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CASE #11 (Issue #67: May 1998)Submitted by Chief Stephen R. Monier, Goffstown (New Hampshire) Police Department Stephen R. Monier, Chief of Goffstown (NH) Police Department since 1984, and a CALEA Commissioner, hopes to help more law enforcement agencies realize the benefits of international accreditation. As a member of the CALEA Outreach Committee, Monier helps develop some of CALEA's marketing plans. Goffstown has 25 sworn officers and another 12 full-time civilian employees, all of whom are familiar with the accreditation process.
Accreditation also has a day-to-day impact on operations at the Goffstown Police Department. Although Goffstown, a town of 17,000, is not totally immune from crime, it is located in a state which has one of the lowest per capita crime rates. However, notes Monier, low crime is not just a matter of geographical serendipity - accreditation can help maintain and facilitate a low crime rate "by having an effective system for managing the department and for meeting the needs of the community." As Monier explains, "by pursuing excellence, the better your agency is, and the better trained people in your agency are, the more responsive you are to the needs of the community and the more effective is your work in your community and that will result in a lower crime rate."
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Accreditation is important, says Monier, for a number of reasons: "It's
helped us to pursue excellence, to have access to state-of-the-art standards, and
to manage and reduce our liability exposure through those standards." For
example, the department, on two different occasions, had pending lawsuits which
both made allegations pertaining to the use of force and a negligence/failure to
train. Both times the department insisted that it go to trial because it felt that the
suits were baseless. Monier recalls, "I was able to testify in both of those
lawsuits about the accreditation process, what that meant specifically in terms of standards that pertain to the
high-risk, high-liability areas — particularly use of force — and standards that relate to training." In both of those
cases, the jury came back with verdicts in favor of the community and not the plaintiffs. "I think," reflects
Monier, "that in both cases the fact that we were nationally accredited and had met national standards and were able
to prove that our training, policies, and procedures in those high-risk areas were up-to-date and exceeded
expectations for professional law enforcement agencies, had a significant impact on the jury."
