When Patrick Bailey first set out to become a police officer, he quickly realized he had a knack for academics.
After getting his associate’s degree in the 2010s, he said he realized the course work “wasn’t quite as intimidating and as hard as I thought it was going to be,” so he went on to get a bachelor’s degree and then multiple advanced degrees in various fields related to police work.
When it came time to get more practical training, however, he noticed something: The training requirements to become an officer in Kentucky seemed less accessible than in Ohio.
Kentucky requires trainees to first get hired by a department before they can begin their basic training. Ohio, on the other hand, has open-enrollment academies that take students who have yet to be hired.
One Ohio academy at Butler Tech in Butler County, Ohio, also had morning classes, so he decided to commute from his home in Union to get training at Butler Tech’s academy rather than doing it through the Kentucky system.
“Some days, I think I spent like an hour and 20 minutes driving up there, depending on traffic,” Bailey said, “but it allowed me to go up there in the morning, kind of get it out of the way, and then be able to come back home still, and then work at night.”
Bailey’s experience reflects a quandary that many potential police officers in Northern Kentucky face when trying to balance their lives with the constraints of police training as it currently exists in the commonwealth.
Scheduling is just one aspect of a multi-factored problem that has resulted in a shortage of recruit candidates, and the region is still trying to find ways to mitigate the problem.
As LINK nky reported last year, departments in Northern Kentucky, even the state and nation generally, are constantly trying to scrape together as many candidates as they can from a seemingly dwindling pool.
Independence Police Chief Brian Ferayorni, for instance, told LINK early last year that, on average, between 25 and 30 people, sometimes fewer, show up for each round of police testing in Independence. “When I tested, I tested against 100 guys for one position,” Ferayorni said in 2024.
“People are just not coming into it anymore,” said Pat Morgan, a retired police colonel who formerly worked with the Kenton County Sheriff’s office. Although he’s retired now, Morgan is still active in advocacy and lobbying efforts to help local police departments attract and retain recruits.
There are “a litany of things,” as Morgan put it, that contribute to the situation.
Police recruits in Kentucky are required to undergo 20 weeks of basic in-person training at an established training academy. They must also complete 80 hours of online training, which can be done in conjunction with the in-person training.
The training is subsidized through the Kentucky Law Enforcement Foundation Program Fund, a state fund that covers the cost of basic training offered through the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training.
In Ohio, by contrast, a student can pay his or her own way through basic training at any state-certified school or academy, a system more closely resembling trade-school education. As stated before, some Ohio academies, such as Butler Tech, offer open enrollment to students who have not yet been offered a job. Academies like that are unheard of in Northern Kentucky.
The trade-off is that, while Ohio recruits are responsible for upfront costs, they have more flexibility in where they can be trained. Kentucky recruits don’t have to pay, but they’re limited to large state academies, often housed at universities.
There are academies in Richmond, Bowling Green, Lexington and Louisville, the latter three of which offer training only to local recruits. The Kentucky State Police also has its own academy.
That means that everyone else, including NKY recruits, must travel to the training center at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond for basic training.
With the current backlog of trainees, Morgan told the Kenton County Mayors Group in December, it can be four or five months from the time a recruit is hired to when the recruit actually starts their academy training. Moreover, basic training is a residential program, meaning that recruits can sometimes be away from their families for long periods.
The potential of being away from family for a long period, especially, Morgan said, can be a big turn-off for many potential recruits. Morgan said he’s observed a change in culture from his own generation to the current generation of new officers. From his point of view, previous generations of officers were more willing to sacrifice time with their families for the work.
“The generation now, they want family time,” Morgan said.
Morgan said there have been several measures departments, both regionally and state-wide, have experimented with in the face of this, such as changes to shift scheduling and time off policies. Additionally, a new training academy is slated to open up in Madisonville this February, which Morgan believes should ease the burden of the academy at Eastern Kentucky University.
Although there has been chatter among the region’s leadership about the potential for a local academy that would serve only local recruits, there’s another challenge: a lack of basic training instructors.
Morgan attributes this to salary competition with other positions. Many experienced officers may want to come out of retirement to continue working, and even though they would serve as ideal instructors, they’re drawn away from those positions to other positions, such as school resource officers, because those positions pay better.
Speaking of retirement, the situation with Kentucky’s police pensions is another factor contributing to the problem. Underfunded for years, the system has gone through multiple iterations and reforms in an effort to control costs.
Today, police and other state pensions are split into three tiers. Tier 1 applies to workers hired before Sept. 1, 2008. It kicks in after 20 years of service and pays out defined benefits based on the length of one’s career. This means that retired officers under this plan are guaranteed a certain payout upon hanging up their uniforms.
Most government jobs don’t have salaries that can compete with the private sector, but many recruits were willing to overlook that if they knew they were going to take home a stable, living income in their golden years under tier 1 of the system.
For those hired after Sept. 1, 2008, pension maturity periods were extended from 20 years to 25 years, but they still had defined benefits similar to tier 1. Workers under this system are classified as tier 2.
Then, beginning on the first day of 2014, pensions were switched from a defined benefits plan to a kind of hybrid cash contribution plan, now referred to as tier 3, which applies to anyone hired after that date.
These plans are similar to 401(k) plans and other individual retirement accounts: Officers contribute consistently over a period of time to an investment pool that yields returns upon retirement. Payouts are based on the amount of cash contributions workers make divided by state-managed actuarial factors.
Although a worker’s age and the type of service performed are accounted for in the actuarial calculations, many argue that such plans rarely yield the same payouts as traditional pension plans. This has blunted one of the primary means by which departments attracted recruits.
Morgan and others are currently in the process of lobbying the General Assembly for reforms to healthcare benefits for pensioners. Officers in tier 1’s B level are beginning to retire, Morgan said, and because many of them are only in their 40s, they may want to come back to work as school resource officers or in similar positions.
As it stands, however, the state’s family health insurance plan puts them on the hook for about $16,000 a year out of pocket. The plan is to have a bill that would provide returning officers with a stipend for healthcare costs, but the details of the legislation are still being worked out.
These days, Bailey works as an officer in Preble County, Ohio. He’s also an elected constable for Boone County District 2.
Based on his observations, a lot of officers are being drawn away from Kentucky to work in Ohio because the training requirements offer more flexibility. Officers in Ohio, he said, also seem to have more flexibility in where they work. This is true for both younger and older officers, the latter of whom often still want to work on a part-time basis. The flexibility allows the more experienced officers opportunities to share their knowledge with more departments.
Bailey advocated for open enrollment-style academies in Kentucky as one way to mitigate the problem.
“If Kentucky had some kind of open enrollment, it could open the market and then compete with Ohio,” Bailey said. “So, I do think that Kentucky is losing candidates to that. There’s no doubt in my mind.”