WHEREAS, it is the mission of law enforcement to preserve law and order, enforce criminal and traffic law, and to provide for an environment of safety for the public; and

WHEREAS, to accomplish this mission, federal, state, and local law enforcement must ensure that they recruit, screen, hire, train, and maintain an adequate force of sworn law enforcement officers physically and mentally capable of enforcing the law and maintaining public safety; and

WHEREAS, the critical function of recruiting, screening, and training new sworn officers constitutes a major time expenditure by law enforcement agencies and significant cost to the taxpayer; and

WHEREAS, all state and local agencies must, at great expense to the agency and taxpayer, conduct full background checks on recruits who, after a conditional offer is made, are determined to be physically unqualified to perform the duties of sworn law enforcement; and

WHEREAS, with the exception of federal agencies, law enforcement agencies are currently prohibited from screening applicants prior to the extension of a condition job offer by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); and

WHEREAS, all federal law enforcement agencies are currently exempt from the provisions of the ADA including the prohibition on pre-employment medical and agility evaluations; and

WHEREAS, the inability to state and local law enforcement agencies to conduct pre-employment medical, physical, and agility, and other testing results is the unnecessary expenditure of scarce resources on recruit processing and conditional offers of employment on clearly unqualified recruits; and

WHEREAS, this inability to screen out unqualified candidates causes unnecessary, costly, and time-consuming delays in the hiring process thereby reducing the availability of state and local law enforcement personnel in the field resulting in a reduced ability to provide an environment of safety for the public; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, that the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) aggressively endorse and support federal legislation to amend the ADA to allow pre-employment screening of sworn law enforcement candidates by state and local law enforcement agencies; and be it

FURTHER RESOLVED, That the IACP encourages all state and local law enforcement agencies to request their respective national congressional delegations to introduce and support federal legislation to accomplish this goal.