Leadership, Accreditation & Best Practices with Kevin Rhea

Welcome And Meet Kevin Rhea

Announcement 0:01

Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice, and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

Kevin’s Path Into Accreditation

Travis Yates 0:12

Well, welcome back to the show. I'm so honored you decided to spend a few minutes with us here today. And today's guest is someone we've been looking at and wanting to get on the show for quite some time. You're going to find this extremely interesting. So thanks for being here. And let's just get right after it. Kevin Rhea is an executive leader. He's a co-founder and executive director of the National Association for Accreditation Leadership. And he's also the host of the Beyond the Checklist podcast. The National Association for Accreditation Leadership is the first and only professional association in the country dedicated exclusively to accreditation professionals across all public safety sectors. Kevin's work includes over 25 years of law enforcement experience, and he was the director of the Arizona Law Enforcement Accreditation Program. Kevin Rhea, how are you doing, sir? Very good, Dr. Yates. How are you, sir? I'm good, man. And I, you know, and I think you've got this incredible journey, and you're this expert in accreditation. I can't wait to get into that because there's certainly uh uh, you know, opinions from all over the spectrum on that. And I think you're really doing a great job of bringing everything together and giving everybody a good explanation. Before we get there, just kind of walk us through your quick law enforcement journey and where you set today.

Why Accreditation Matters To Officers

Kevin Rhea 1:26

Perfect. Well, uh, thank you so much for having me on the show. Uh, I've really um wanted to be on your show specifically for a long time. Uh, I don't know if if you remember, but you and I first met um probably in the 2010, 2012 time, uh, when you were still on the job, and we met at an Aileda conference. Uh, and I really looked up to you and some of the things that you were doing and saying uh over the course of my career. I was also a driving instructor at two different police academies. So uh your driving skills and and the knowledge that you have uh is really what I took from our initial meeting. But so thank you again for having me on. I I greatly respect uh what you do. So my journey is um I worked for a police department at Metro Detroit for 25 years, served in all different capacities of the organization. But my last seven years, I worked as the training and standards sergeant or administrative sergeant, working directly for the chief's office. So one of my responsibilities uh besides doing internal investigations, writing our policies, was our chief wanted to pursue CALEA accreditation. So I was our agency's first uh CALIA accreditation manager, got the agency through that process, uh, then went through the Michigan Chiefs of Police accreditation process. Um during that time, I also uh served as an assessor for CALIA. So I would go out and assess other agencies, uh, basically in the Great Lakes area because that's where I was. So Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. And then I retired in 2018. And when I retired in 2018, uh my wife and I made the decision to leave the snow and cold of Metro Detroit behind, and we moved out here to Phoenix, Arizona. And once we got out here to uh Phoenix in 2018, uh, about that same time, the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police was starting their own accreditation program, state-level accreditation program, and I was hired to create to develop from uh scratch the Arizona Law Enforcement Accreditation Program. So I did that, uh served as its director for uh uh six years, turned that over to some new leadership so I could uh start on my next venture, and I went to go work for NeoGov or more specifically Power DMS. And I worked for Power DMS for uh nine months on their partner success team, and always in the back of my mind, uh being so involved in accreditation was this idea of creating this discipline agnostic association of accreditation managers, basically so we could start the process of professionalizing that position of accreditation leader. So that's kind of where we are now, and uh I look forward to our conversation.

Travis Yates 4:35

Yeah, it's so interesting. So you you just jumped out there and uh and launched this all in, both feet in, you don't have a side gig. This is what you do. And I think when most police officers hear accreditation, to some of them it's a little bit of a dirty word. Talk to us about the benefits of that. Um what you would tell them if they if they immediately think that. Because probably why they think that is they either they were told by they were told by person by person, or maybe they had a negative encounter with some sort of leader that do this because of accreditation, or you got to do this document because of accreditation. What would you tell them uh that maybe has that negative connotation about it?

Kevin Rhea 5:14

Yeah, I would tell them that that's not the case. I mean, as you move up, and Travis, you know this all too well, as you move up, your field of vision gets a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger. So by the time you move up in your leadership journey, you start to see more of the picture. Now, I completely understand from a patrol officer position or from a deputy sheriff position that's out working midnights, that accreditation may not mean a whole lot to them, but it does mean a lot to their agency and it does mean a lot to their community. What it means is that you are willing to hold your agency to a set of standards of best practices throughout the industry. And so while the rank and file police officer may not quite understand what that means, as they start their leadership journey, what they're gonna find is it's not about the plaque on the wall and it's not about the sticker on the car. It's about how, as an agency, are we going to hold ourselves accountable to the community that we serve? And we do that by following a set of best practices, not only in our policy, but also in our practices.

Travis Yates 6:26

Yeah, and ultimately that protects that line officer, right? If you're holding the agency to a standard, that means a leader can't just go off on a tangent and just totally change something up because they have to keep those standards in mind. So that line officer should respect that, correct?

Kevin Rhea 6:42

Absolutely. And if the officer is following uh their policies, which include the best practices for the safe, effective, efficient, non-discriminatory um delivery of professional law enforcement services, then it protects that individual officer because they're not going to be sued as often. They're not going to be successfully sued as often. The agency isn't going to. And then what happens is it kind of snowballs because the agency is able to save money not only on their uh insurance policies, but also to prevent their officers from being sued all the time. So I'll give you an example of follow-up policy. So the purpose of policy is really to set the limits of acceptable behavior, right? As long as you operate within the acceptable levels of behavior, then you are going to be perfectly fine. If you decide to work outside of your policy, two things better happen. Either you better have your supervisor's permission, or you better pray that nothing goes wrong. Because if something does go wrong and you're working outside of your policy, that's when you're going to have a legal issue. But that policy is meant to protect you, not meant to restrict you.

Travis Yates 8:03

I'll just ask, I'll go ahead and ask a tough question because I I agree policy should be made to protect the officer, but we do find certain leaders that will develop a policy that seems to be so unfollowable, right? It almost seems to be against the officer. And I would assume accreditation can actually help in this area, could it not?

Kevin Rhea 8:23

Yeah, absolutely. As a matter of fact, uh your episode back in October talked about policy and really talked about whether or not policy is meant to protect the officer, or if the the leadership is just using it as kind of a scapegoat method uh to kind of hang the officers out to dry. And what I will tell you is this I would tell you that if you are following your policy, um, then you have absolutely no concerns about being disciplined, about being uh sued, uh, about any negative ramifications. But but there are quote unquote leaders that uh regardless of whether you're following your policy or not, uh they can find something wrong that you did. And so uh the problem is when policy is not applied consistently, is when officers are going to have problems. And the reason that accreditation helps work that situation specifically is if you have two supervisors and they are applying the same policy differently, then that's what the problem is. That means that there's not understanding that is built into the agency culture. Everybody is going to apply that policy differently, where there needs to be a whole of agency approach when it comes to policies, because let's face it, I came from Metro Detroit. We're a heavily union state. Uh, we had uh four different police unions just in our shop of 70 people, and so you need to work with all of those key stakeholders when you develop those policies, but it's really important that there is understanding so that those policies are not subjectively applied to different situations.

Travis Yates 10:20

Another tough question for you, Kevin. Like I said, we've been waiting a while to get you on, so I'm not gonna hesitate. So uh there's a difference between management and leadership. Uh accreditation to some people may say that's gonna be that's gonna favor a management process, you know, paperwork, bureaucracy, check checklist, balances. How do you balance that out where management doesn't override leadership? Because obviously you have to have both in organizations. You have to have good managers, you have to have great leaders, right? They kind of go hand in hand. If you're if you get lucky, they're a good manager and a good leader. And so, where does accreditation help the leadership aspect of an organization?

Kevin Rhea 10:56

Yeah, so when I started this organization, we really started talking about uh this project called reimagining accreditation, because uh I believe that a lot of your listeners probably do think just like that, that accreditation is a management exercise and not just a leadership exercise. But I will tell you that traditionally accreditation has always looked backwards, right? You document what was done. When we talk about reimagining accreditation, we're talking about looking forward. So, how can we use accreditation to shape better leadership, improve service delivery, strengthen community trust? So, while some people look at accreditation being a very backwards-looking um way of managing, uh, I look at it as a very forward-thinking way of leadership. And how are we going to improve service delivery, improve the culture within our agency, strengthen community trust, and we can do all of that. We can do all of that just by uh following a set of standards, industry best standards of best practices.

Travis Yates 12:12

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. I like that looking forward instead of backwards because accreditation historically is sort of that's been the demand uh from the chief on down, is is these we need these past documents. When did you do this? Submit this. But I love this idea of using it to look forward, and that goes right in the leadership aspect. And Kevin, you probably have encountered all sorts of agencies going through accreditation. Can you pretty much sniff out the ones that are just want to kind of go through the motions, check the boxes, get the proverbial sticker on the car versus the ones that really are doing it for the right reason?

Leadership Versus Checklist Compliance

Kevin Rhea 12:45

Absolutely. If you're an assessor, you can tell within the first five minutes of being at an agency, those agencies that have bought into accreditation and really make it a culture shaper, uh, and those that are looking backwards, just trying to get the sticker or get the plaque on the wall. You know, one of my favorite sayings is the windshield is bigger than the rear view mirror. We should always be looking forward, but remembering what we've done in the past as a way of being a learning organization, you have to remember those mistakes that have been made so that you can correct them. And look, when it comes to accreditation, I'm not saying that one bad incident is going to affect your accreditation, right? If you have a bad shoot, it may not affect your accreditation because accreditation makes sure that you have the systems in place to handle the bad stuff when the bad stuff happens. Because we all know what's going to happen eventually. So, do you have the systems in place to handle the bad stuff when the bad stuff happens? And unless you've put your agency through that process, you may not really understand that. There's only been one agency that I'm aware of. And um I don't know if I should call them out, but it's a large agency in southern Florida that lost their uh accreditation, and it was due to the fact that they had an active shooter uh situation in a school, and that was a total agency-wide, system-wide failure. So they got their accreditation taken away from them, and they had to earn it back over several years to prove that they now had systems in place in order to handle that. So, really, when you're talking about making accreditation move from a compliance exercise to a culture exercise, and how are you going to be able to shape your agency and build that strong organizational culture and you do it by the standards?

Travis Yates 14:56

Yeah, I think that's probably the milestone, right? How do you take it just from an exercise to actually shaping the culture? And uh that's that that's the ultimate goal, I would have to imagine. And I'm sure you get some agencies, Kevin, that sort of are resistant. Maybe even the leaders are resistant. Uh, how do you deal with that? Maybe you have encounters with them about that. Is it just about lining out what we're talking about and the benefits of it?

Kevin Rhea 15:20

Yeah, I really think a lot of it is just an educational piece that has to take place with uh with the command staff within the agency. Uh, you know, we still have uh some chiefs that are resistant to accreditation. And the quote is nobody's gonna come into my department and tell me how to run my police department. And that's not what it's about. This is not about egos. This is about what are you doing to set your agency and your community up for success after you leave the organization? So if you don't want to do anything to affect change within the organization, if you want to ride your time out three, four, five years as a chief of police and put your feet on the desk, that's that's completely your decision. But are you prepared and are you willing to set your agency up for success after you no longer work there?

Travis Yates 16:17

I I think another benefit is we always talk about professionalism and is law enforcement a profession. And obviously, to be a profession, there has to be certain things there, and one of them is standardization. We obviously have 18,000 police departments, a lot of different policies, a lot of different rules, a lot of different guidelines. And I think that the benefit of accreditation is you're at least taking that step forward to professionalizing the profession. We call it a profession, but in reality, uh the officer in southern Alabama may be working under a completely different standard than the West Coast or East Coast, right? Uh, you know, if you're a doctor, you have generally the same standards across the country, same with attorneys and things like that. And so I I think they're I think that that's something that we're probably not quite there yet, but I think that's something that accreditation provides. And with that said, one of the things that bothers me, and if you if you followed me for any while, you know this, Kevin, is when politics interjects itself into law enforcement. And so when you when I hear the word best practices, I immediately get a spotty sense about well, who's dictating best practices? Is it perf where I don't want to take any advice from, or is it another organization where sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong? Kind of talk to about, because I'm probably the only one listening to this and didn't hear the word best practices and goes, well, who gets to determine that? Let's talk to me a little bit about that.

Systems That Hold Up Under Crisis

Handling Resistant Chiefs And Egos

Kevin Rhea 17:35

Yeah, so it really kind of depends upon if you are being accredited by uh the national organization. And and when when I'm talking about accreditation right now, I'm talking specifically about law enforcement. So it's whether you are uh being accredited by the National Association, which is the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies or CALEA, or if it is a state level organization. And I can tell you that I have experiences on both sides of that coin. So with CALEA, they have a standards review committee that meets uh three times a year, and they talk about changes to the standards. As a matter of fact, just last week I was at the CALEA conference in Tucson, Arizona, and their standards review committee met because they are creating uh standards on the use of artificial intelligence, the use of AI in writing police reports, the use of AI in proactive ways, like using predictive AI to help uh map out where your incidents are happening or whatever. But so they are creating standards now. So the CALIA was created back in 1979 uh as a joint venture between the International Association of Chiefs of Police, uh, the National Sheriff's Association, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, and your favorite PERF. Uh, the four of them came together and created CALIA. So when it comes to who is making those recommendations, a lot of the recommendations are coming directly from the chief or the accreditation manager themselves. Uh, but there is some influence by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the National Sheriff's Association where they bring input into that situation. Now, I'll give you an example from a state level perspective. When I started the program here in the state of Arizona, I answered to six people, and that were the six chiefs that were on the executive board of the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police. So I was not involved in the drafting of the standards. As a matter of fact, when I got when I moved here to Arizona, I landed here in the valley with my moving truck on uh July the 5th, and I had my first meeting with the Chiefs Association on the 6th, and they handed me a three-ring binder and said, these are our standards of compliance uh that have already been approved by our legal counsel, by our risk management association. Um, go ahead and build a program around these standards. So I think from a state level perspective, a lot of them get vetted through the Chiefs Association's attorneys, uh, the risk pools for those individual states. Um, and then from CALEA, it's done uh at a more uh uh macro level as opposed to a micro level. So um so I'll give you an example of a a standard um difference that we had at the state level than at the national level. So uh at the national level at CALEA uh they have a standard that says warning shots are prohibited. And so when I got here uh here to Arizona and I started looking at their standards, uh that language prohibited uh was not in there. So I started asking questions and I learned that uh there are some very, very rural parts of Arizona that they still allow for warning shots, which personally I think is a bad idea, but my what I thought doesn't matter uh under certain circumstances. And so our policy or our standard read that your policy must address the use of warning shots. Now, obviously, if you're right here in the Phoenix Valley, you're gonna prohibit those warning shots just because of the density of the population and the danger involved in warning shots. And I'm not telling you that every bullet has a name and a dollar sign attached to it. So, but out in rural Arizona, under these certain circumstances, uh some agencies still permit it. So that's that's how you can have a little bit of difference in the standards from a state level perspective as opposed to a national perspective. It's it's really your community expectations. What does your community expect your officers to do?

Travis Yates 22:00

Yeah, I think the last argument that I had with myself about the IECP was when they modified their use of because they they have a model use of force policy. I'm not saying the accreditation is using that, but their model use of force policies have been all over the map through the years. One time they permitted warning shots, and one time they didn't. And then post-2020, they they they made um lateral vascular neck restraint, uh deadly force only when it's not deadly force. I mean, we watch that every weekend on UFC, but of course that's politics. They did that because of George Floyd, did not die from LB and R. He did not die from a chokehold. We all know that, but they they got involved in that. And my argument was you shouldn't have said anything. You should have let every agency make that decision. But but but when you when you put that in their model policy, that forced a lot of good good chiefs that I know believed in what I believed in, but they were forced to change it because they had mayors and politicians and activists coming at them on why they'd permitted that in their policy. Well, it's in their policy because it's been a technique used for over 50 years, it's never hurt anybody. It's a if somebody's trying to kill you and hurt you, you can oftentimes use an LB and R versus deadly force. And so when you take that out of a policy, um, that's going to create more deadly force interactions. And so I'm not saying that Kalia did that or accreditation did that, but when you get organizations to go off on their own and make some standardized policy, that can create problems for a chief or a sheriff who's trying to do the right thing. Because it I talked to a chief specifically that is a good chief, a great leader chief. I'm not going to name names, but he's in Springfield, Missouri. And he flat out told me that he didn't want to change it. But it's because what ICP did in this model policy put so much pressure on him because that is seen as a standard. Where I think we've got to try to avoid that in the future because 2020 will repeat itself. We'll still have these things occur. And there just seems to be a time when there's you don't need to talk about that, right? You don't need to interject yourself in that specific. You used to force as a broad policy. Why are you getting down in the weeds and something like that?

Who Defines Best Practices And Why

Kevin Rhea 24:02

Yeah, and uh, you know, I can tell you exactly where that came from. It was it was, as you said, right after George Floyd. Um, and there was a lot of pressure on um the administration in Washington, D.C. to do something about police reform. And I love the word police reform. We'll get to that in just a minute. But uh, you know, there was uh there was a big outcry in Washington for the administration to do something. So uh when President Trump uh signed Executive Order 13929, one of the things he did was he uh instructed the Department of Justice to uh create standards around use of force and specifically chokeholds. And one of the things that the Department of Justice put together was the use of chokeholds or any other restraint technique. So uh we had a lot of chiefs out here in Arizona that absolutely hated this because the LVNR was an accepted and taught method of restraint by Arizona Post. And so the the argument was why are you taking this tool away from us? And the the best answer I could come up with is we all know the difference between LVNR and a chokehold, but from an iPhone camera, it doesn't look much different. So you may be using an approved technique, but you're gonna be the next viral star the next time you do it because somebody's gonna accuse you of doing a chokehold on somebody. So it doesn't make what the Department of Justice did right. So the Department of Justice really only has one way to get state and local agencies to comply, right? They have a big carrot in the form of grant money. If you comply, your application goes to the top of the list. It doesn't mean that if you don't comply with those standards, that you're not going to get a grant award, but you're gonna go to the bottom of the list. And those agencies that have complied are gonna go to the top of the list, and so that's the only carrot that the Department of Justice has to get agencies to comply because they do not have a stick because of the 10th Amendment. They can't come in unless it's a consent decree, and I'd love to get into that. Unless it's a consent decree, they have no stick over a state and local agency.

Travis Yates 26:32

Yeah, we can't go down too far into the rabbit hole, but they can't come in with a consent decree unless the department voluntarily complies, which is what happens all over the place. Uh and that's why they have to agree with the department to enter in a consent decree because you can't force a department to be held, uh, to be run by the federal government. That violates the 10th Amendment. But that's gone on for 30 years because while there have been departments that certainly deserved it, there have been plenty of departments that didn't, and these departments have just complied and they just took it and then look where it found them, right? Seven of the top 10 most violent cities in this country ran by the federal government. Obviously, they investigated Phoenix, and people listening to this show know this too well. The DLJ misrepresented or lied 97% of the time. That's that's grown into an ugly, ugly monster, which oftentimes the federal government, it's a snowball effect. I'm sure I'm sure 30 years ago these DLJ investigations were started with the right intentions in mind, but obviously we're far past that now. So um and I would ask you about accreditation in this. So consent decrees aren't going away. Uh President Trump has obviously pulled it back, but the Republicans in Congress, and I'll put the blame where it is, they could get rid of that law, the 90 to 4 crime bill, that section of the law. They won't get rid of it because they've they've said in no implicit terms that they want the control and power as well. They don't want to get rid of it, but they ought to get rid of it because they've been caught red-handed, manipulating local law enforcement, and costing taxpayers billions of dollars throughout the years. And what have they done for agencies? They haven't done anything, it's created more violence and more morale issues and recruiting issues in every department they go to. That's not even at dispute. And if anybody is not familiar with what I'm talking about, I'll just refer them over to lawofficer.com backslash DLJ. You'll see our research on that. Pretty sickening. But I will tie this back into accreditation, Kevin. So how could that help you if the DLJ comes knocking? Now, in fact, you could do nothing, the DLJ will come knocking. They they it's highly political on what departments they so-called investigate. It's highly political. Uh, so probably departments that need to be investigated, they don't investigate, but then departments like Phoenix, I have a high respect for the city of Phoenix, and I've looked at their agency for a long time. It's a big department. So do they have some problems? Of course. But man, overall, you'll never convince me in a million years they have a pattern in practice of anything negative. Uh, but um, they came knocking in Phoenix because politically they thought they had a window there. But so keeping that aside, if the DLJ is on the up and up and they actually look for people to actually investigate they're having problems, how can accreditation kind of stop that in its tracks or help an agency? Obviously, you're holding to standards that's got to help. Uh, so I'll just let you answer that.

Kevin Rhea 29:14

Yeah, no, I appreciate the opportunity. So I was still the program director for the Arizona Law Enforcement Accreditation Program when the Pattern and Practice Investigation started with the Phoenix Police Department. And the Phoenix Police Department entered our accreditation program after the pattern and practice investigation had begun. And after two years, uh, we were able to uh have Phoenix PD prove compliance with all of our standards. And uh I believe uh that it had a positive effect um on the pattern and practice investigation. Uh it gave the political leaders the ammunition that they needed to go back to the Department of Justice and say, we are following this standard of best practice. So if you have an issue, it is with the standards of best practices, and nobody from the DOJ ever came and knocked on my door. And this topic is kind of personal to me because I actually live in Maricopa County, Arizona, and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has been under a federal consent decree since 2013. So over the last 13 years, the Maricopa County taxpayers have had to pay over $250 million for this consent decree in oversight costs. And um, you know, fortunately, I think they they just moved within the last couple of months to to finally have that dismissed. But the the problem with consent decrees, Travis, is simply this there is zero incentive for the monitor to say that an agency is in compliance because what it does is it dries up their revenue stream. I hate to say it that way, but the longer that the monitor can stretch this consent decree process out, obviously the more years that he's gonna get paid. And I'll give you an example right here in Maricopa County, we uh the taxpayers had to pay for office space for the monitor and his team in downtown Phoenix, $90,000 a year. And they weren't even there, the monitor hadn't been there since 2020. Yeah, so five years.

Politics After 2020 And DOJ Pressure

Travis Yates 31:30

Yeah, the sal the salaries of a monitor starts at about a million dollars and moves up from there. And you're right, why would you ever say a department was in compliance if you're raking in millions of dollars to do pretty much nothing, right?

Kevin Rhea 31:42

Right, and and all of these all of these consent decree monitoring um contracts keep going to the same politically connected people. So are they really experts in police practice and and police leadership? No, they're politically connected monitors that are that have no incentive to um to say that an agency is in compliance.

Travis Yates 32:08

Well, it's it's worse than that if you read that read that report at lawoffster.com backslash dlj, we expose the fact that they're not only they're not only not experts, a freshman criminal justice student knows more than them, and they don't even understand the constitution. It it was honestly what I found, it didn't surprise me, but it shocked me because it was so outrageous. I thought to myself, no one's gonna believe this. This is the highest law enforcement agency in the land that are doesn't even know what Grammy Connor says or the Fourth Amendment says. It's really disgusting. And I I I would like to think that if they if they throw this bang thing back up, which they will when the administration changes, they'll start it again. I would like to think we at least have some leaders that do what Phoenix did, Kevin, and take a second look at it. I do agree. I think the Phoenix Police Department complying with accreditation did give the politicians the confidence to at least go to the DLJ and say, can you at least show us what you found? Because uh we have maybe a different opinion. Of course, the DLJ refused, and the DLJ did what they did and and uh tried to bully them into complying because frankly they have to. What they did, they could never be in front of a judge. A federal judge would have laughed them out of court if they would have tried to show them the evidence that that was seen. And people are listening, they don't know what I'm talking about. The Phoenix Police Department was so confident, and I think being accredited and complying with a lot of these standards, Kevin, is they put up a public website that showed what the DLJ said about them on each incident. I think I think there was 134 incidents that the DLJ said was a pattern in practice. Well, that's a problem in itself. The thing police department responds to millions of calls a year, right? So, I mean, you show us 134 incidents and you call that a pattern in practice. Well, they put up what the DLJ said, but they also next to it put up the actual video and the actual reports of those incidents. That's how the DOJ got exposed of being liars. Because I have no doubt they didn't start off lying about Phoenix. They've probably been lying for many, many years, but because departments just agree to it, none of this comes out in the public. So I give Phoenix a lot of credit for exposing that because we wouldn't know about any of this without them doing it. And let me talk quickly, Kevin, about the National Association for Accreditation Leadership. It's sort of you're the founder, co-founder, you're the director of that. Tell us why professionals inside the accreditation space and agencies need to get involved with what you're doing there.

Consent Decrees And The Phoenix Example

Kevin Rhea 34:31

Yeah, no, thank you for this uh this opportunity to really talk about what it is that we're doing. So uh we believe at the National Association for Accreditation Leadership that that position of accreditation manager is not just a file clerk, right? This is somebody who is uh important to the leadership within your organization. They're the ones that are going to be advising the chief on where the gaps in the policies are, they're the ones that are gonna be uh uh alerting the command staff to say, I can't find a proof of compliance. This is what I need the report to say. Um, and and you know, it's funny, whenever I say that, I always get a kind of a strange look. So you're telling your officers what what needs to be in the report for accreditation? And I say, absolutely, because you're not trying to game the system for accreditation. What you're doing is you are creating a culture of confidence within your organization because you tell that officer what needs to be in the report, sure, it meets a standard. But the next time the officer does it, it's gonna be in the report, and the next time it's gonna be in the report, and the next time another officer is gonna do it and it's not gonna be in the report, but the supervisor is gonna kick the report back and say, hey, you forgot to add this stuff. So you're creating a culture of competence within your organization because you know what? Let's admit it. Cops are great at what they do. Uh, I wouldn't have been in this profession for 25 years if I didn't believe that it was the most honorable profession in the world. They are extremely adept at doing a good job. They all want to do a good job, but they all really suck at writing police reports, right? So if we can give them some guidance, some police report writing, and I'll give you an example from my past. Uh, when I was working at my agency back in Michigan, um, we would put all of our officers through report writing class every year. But you know what? Our police reports got so good that um our court overtime went down. Officers weren't going to court as often because the defense attorneys had no way to pop holes in the police report. And so our court overtime went down. And we were able to, as an administration, take that money that we would normally spend on court overtime and start a drone program. So we were able to repurpose that money someplace else just simply by teaching the officers how to write a better report. And the same thing happens with driving training. We would send our officers to driving training uh twice a year because we understand that um, you know, you qualify with your firearm twice a year or four times a year, uh, but the only driving training that you're gonna get is when you're in the police academy. That's just wrong because you're more likely to get in an accident than you are to get in a shooting. So we would train that. And that's where and that's where the accreditation manager and the training officer can work together because there are standards for training. Can they work together to increase the professionalism, the training opportunities that the officers get?

Travis Yates 37:42

Wow, somebody listened all that time. I was screaming that for years, huh?

Kevin Rhea 37:46

Absolutely. I told you, I told you. I listened every time you got on stage and talked about driving. So it always boggled my mind.

Travis Yates 37:53

I'm like, we're shooting our gun every year, but you're more likely to get to die and get sued and everything else driving a car, but we think we're all good. Kind of crazy when you think about it.

The Accreditation Manager As A Leader

Kevin Rhea 38:02

Yeah, yeah. Let me let me get back to one thing really quick. Um, and that's um when it comes to um consent decrees and accreditation and other things. Um you know, I'm a I'm a doctoral candidate at Liberty University, and I'm currently doing research right now into how our police executives, our police chiefs make decisions. So there's a theory out there called institutional theory, or more specifically, institutional isomorphism. I know it's a big word, but um so one of three things happened: there's coercive isomorphism, normative, and then there's memetic. So coercive is like DOJ consent decrees. You're gonna do it because somebody told you to do it. There's normative, which is professionalism, accreditation, all the stuff that we've just been talking about. And then there's mimetic, and mimetic just means um the next door, the agency next door has a good policy, and so I'm going to take their policy, take their name off it, put our name on it, and that's going to be our policy. Well, a lot of times that doesn't work because it doesn't meet your community expectations. But which one of those three allow chiefs to make decisions and leaders to make decisions? Because if you look at the 21st century policing report, the six pillars that they had, each pillar had different subpoints, and there were there were a couple hundred subpoints in the 21st century policing report, right? So how much of that actually got implemented? About 10%. Okay. The chiefs took the low-hanging fruit, the stuff that that on the outside makes the agency look good, but they didn't want to do the tough stuff. So what form of institutional uh pressure does does the chiefs use to determine what reform measures they're going to implement and which ones they're going to cast aside as being unnecessary. And so that's what the focus of my research is. And it's really going to help kind of guide decisions in the future for a police chief to say, do we need to do this? How much is it going to cost? What's the impact on the budget? What's the impact on the community? What's the impact on the officers on the ground? Uh, and so you know, I started this program in January of 2023. It was the day after Tyree Nichols was killed in Memphis, Tennessee. I started this program because I told myself, I have to make a difference in the profession that gave me so much. So I went back to school to get my PhD. Because now that we find out the five officers or four officers that were involved in the Tyree Nichols incident probably should have never been officers to begin with. If they would have done a thorough background investigation, they would have found out that one of us has been in jail, another one had discipline problems. They should have never been police officers to begin with. And so that was the impotence for me going back to school to get my doctorate, and I hope to be done uh by Labor Day.

Travis Yates 41:08

You started in 2023 and you're already at the dissertation phase, Kevin. That's uh I don't have to tell, maybe I should just tell our audience that that is extremely fast.

Kevin Rhea 41:19

Yeah, yeah. I I love our school, Liberty University. Uh, I just took one class per term and I started in January of 23 and I've never taken a break. And now I am uh through uh chapters one through three of my dissertation, and I'm uh getting ready to defend my proposal and then start my research.

Travis Yates 41:42

That's excellent. Excellent. One more question for you. Where do you where do you think this is all going? What's the next five years look like for law enforcement and for accreditation?

Kevin Rhea 41:54

Well, that's a great question. I I really think that you are going to see accreditation continue to grow. And the reason that I say that is especially over the next five years, you have a lot of um personnel within your agency that now know what accreditation is. Um the chiefs that we had back in the day had no idea. And when I advised my chief, yeah, chief, we really need to do this, uh, he kind of looked at me skeptically, but he was on board and he said, Let's do it. So, um, what I would like to see is um in a perfect world, working with Ailita, check that, working with Iatlas to get even an hour in the police academies to talk about accreditation and to talk about following policies and talk about following best practices and procedures. Um, and then 15 years from now, 10 years from now, those are going to be the chiefs. So it's really an education process that has to take place within those officers in their first five years to kind of explain to them that not everything bad in their life is a result of accreditation. Because we hear it all the time. Oh, we only have to do this because of accreditation. Uh, not everything bad in your life is a result of accreditation. You just are at the ground level and you don't see the big picture yet. Your time is coming, but you don't see the big picture yet.

Travis Yates 43:31

Kevin Ray, executive director of the National Association for Accreditation Leadership. Kevin, where can they find you? How can they find out more about the organization?

Where Accreditation Goes Next

Kevin Rhea 43:39

Yeah, if uh you just want to visit our website, it is T-H-E-N-A-A-L dot org. So the nan.org. And I just want to mention really quick that uh we have a national accreditation conference coming up September 28th through the 30th. In Columbus, Ohio. Uh, this will be the first time that accreditation managers from all six public safety disciplines will be under the roof, under the same roof at the same time, talking the same language. And we're really looking forward to that opportunity to get everybody together.

Travis Yates 44:16

Good stuff, Kevin. I can't thank you enough for being here and what you're doing. Uh we we got to have you back, man. I think there's so much we could talk about, but thank you so much.

Kevin Rhea 44:25

Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'd love to come back anytime. Travis, you've always been, uh whether you know it or not, you've always been a mentor of mine, and I appreciate uh everything you do uh to help build up uh the leader within each officer.

Travis Yates 44:40

Thank you, Kevin. If you've been watching, if you've been listening, thank you for doing that. And just remember, lead on and stay courageous.

Announcement 44:48

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