don Enloe. “Accreditation has meant change of our division, not just transactional change but transformational change” said Enloe. “We have always been open to changing transactions like procedures or processes but through this process we have embraced an entire new management model that is bringing transformational change to how the division operates, changing our focus more to community engagement and customer service more than ever before.”
In order to receive the accreditation, the department had to undergo a complete rework.
“In that time [two years] we re-wrote every policy that our fivision has, added several new policies, created an entirely new training program, and much more,” said Johnston. “For the actual process of accreditation, we have to prove compliance of 297 standards that CALEA has identified as industry best practice. The standards cover everything from recruiting to training to evidence management to employee performance, critical incident and much, much more.”
According to Johnston, CALEA had done a practice assessment in Feb. 2015 and then an actual assessment in Sept. 2015. Each assessment included policy reviews, interviews with the DCS staff and community meetings. Johnston noted that the community meeting held was the largest CALEA had ever seen and received positive feedback from all members in the meeting. Having received the accreditation, DCS will now be assessed every year to continue their accreditation.
The CALEA accreditation of DCS is the first for a Campus Security program and will make a lasting impact.
“Our department is currently the only department accredited under the Campus Security program offered by CALEA and we were the first private, non-sworn agency to receive this award of accreditation,” said Johnston. “We are looking forward to leading the way for other institutions and assisting them as they enter into this program.”
More information about DCS and their accreditation can be found on their website.
