IACP Policy Center
For more than 30 years, the IACP Policy Center has been identifying leading practices and providing sound guidance to the law enforcement profession to assist in developing policies for individual departments.
Policy Center Resources
The Policy Center offers four types of resources:
- Model Policy: Provides officers with concrete guidance and directives by describing, the manner in which actions, tasks, and operations are to be performed.
- Considerations: Intended to present items for agencies to take into account when developing their own policies on a topic. This format recognizes that expectations and capabilities vary by agency, and it aims to present recommendations to the policing field without dictating exact approaches.
- Concepts and Issues: Designed to provide background information on the topic to support the Model Policy or Considerations document.
- Need to Know...: Synthesizes the key points of the topic into a brief, one-page overview.
Click here to visit the full list of Policy Center topics.
Featured Policy Center Resources
Welfare Checks
Welfare checks are requests for the police to check on an individual due to concern for their safety or well-being. Reasons for such requests vary...
Electronic Control Weapons
Law enforcement officers should use only the force that is objectively reasonable to effectively bring an incident under control, while protecting the safety of the...
Search Warrants
The search warrant is one of the more powerful and valuable tools in the law enforcement arsenal. While the process of applying for and obtaining...
Crime Scene Response
Protection of the crime scene, appropriate documentation, and preservation of evidence are crucial steps in criminal investigations and often provide the basis for effective identification...
Every effort has been made by the IACP Policy Center staff and advisory board to ensure that these documents incorporate the most current information and contemporary judgment on these issues. However, police administrators should be cautioned that no model policy can meet all the needs of any given police agency. In addition, the formulation of specific agency policies must take into account local political and community perspectives and customs, prerogatives, and demands; often divergent law enforcement strategies and philosophies; and the impact of varied agency resource capabilities, among other factors. Readers outside of the United States should note that, while these documents promote procedures reflective of a democratic society, their legal basis follows United States Supreme Court rulings and other federal laws and statutes. Police administrators should be cautioned that each police agency operates in a unique environment of court rulings, state laws, local ordinances, regulations, judicial and administrative decisions, and collective bargaining agreements that must be considered and should, therefore, consult their agency's legal advisor before implementing any policy.
The IACP Policy Center documents are periodically updated, and the most current versions are published to this website. To minimize confusion and to help ensure reference to the most recent documents available, the IACP Policy Center does not distribute prior versions of any documents that have since been updated.