Did the Albemarle County Police Department have its accreditation revoked?

A spokesperson tells AFP that the Albemarle County Police Department has voluntarily postponed its state accreditation inspection to 2025, though reports to the contrary are making their way around the Albemarle County community.

The story made it to us late Wednesday, when the first of two readers who reached out to AFP on the matter reported that the Albemarle County PD had actually had its state accreditation, through the Virginia Law Enforcement Professional Standards Commission, in the words of the tipster, “revoked.”

As was pointed out to us by one of the readers, there are two main issues that would cause an police agency to lose its accreditation status: a serious offense was identified by the VLEPSC that hadn’t been previously disclosed by the agency; or a determination being made by the accreditation team that there were issues with record-keeping that could not be rectified.

We reached out to the county’s public safety information officer, Logan Bogert, to try to learn more about what was going on with the accreditation review.

This was her response:

“The Albemarle County Police Department did not ‘fail’ reaccreditation. The department voluntarily postponed its accreditation inspection until next year and has entered a self-assessment phase to continue work on developing and reviewing policy. Once this work is complete, ACPD intends to continue on throughout the re-accreditation process with the Virginia Law Enforcement Professional Standards Commission. This decision was made by ACPD leadership in consultation with the VLEPSC.”

Just to verify, we’ve submitted two requests under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act – one for communications from the Albemarle County Police Department to its employees that we were told by our tipsters would have gone out in recent days, the other to the Virginia Law Enforcement Professional Standards Commission for any communications between the commission and the Albemarle County PD.

The agencies have five working days to respond to our requests, so we’re marking our calendars to hear back by next Thursday, Aug. 8.