ORLANDO — Imagine you’re a police chief sitting at your desk when a call comes over the radio about a wanted shooting suspect spotted at a local Walmart. Officers respond, and moments later, you hear the transmission no chief wants to hear: Shots fired. What happens next?
For Chief James Gerace of the Colonie Town Police Department in New York, that question goes well beyond the immediate response. Medical resources must be coordinated, command established, investigators mobilized, notifications made and officers supported, all while the department continues responding to other calls for service. Each responsibility is important, but with so much happening simultaneously, how can a chief be confident that nothing gets overlooked?
Gerace posed that scenario during an educational session at IACP 2026, where he joined Lt. Matthew Barter of the Manchester Police Department in New Hampshire and Cory Haberman, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, to discuss how a familiar, decidedly low-tech tool is being used to improve police operations.
Their focus was on checklists, an approach long established in medicine and aviation but one that has received comparatively little research attention in policing. The presenters shared examples of how agencies are applying checklists to critical incident management and routine investigations, along with preliminary research examining whether their use can improve investigative outcomes.
Making sure critical responsibilities don’t get overlooked
At Colonie PD, Gerace and his team developed a series of officer-involved shooting checklists that divide responsibilities among dispatch personnel, command staff and other employees who have specific roles during a critical incident. Rather than expecting one supervisor to remember every required action, the department identifies who is responsible for each function and provides a short list of tasks to guide their response.
The dispatch protocols, for example, include separate checklists for managing police radio traffic, coordinating medical resources, handling incoming emergency calls and requesting mutual aid. Command-level checklists address incident command, investigative responsibilities, public information, officer wellness and maintaining patrol coverage while the shooting investigation is underway.
That last responsibility illustrates how easily an important operational need can become secondary during a major incident. Colonie’s protocols call for neighboring agencies to help handle routine emergency calls while department personnel respond to the shooting, with a designated commander responsible for recalling officers and eventually restoring normal patrol operations.
The department has also assigned specific responsibilities for supporting involved officers. Its wellness coordinator checklist includes confirming that buddy officers have been assigned, arranging peer support, coordinating family assistance and beginning to consider longer-term wellness needs.
Gerace explained that the immediate-action checklists are intentionally straightforward, generally assigning six to nine steps to individual employees. Although the documents are available electronically, many personnel prefer printed copies they can keep readily accessible.
“I can tell you anecdotally from our agency, it really works,” Gerace told attendees, describing how employees appreciate having their immediate responsibilities clearly identified.
The approach is not intended to replace the department’s policies or critical incident training. Instead, the checklists provide a practical way to put those procedures into action when multiple decisions and responsibilities demand attention at once.
Can checklists improve investigations?
While Colonie’s experience illustrates how checklists can organize a complex response, Manchester PD has been working with researchers to answer a different question: Can a checklist improve the quality of an initial investigation and ultimately help solve more cases?
Manchester’s work was born out the National Institute of Justice’s Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS) program. Manchester’s work is supported by a $537,124 grant awarded in 2023 through the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance Smart Policing Initiative. The funding supports the department’s partnership with the University of Cincinnati to develop, implement and evaluate an investigative checklist strategy intended to improve case clearance rates.
Haberman explained that the project grew out of research examining how checklists influence evidence collection. In an earlier virtual reality study, officers investigated a simulated burglary, with some receiving an investigative checklist and others completing the scenario without one.
Both groups performed similarly when collecting relatively obvious evidence inside the residence. The differences emerged when officers needed to look beyond the immediate crime scene. Those using checklists were more likely to identify surveillance footage from a neighboring property and obtain information from a witness who had recorded a vehicle’s license plate number.
The findings prompted researchers to partner with Manchester to examine how checklists might work in actual investigations. Before developing the tool, the team interviewed approximately 20 detectives and reviewed roughly 800 case files to identify investigative steps that were sometimes missed or inadequately documented.
The interviews revealed familiar frustrations. Officers might obtain a witness’s contact information during an initial response but fail to include it in their reports, leaving detectives to search through body-worn camera footage to retrieve the information. In other cases, detectives repeated neighborhood canvasses because the original officers had not documented which residents they had already contacted.
Barter said the department wanted to avoid developing a checklist based solely on what individual supervisors or researchers believed officers should do. Instead, the team used detective feedback, case reviews and an analysis of evidence associated with case clearances to identify the steps worth including.
“We really wanted it to be based in the evidence and what the data was telling us,” Barter explained.
The resulting checklist covers six areas of investigative work: contact information and statements, scene photographs, evidence handling, neighborhood canvassing, required paperwork and permissions, and intelligence sharing. Before beginning those steps, officers are also reminded to confirm scene safety, secure the crime scene, address medical needs and establish their legal authority to conduct investigative activities.
The checklist is designed to prompt consideration rather than require officers to complete every action at every scene. Barter emphasized that officers must still exercise judgment about what is appropriate for the circumstances.
Explore Manchester PD’s interactive investigative checklist
Developed in partnership with researchers at the University of Cincinnati, Manchester PD’s checklist is designed to help officers work through key considerations during an initial investigation. Explore the interactive version below to see how the department has organized the process.
Checklist not displaying? Open Manchester PD’s interactive checklist in a separate window.
Early findings show a possible connection to case clearances
Manchester initially introduced the checklist to day-shift officers before expanding its use across the department. The project focused on burglaries, robberies, aggravated assaults and domestic violence investigations, with supervisors expected to reinforce its use during report reviews.
At IACP, Barter presented preliminary findings from an analysis of 188 robbery, burglary and aggravated assault cases. Domestic violence cases had not yet been included in that analysis.
The checklist was documented as being used in nearly 70% of the cases reviewed. More significantly, cases with documented checklist use had a clearance rate approximately 14.5 percentage points higher than cases without documented use.
The findings were not consistent across crime types, however. The strongest association appeared in aggravated assault cases, with positive results also observed in robberies. Burglaries did not show the same improvement, despite the earlier virtual reality study suggesting that checklists could help officers identify additional evidence during burglary investigations.
Researchers also found that the difference in clearance rates appeared primarily in cases involving arrests made during the initial response, rather than those cleared through subsequent investigative work.
Those distinctions matter because the findings do not establish that using a checklist caused the higher clearance rate. The research team still needs to examine the underlying case files to determine whether checklist use was associated with more thorough evidence collection and whether that evidence contributed to the case outcome.
For now, the preliminary results suggest the approach warrants further study, particularly as agencies look for practical ways to improve investigative consistency without substantial new expenditures.
The challenge of getting experienced officers on board
One of the more revealing aspects of Manchester’s project was the response from the officers expected to use the checklist.
Haberman described feedback from the initial pilot as “mixed or lukewarm.” Officers generally agreed that the checklist included appropriate investigative steps, but many were experienced personnel who felt they already knew how to conduct an investigation.
That reaction helped the researchers recognize the importance of how the tool was introduced. The checklist was never intended to teach experienced officers how to investigate a crime; it was designed to help them remember to complete the steps they already understood were important.
“This isn’t a how to do your job checklist,” Haberman explained. “It’s just a confirmation that you did the things that you do know how to do already.”
The department also learned that making a checklist available doesn’t necessarily mean officers will use it. Manchester initially attached a paper version to the daily roster, something officers were already accustomed to carrying. The department later introduced a smartphone application and incorporated the checklist into its records management system, allowing officers to access it in different ways.
Despite the digital options, smartphone use did not gain the traction the department anticipated. Some officers were reluctant to add another application to an already crowded collection of technology tools, while others expressed concern that looking at a phone during an investigation might appear unprofessional to victims or witnesses.
The presenters discussed separate research suggesting that members of the public viewed officers using paper notepads more favorably than those taking notes on smartphones, even when the purpose of the phone use was explained.
For Manchester, the experience reinforced the importance of fitting new procedures into existing workflows rather than expecting officers to change established habits simply because another tool has become available.
The department has also incorporated the checklist into its field training process, where Haberman suggested it may prove especially useful for helping newer officers develop consistent investigative practices.
Start with the problem, not the checklist
Although the two departments are applying checklists in different ways, their experiences point to a common consideration for police leaders: The effectiveness of a checklist depends as much on how it is developed and introduced as on what it contains.
Gerace, who also serves as an instructor with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, described a training approach that encourages police executives to identify an operational problem and work through the process of developing an appropriate checklist.
He cautioned against returning from a conference with a new idea and immediately putting it into practice without considering the people who will be affected or the evidence supporting the proposed change.
Before implementing a checklist, he encouraged leaders to identify who should participate in its development and what research, data, policies or legal requirements need to be considered. Involving the employees who will actually use the tool can also help identify practical obstacles that might otherwise be overlooked.
Manchester’s experience demonstrates why that process matters. Its checklist was informed by detective interviews and case analysis, refined through officer feedback and adapted to fit the way personnel work. Even with that preparation, adoption remains a challenge, and the department is continuing to evaluate whether the tool produces the intended results.
For smaller agencies, where staffing and resources may limit the ability to introduce new systems or specialized programs, the appeal is straightforward. A checklist can be developed without a major technology investment, but its value comes from identifying the right steps, assigning responsibility and making it practical enough that employees will actually use it.
The research is still developing, and neither department’s experience suggests that checklists can eliminate errors or substitute for training and professional judgment. What the examples do show is that improving performance doesn’t always require a new technology platform or a complicated initiative. Sometimes it begins with examining where important steps are being missed and finding a more reliable way to make sure they are considered.
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