GRAY POLICE DEPARTMENT
The Gray Police Department is now one of 139 law enforcement agencies in Georgia that is state certified.
Chuck Groover is the State Certification Coordinator for the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police. He attended the City of Gray’s June 5 meeting to make the presentation of certification awards to Gray Police Chief Adam Lowe and GPD Certification Manager Sgt. Mark Robinson.
Groover noted that there are over 700 state law enforcement agencies in the state. He said certification is not an easy process and can take years to achieve.
“The Gray Police Department did it in 14 months because of their commitment,” he said.
The coordinator said policies and procedures had to be written about each standard and then employees had to be trained to follow the procedures.
“This is good for the city,” Groover stated.
The Jones County community is unique in having both law enforcement agencies state certified. The Jones County Sheriff’s Office has been certified since 2004.
According to the GACP website, certification status represents a significant professional achievement for a law enforcement agency. Certification acknowledges the implementation of policies and procedures conceptually sound and operationally effective. Certification is about best practices and provides a comprehensive blueprint for effective, professional law enforcement.
The cornerstones of certification are professionalism, operational guidance, positive community support, transparency, ethical conduct and liability protection.
In a June 13 interview, Lowe said he had been looking at certification for several years but did not have the manpower to do it. He said the opportunity came when Robinson retired from his position of investigator at the Ocmulgee Circuit District Attorney’s Office in December of 2021.
The chief said he reached out to Robinson to find out if he was interested.
“We had to have a dedicated person to be the certification manager, and everyone in the department had to buy in,” he said.
The process included rewriting every policy for the department. Lowe said now the manager has to make sure those policies are followed.
GPD Maj. Chris Williams said keeping the policies updated is an ever-changing process. He should know; he rewrote the policies in 2012.
Robinson said there are 144 standards for the certification process, but all of them did not apply to the GPD, such as having a jail and 911 center. He said a lot of the standards are about how the department does business, writes reports and packages evidence.
“It’s about checks and balances,” the manager added.
He said accreditation managers meet in Forsyth every three months with GPAC managers to discuss the process. Robinson said he took 10 files he had worked on to the first meeting, and something needed to be changed in all of them.
“The next time there were less changes. It got better as it went along,” Robinson said.
He said the use of force policy for the department was also sent to the national division, and was nationally certified. That process took eight months.
The manager said the policies had to fit the GPD office, and GPD officers have to be trained on and able to perform what is in the policies.
Lowe said that is an expansion of the 12 critical tasks that officers previously received training for every year.
The chief reiterated that there would have been no way to have achieved certification without having one person dedicated to the job.
“It takes a detail-oriented mind,” he said.
Robinson has been in law enforcement since 1987. He said when he retired from the DA’s office, his plan was to sit on his back porch.
“That’s where I was when Adam called, and I was starting to get bored,” he said.
The manager said Lowe pitched the idea of the job, and he agreed to give it a try, starting with attending accreditation school in January. He recalled in March, the chief asked him to write an application for the COPS grant.
GPD did not receive funding for that grant. The reason given was there was not enough violent crime in the city. Robinson said that was a lesson learned that would be useful later.
Lowe said one of the biggest challenges of writing the policies was to make sure they fit the department.
“We don’t want to have a policy we can’t do,” he said.
Robinson said starting at zero was difficult, but he said maintaining the certification going forward would be even harder.
“We can’t relax. It has to be maintained yearly, weekly, daily and hourly. We have to maintain all the standards every year,” he said.
