The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Transit Police Department will receive a reaccreditation assessment performed by the Massachusetts Police Accreditation Commission in two weeks, according to a Wednesday press release from the Transit Police.
Starting March 7, the MPAC will “examine all aspects of the MBTA Transit Police Department policy and procedures, management, operations and support services,” according to the release. The assessment team will be composed of officers from police departments in Massachusetts who volunteers to be on the team.
Jason Johnson, a spokesperson for the MBTA, wrote in an email that the accreditation serves to improve the oversight of how the department’s procedures are carried out.
“The purpose of accreditation programs is to improve the delivery of public safety services, primarily by maintaining a body of standards developed by public safety practitioners and covering a wide range of up-to-date public safety initiatives,” Johnson wrote.
Police agencies are required to be reassessed every three years, in which the assessing team will come in and monitor what the department is doing, said Kate Stephens, a captain in the Salem Police Department who has volunteered in numerous assessments.
Stephens said the state accreditation consists of more than 300 standards, including mandatory and optional ones, ranging from how an officer arrests someone, how a station manages finances, to how warrants are served.
After the department is selected for accreditation, the assessing team starts with looking at the infrastructure of the department’s premises, Stephens said.
“They look at everything from the cell blocks to make sure that they have a medical kit there, they’ll go into the control room where they dispatch calls to check certain criteria, they’ll look at your emergency generator,” Stephens said. “Everything that’s really related to the accreditation process they’ll physically go and look at.”
Stephens said the next step is to examine the policies the MBTA has their officers comply with.
“They’ll take a checklist with the policies and they’ll go through and they will look at everything and they’ll make sure that the MBTA is doing what they say they’re doing,” Stephens said.
Stephens said there are many benefits to going through the accreditation process.
“The biggest benefit that I’ve seen is a real liability shield where you have policies in place that officers have to follow,” Stephens said. “You have a standardized way of doing things.”
Several Boston residents, such as Rick Kocen, 48, of Kenmore, said the accreditation process could be good for the transit police.
“It makes sense to me to have oversight and to have other agencies looking in to make sure that they’re basically doing their job up to code, and they’re not stepping outside of their boundaries of police work,” Kocen said. “Public safety is paramount to pretty much anything and everything.”
Marc Gràcia, 36, of the West End, said he and his wife moved to Boston from Spain a year ago and always feel protected by the various police departments in the area.
“We didn’t know how many kinds of police departments there are, but we feel safe everywhere because we know we have police departments at MIT, Harvard, Boston,” Gràcia said.
Jordan Stillman, 26, of Jamaica Plain, said she thinks the more standardized measures that follow accreditation could help improve transparency in the department.
“I’m all for people getting more training and being more aware of how procedures should be done,” Stillman said. “With any kind of law enforcement, there’s a possibility for there not to be transparency about how things are done, and that’s a problem.”
