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Crime & Safety

Accreditation Makes Eatontown Police Efficient

A new electronic system brings better training and neater desks to the borough's officers.

runs a tight ship, and now, it have something to prove it. Recently Chief Michael Goldfarb accepted from the official certificate of accreditation that his department worked two years to achieve.

There was a time when Goldfarb started his day with a stack of paper police reports piled high on his desk. Now reports are electronic and when the chief reviews one, he can add his notes online. And if Lt. Det. Lawrence Tyler needs to look up evidence from a crime scene from yesterday, or even last year, there's no rooting around in unmarked file cabinets. For that Tyler, who spearheaded the accreditation process, turns to a new bar code system.

"You watch CSI Miami and of course they have bar codes. Not all PDs have that," says Tyler.

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Together with Captain John Cleary, Tyler took on the lengthy project to win accreditation for the department last fall from CALEA, Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, Inc., the credentialing authority of police. That mouthful means that the department fulfilled 112 standards for safety, record keeping, evidence processing, discipline, training and more.

Tyler said that the hard work was not so much is meeting the standards, but it showing how the department had already achieved them. That and getting all the cops to see that the new electronic system would eventually be a help, and not a hassle.

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"The hardest thing was to get the guys to buy into it," Tyler said, referring to the new electronic record keeping. "But now 80-90 percent of them get it."

Goldfarb said he couldn't be happier about the work that Cleary and Tyler did to win the accreditation.

"If you need to get something done, you need the right people to do it," Goldfarb said about Tyler and Cleary. "And we had unbelievable support from the mayor and council."

The accreditation lasts three years and the department must continue to prove it meets standards and undergo inspection by CALEA.

Chief Goldfarb said key benefits of the accreditation process are:

  • protection from liability
  • achieving best practices
  • information accessibility
  • better training

For example, if his department's work is called into question in court, Goldfarb will have an accurate accounting of how suspects and evidence were handled.

The new system also streamlines continuing education. In the past when the department was due to watch a training DVD, the entire department would need to be called in off the road, or from vacation. Now officers can access the Web based training individually.

As the chief puts it, the new electronic system "brings the information right to their finger tips," when they are on the system in the office or on the laptop in their patrol car.

Now when a patrol officer is on the road, Goldfarb said, he or she can pull over on a coffee break and read through new training standards.

One officer who was out for months with a knee injury was able to stay current on department memos from home through the online document management system. "She was able to log on and keep going," he said. "If she hadn't, she would have come back to 60 memos."

All in all, Tyler said, the accreditation process means these days good police work is getting done in a better way in Eatontown.

"We've always gotten things done. We've always done the work we needed to do," Tyler said. "Now we're so much more effective and efficient."

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