John,

Thanks for your comments. I am not a Law Enforcement professional, so I found them insightful and certainly food for some follow up work.

When a unit attends the National Training Center, 29 Palms or the like then the Observer Controllers have a checklist that they can work down that covers the spectrum of Personnel (right numbers, ranks and specialties in the right posts) Equipment (have they the right kit in the right place) and Training (have they done the requisite individual courses for their roles, and mandated build-up training. At the end they have a pretty good feel for where the unit is at the start of training.

In Iraq and Afghanistan we often had similar check lists for mentors to assist them in evaluating their units. From a military perspective this is all fairly straight forward. But for an Advisor turning up at a police unit or station, what should be on his checklist?

David,
The check list is very much focused at the low tactical level, and there are various schemes in the pipeline that may start working at the operational level. I can extrapolate from my military checklist how likely a unit is going to perform and also see easily what it is incapable of doing. I would like to be able to generate something similar for the police.

I suppose the simple question would be what would a policeman look for if he was assessing a unit? Arrest logs? I like the idea of an assessment exercise.