Earlier this year, the Eugene Police Department was reaccredited by the Northwest Accreditation Alliance, an Oregon-based nonprofit that accredits 60 police agencies in Oregon and four in Alaska. Eugene police officials said the department has been accredited by NWAA since 2015.
NWAA — formerly known as the Oregon Accreditation Alliance until January 2024 — was founded in 2001 under the direction and authorization of the Oregon State Sheriff’s Association, the Oregon Association Chiefs of Police and the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials. As of mid-April 2025, it provides accreditation to 60 police agencies and nine 9-11 Communication Centers in Oregon. These agencies include the University of Oregon Police Department, the Lane County Sheriff, the Portland Police Bureau, the Springfield Police Department, Central Lane 911 and the Salem Police Department.
Police Accreditation Required by Oregon Law
Under an Oregon law passed in 2021, police agencies with more than 100 sworn officers are required to be accredited by a body designated by the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training by July 1, 2025. In addition to that requirement, the law mandates that small police agencies with 35 or more employees be accredited by one of the designated accrediting bodies by July 1, 2026. Currently, the NWAA and the Virginia-based Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies are the only designated accrediting bodies.
CALEA is a nonprofit organization founded in 1979 through the joint efforts of the Police Executive Research Forum, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Police Executive Research Forum. CALEA accredits law enforcement agencies, public safety communications agencies, public safety training academies and campus security.
Police Accreditation Board Independence
One difference between NWAA and CALEA is the composition of their boards. Most of NWAA’s 24-member board consists of former or current law enforcement officers in Oregon.
Only one voting NWAA board member is from outside Oregon: Gene Meek, the current Chief of Police for the Wrangell Police Department in Alaska, an agency that NWAA does not currently accredit. Two voting members, Wendy Patterson and Andrea Tobin, currently work for 911 Communication Centers.
NWAA Executive Director Scott Hayes said that steps are in place to address conflicts of interest that board members might have. If board members are voting on the accreditation of agencies that they are currently employed by, Hayes said that they will abstain from voting.
However, when The Daily Emerald inquired about the safeguards in place to ensure impartiality in board decisions, Hayes did not mention any further policies.
CALEA’s 21-member board is more independent than NWAA’s. Eleven board members currently work or are retired from work in law enforcement; the rest come from other sectors. Those 10 board members include current and former municipal administrators, a criminology professor, a state senator, a circuit court judge and a county attorney.
Arizona State University Criminal Justice Professor Joseph Schafer, who served on CALEA’s Board from 2016 to 2024, said that it makes sense for police accreditation bodies to include former and current law enforcement professionals because they understand agency operations and legal constraints. However, he said that including outside voices — like academics and civic leaders — adds “value” by bringing diverse perspectives and identifying potential blind spots in board governance and objectivity.
“There’s value in having those other perspectives to sometimes help us see things that are difficult to recognize, because we are so enmeshed in a particular professional environment,” Schafer said.
University of Texas Public Affairs Assistant Professor Gordon Abner, who has studied police accreditation, offered more critical remarks on the composition of NWAA’s board. While Abner said NWAA’s accreditation “is better than no accreditation at all,” he cautioned that the lack of non-law enforcement voting board members impacts the rigor and neutrality of the accreditation process.
“A lot of these folks are going to know each other,” Abner said. “I think it doesn’t invalidate it, but I think it would be viewed as more rigorous, and would be more rigorous if maybe you had some people from out of state, … some non-law enforcement people … involved in it with expertise into the functionings of police departments … some judges, some prosecutors.”
Abner said that NWAA’s current board composition “definitely sets up a false sense of accountability.” He said that “part of the idea behind accreditation is that you catch things before they become sort of big problems.” If the accreditation process is not “as rigorous as it could be,” Abner said that police agencies could end up having problems that will cost them in the long run.
“There’s … sort of a potential liability risk involved in not having a more thorough or more rigorous process,” Abner said.
While Abner said it may cost more money for accreditation agencies to increase independence by adding non-law enforcement board members, Abner believes it would be a worthwhile investment for accreditation agencies like NWAA.
“I think people are going to start looking more closely … It’s gonna only generate further criticism,” Abner said. “I think it would be … extremely useful, and extremely worth the money … Why not just have another sort of further stamp of approval?”
Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner said he doesn’t have any concerns with the current composition of NWAA’s board and its ability to remain impartial when voting on the accreditation of police agencies.
“I don’t have any concerns with that, because what we’re asking people is to evaluate deep operational police policy,” Skinner said. “It’s really hard to evaluate deep operational police policy if you don’t have any experience in actual operations.”
When presented with Professor Abner’s suggestion to add more independent voices to the board, Skinner said that he’s open to the idea.
“If NWAA wants to do that, we would welcome it … We have so many layers of oversight here that it would be normal for us … I don’t think it would be met with any resistance,” Skinner said.
When asked about the NWAA board having more independence and oversight, Executive Director Hayes said Abener’s recommendation requires more investigation. Hayes also pointed out that other accrediting bodies in other states share a similar board structure to that of the NWAA. These accreditation bodies include the Utah Chiefs of Police Association, which provides accreditation to police agencies in the state.
“We would have to look into it,” Hayes said of Abner’s recommendation. “Currently, the way it works now, we’re pretty solid with how we operate.”
NWAA and CALEA Differences
CALEA has a much broader reach than the NWAA nationwide. According to the CALEA, approximately 35% of law enforcement officers in the United States worked for a CALEA-accredited agency in 2023. In addition to accrediting agencies in the United States, CALEA also accredits agencies in other countries, including Mexico, Canada and Barbados.
As of mid-April 2025, CALEA has fully accredited three police agencies in Oregon, far fewer than the 60 police agencies that the NWAA currently accredits. The three agencies are the Albany Police Department, the Corvallis Police Department and the Washington County Sheriff.
The CALEA accreditation process includes a self-assessment, in which agencies evaluate their level of compliance with the accreditation standards. After the self-assessment is completed, assessors confirm compliance through on-site reviews and other review methods, all of which are compiled into a final report that is presented to the commission’s board for review.
The final decision to accredit an agency rests with CALEA’s Board. CALEA also requires annual reports.
There are, however, key differences between the NWAA’s and CALEA’s accreditation processes. One difference is that the accreditation process includes a public comment period. Another difference is the timeframe: agencies in CALEA must be re-accredited every four years to keep their accreditation, while agencies in NWAA must be re-accredited every three years.
When asked if there should be public comment during the accreditation process, Eugene Police Chief Skinner said he “doesn’t know” if there should be one or not. He said that if the NWAA opened the accreditation process for public comment, it would receive an “awful lot” of comments that would not help improve anything.
“It’s always a bit of a slippery slope when you start asking people to give you public comment around mostly operational aspects that they have no foundational understanding of,” Skinner said.
NWAA Director Hayes echoed a similar sentiment, recalling his time as accreditation manager for the Salem Police Department when it was accredited by CALEA. Back then, he said the department received “a lot of complaints.” (Salem has since ended its accreditation with CALEA and is now accredited by NWAA.)
“We have a limited scope or limited window in which we have to get agencies accredited, so we don’t offer that,” Hayes said.
Former CALEA board member Schafer said that CALEA’s public comment process typically generates little feedback.
“In a very large community, you might have three or four comments in a community of 100,000 people,” Schafer said. “So you’re not necessarily getting a huge amount of feedback in that process.”
CALEA and the NWAA also vary in costs. For an agency like the Eugene Police Department with more than 200 sworn officers and 137 civilian staff, accreditation with CALEA currently costs $16,125 initially (this does not include on-site assessment fees, which can vary) and $5,000 annually in continuation fees. NWAA’s current fees, by comparison, currently cost an agency like Eugene between $4,483 and $5,503 per year.
In addition to differences in cost, another difference between the NWAA and CALEA is the number of standards that agencies need to meet to get accredited. CALEA currently has two tiers for accreditation, whereas NWAA has no tiers.
CALEA’s two tiers are Tier 1: CALEA Law Enforcement Accreditation Program with 185 total standards and Tier 2: CALEA Advanced Law Enforcement Accreditation Program with 461 total standards. NWAA, by comparison, has fewer standards. According to Lane County’s Sheriff’s Office, NWAA currently has 104 standards.
Inside NWAA’s Accreditation System
To remain accredited, NWAA agencies must undergo the accreditation process every three years. The process begins with the agency completing a self-assessment, in which the agency determines its level of compliance with the NWAA’s standards. After that, all of an agency’s policies and processes undergo a review. In that review, NWAA officials said that policies and procedures are updated and revised as needed.
Following that process, one or more of the NWAA’s assessors will conduct an onsite review of the agency to ensure that its policies, procedures and practices meet the accreditation standards. After the onsite review, a final report is made and forwarded to the NWAA’s board for review and final approval.
Eugene Police Department’s final report is not currently publicly available on the department’s website. In the past, the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office has made such reports publicly available online. To obtain the final report, The Daily Emerald had to submit a public records request and pay roughly $80. The Lane County Sheriff and the Springfield Police Department also did not have their final reports online, but neither charged The Daily Emerald a public records fee to obtain their reports.
Eugene Police Chief Skinner said that he was not aware that the department’s final accreditation report wasn’t publicly available. Skinner expressed no objection to making the report publicly available online. He suggested that the omission of the report online might have been due to an oversight.
The Daily Emerald also attempted to obtain the self-assessment that the three police departments filed with NWAA in public records requests, but all departments reported having no responsive records.
NWAA Executive Director Hayes said the onsite accreditation assessment generally takes a day to conduct. He said that all NWAA assessors are former police officers with decades of experience, who know “what to look for” and “what to ask.”
“We do everything from looking at the police vehicles to … ensuring property evidence is handled correctly,” Hayes said. “We’re all over the board when it comes to reviewing an agency.”
In addition to that process, Hayes said that several of the NWAA’s standards require agencies to submit annual reports. And every year, Hayes said, NWAA’s standards are updated to comply with new state and federal laws and recommendations from state and federal agencies.
Eugene Police Chief Skinner said that the NWAA’s accreditation has many benefits for the department. He said that the accreditation process has prompted changes, which include updating policies that have fallen off the radar — ones that are rarely used or have been affected by recent case law.
“What this process does is it brings everything to the forefront to be taken a look at,” Skinner said.
Through the recent re-accreditation process, two Eugene Police policies were updated, according to the department’s NWAA final report. One policy update clarified that firearms proficiency training must be conducted under the supervision of a “certified” range master. Another added “annual” to some training policies to ensure that the department provides annual training on specific topics.
Benefits to the Eugene Community
Ultimately, Eugene Police Chief Skinner believes that NWAA accreditation demonstrates to the Eugene community that the department is a “contemporary, innovative and 21st-century policing agency” that is open to outside review.
“I’m hoping what it does is that it fosters a higher level of trust and confidence in us,” Skinner said.
Whether NWAA will add more independent voices to its board remains unclear. For now, it is one of only two accreditation bodies authorized under Oregon law to accredit police departments — a requirement that takes effect for many agencies as early as this summer.
