Body Armor Follow-Up Testing Component Launched

This article discusses the follow-up testing process to the National Institute of Justice’s (NIJ’s) Body Armor Compliance Testing Program (CTP). The follow-up testing process is administered by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center – National and is an abbreviated form of the initial ballistic testing that is conducted on body armor used by law enforcement. The primary testing also involves construction comparison between production samples and the samples submitted for initial compliance testing, and comparison of current and original manufacturer build sheets. With the addition of follow-up testing, inspections and testing of collected samples of body armor will occur every 10 months, or every 20 months if the manufacturing location’s quality management system has been certified to BA 9000, implementation of which provides greater confidence in the manufacturer’s production of body armor. BA 9000 is similar to ISO 9001:2008, a standard for quality management that provides requirements specific to body armor.