Albemarle County Police Chief Sean Reeves is taking ownership of the decision that he made in June to voluntarily postpone a state accreditation review into 2025.
“It’s not like we’re breaking away from accreditation altogether. It is, hey, we need to take a step back, and we need to make sure that our policies and procedures are up to standards, and that we are in the best position to move forward as an agency, and so that way our community does have faith in us,” Reeves told AFP, which was the first to report that the police department had decided to postpone the accreditation review by the Virginia Law Enforcement Professional Standards Commission.
ICYMI
- Why did the Albemarle County Police Department postpone its accreditation review?
- Did the Albemarle County Police Department have its accreditation revoked?
Reeves was appointed to the police chief job in 2022, replacing Ron Lantz, who had led the Albemarle County Police Department for six years.
Reeves, a U.S. Army veteran, is a career ACPD guy, working his way up the internal ladder from his first boots on the ground as a patrol officer in 2001 all the way up to the top job.
His view from the inside gave him insight into the challenges facing the department from within, with new leadership in place, and the course corrections that would need to come in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As relates specifically to accreditation, the ACPD was most recently accredited by the VLEPSC in 2020, and the standard four-year accreditation was set to come up for a fresh review this year.
A mock accreditation review done earlier this year revealed issues that needed to be addressed in “three critical areas,” Reeves wrote in an email to ACPD employees dated June 6, which was obtained by AFP through a public-records request: “the revision of our policy manual, the update of our K-9 policy, and enhancements to our Evidence Unit’s practices.”
The issue with the 40-year-old policy manual, Reeves said, is “a lot of it was archaic, it was written by multiple different authors, we had conflicts within our policy, and a lot of our policy conflicted with itself.”
“There was some internal reflection on, OK, are we truly ready with a policy that’s not yet completed for inspection?” Reeves said. “It’s almost akin to taking a pre-test and saying, Hey, you got some work to do here, and you could take your test and kind of take fate into your own hands, or you can take a step back, essentially, from accreditation, get your stuff together and then come back to it.”
With the evidence unit, Reeves stressed that “people need to have faith and confidence that that our evidence unit is exceeding community expectations.”
“It might sound boring to some, but something as simple as, just making sure that, technically, our computer systems are up to date and modernized, and that we have 100 percent accountability of every piece of item in our evidence unit. That’s part of being a professional police department. Then working with our Commonwealth’s attorney to ensure that, if there’s any deficiencies, that that’s disclosed,” Reeves said.
The decision to postpone the accreditation review into 2025 came into public view around the time that we learned that the Albemarle County Sheriff’s Office was dissolving its contract with the county over a dispute with the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors over staffing.
That move led to speculation that there was some issue with the accreditation review that may have played a role in the sheriff’s office decision.
“That led to rumors going out that we had our accreditation revoked, that we failed our accreditation inspection, and I found myself having to, you know, make these corrections on misinformation,” Reeves said. “There was, you know, this quote, unquote tipster that called different people saying, hey, you know, you know the look at the police department, they, you know, they had their accreditation revoked, they failed their inspection and, and there’s all sorts of misinformation that was put out. That’s not factual information.”
The extra year to address the internal issues should get the department on a solid footing, Reeves said.
“This way, when we do get inspected, it is based on my tenure as chief of police, and I own that,” Reeves said. “It’s not this split process, it’s not about blame or excuses. We will succeed or fail based on the measures that I have put in place. It’s taking that ownership of it, but also not just, Hey, we’re not going to do state accreditation. We want to be a state-accredited agency, and these are the steps we’re taking to get that accreditation, and assure that we do get reaccredited in July of 2025.”
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Chris Graham
