Law enforcement organizations are continually adapting to the needs of the community and the evolving expectations for the delivery of police services. This can sometimes pose a challenge for agencies. Few agencies have sufficient means to accomplish this using only internal resources, and those that can still have a need to connect with stakeholders in the law enforcement profession to validate their practices.

To help agencies meet this challenge, the IACP offers a host of professional services to advance the law enforcement profession. These services include management studies, promotional testing, and executive searches. Each of these draws on our membership and extensive network of law enforcement professionals. The IACP’s ability to pull from the experience of practitioners, academics, and associated professionals ensures that professional services are reflective of promising practices and proportionate with each recipient’s needs.

Management Studies

Instituting change within organizations requires leaders to have vision and commitment. An independent assessment can provide a blueprint to prioritize and guide these changes, support leaders’ efforts, and significantly influence the degree of their success. The IACP’s management studies assess the operational effectiveness of a law enforcement agency. Scaled to address an agency’s needs, management studies can include a comprehensive review of operations, policies, training, staffing, organizational structure, administrative boundaries, community relations, and organizational culture. The IACP’s management studies produce an extensive set of practical, prioritized recommendations to upgrade the effectiveness, productivity, and professionalism of municipal police services. The recommendations enable the department to cope successfully in the future with emerging conditions or trends, placing special emphasis on actions to ensure that the department is accountable to elected officials and the public.

Promotional Testing and Assessment

The IACP recognizes the importance of selecting and advancing the right candidates into leadership positions, and a sound methodology to assess qualified candidates for promotion within a law enforcement organization is vital to ensuring the integrity of the process and informing promotional decisions. The IACP provides promotional examinations and assessment centers to support law enforcement organizations with this process. These services are augmented with customized study guides, candidate orientation and feedback, and test administration.

“The IACP recognizes the importance of selecting and advancing the right candidates into leadership positions.”

Promotional exams utilize a job analysis survey to select questions from an IACP question bank that are appropriate for the specific rank and organization. This is a cost-effective process regardless of the size of candidate pools. Specific questions can be created to complement existing ones or to create an entirely custom exam that is based on an agency’s specific needs and requirements.

Assessment centers are a powerful tool for making promotion decisions. Incorporating simulated challenges of the target position, the centers aid agencies in gauging a candidate’s ability to perform the job and provide insight on an individual’s strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance potential based on written exams. The IACP completes a job analysis to develop exercises for individual and group simulations, and the performance of candidates is evaluated by trained assessors, providing information that is unattainable from written exams. Assessors are trained in objective evaluation and scoring. The IACP administers the assessment center and provides a report summarizing its development and the performance of each candidate.

Assessment centers can be utilized for all promotional processes, from first-line supervisor to chief of police.

Executive Searches

The chief of police is a highly visible and influential leader touching many aspects of the community, and the role of law enforcement executives requires chiefs to have a balance of technical skills and an understanding of the needs of the community, as well as the agency.

The IACP executive search utilizes a comprehensive candidate profile and job analysis; extensive recruitment advertising; and an applicant screening, evaluation, and selection process to ensure candidates are qualified for the position and representative of the community’s values. Using a collaborative model, the IACP integrates the desired qualifications, management, and leadership styles with education and experience requirements. A community profile accompanies the resulting vacancy announcement and is distributed across the IACP network of members and law enforcement practitioners.

Contributing to Your Success

IACP professional services are well suited to assess, validate, and improve law enforcement operations, as well as to identify, prepare, and engage rising leaders within the profession. The IACP stands ready to meet your needs with management studies, promotional testing, executive searches, and research. Equally, the IACP is committed to continually expanding its base of practitioners and subject matter experts. Participation in these services is an outstanding way to contribute to the law enforcement profession, and participants develop a richer understanding of proven practices by adapting them to similar applications. d

Please cite as

Meghann Casanova, “Professional Services to Advance Law Enforcement,” IACP@Work, Police Chief 88, no. 9 (September 2021): 150–151.