2022-12-12 Police Commission Regular Minutes

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Hawaii Police Commission Special Meeting Minutes December 12, 2022 Page 12 • Vice Chair Brown stated following the guidelines of CALEA has improved the department. Please explain yes or no and explain why. ➢ Paul Applegate stated he believes that CALEA accreditation plays a major role in the improvement of the police department. with first-hand knowledge at the department he's at right now. They have been through accreditation and re-accreditation. It sets the absolute minimum standards that have to be met. If you leave it up to a department to decide what is a priority, you run into the internal or external politics of what is important, but if you have a national standard of what is important, these are the minimum standards that have to be met in each field, in each category of training, communications, report writing, and you have to give proofs showing how you accomplished this and showing you actually did it as a department. That is a large role in setting the base standard and from there, we can go to a higher standard, but that's the bare minimum of what should be done and in this case of training especially, it would be very helpful to use that and stick with CALEA. ➢ Sherry Bird stated that the CALEA process does improve our department. It holds us to nationally recognized law enforcement standards and ultimately it holds us accountable. If we say we're doing something, we have to make sure we're doing it. Part of the process is that we have to provide proof that we're doing what we said we were going to do. The accreditation process that we go through is like a gold star in policing. It shows that we're professional and we hold ourselves accountable. It serves a great purpose to improve our department. ➢ Benjamin Moszkowicz stated that accreditation is something that is essential. He comes from a department that has been accredited by CALEA for over a decade. He's been through multiple accreditations and the way their department does it is a one-point person or a team who farms out these proofs to different divisions. He had a chance to work on lots of different proofs. It forces the department to remain accountable. It also does help the department in the case of a civil lawsuit. The claim would be difficult to prove that your department was unable to provide the policy guidance if the CALEA accreditation requires you to have that policy guidance. The other main benefit of accreditation is that it helps law enforcement nationwide to capitalize on this concept of best practices. One of the things that he learned by attending the FBI National Academy this past spring with 255 police officers from around the world is that while we may speak different languages or work in different states, we all basically have the same challenges. We have the same opportunities for success, we have the same issues, we wear different uniforms and have different rules, but essentially it boils down to what works here may very well work somewhere else. Having that