photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Lawrence Police Department headquarters, 5100 Overland Drive, is pictured June 28, 2022.

A branch of the University of Kansas has gotten into the business of evaluating the operations of law enforcement agencies across the state and offering accreditation to police and sheriff’s departments.

The Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center, which is based in Hutchinson but run by KU, has recently launched the Kansas Law Enforcement Accreditation Program. The program reviews police and sheriff’s departments that sign up for the program, and ultimately certifies whether the agencies are meeting a set of best practices for law enforcement.

Kansas was one of only 14 states that did not have its own state-level law enforcement accreditation program, KU said in a press release. KU last year received a two-year federal grant to establish the program. In the last several months, the program has been working with a small group of police and sheriff’s departments, but now is rolling the program out across the state.

The accreditation process remains voluntary. Kansas law does not require a law enforcement agency to go through a particular accreditation process. The process created by KU involves trained assessors evaluating the operations and policies of law enforcement agencies and comparing those with a set of standards.

Those standards include information on a code of ethics, workplace conditions, professional standards and specific topics such as use of force, search and seizure, biased policing and several other issues.

The Lawrence Police Department was one of nine police and sheriff’s departments selected in August to go through the first round of the accreditation process, which is ongoing. The neighboring Franklin County Sheriff’s Office also is part of that first group of agencies.