The Kenton County Mayors group discussed the possibility of a police training academy in the Northern Kentucky region at their meeting Saturday morning.
The discussions picked up from a presentation from Taylor Mill Police Chief James Mills Jr. at the mayor’s meeting last month, where Mills briefed the mayors on the logistical challenges of setting up a basic training academy in the region, namely a lack of instructors.
“I understand the chief made a valid point that we’re not ready for it yet; we don’t have the staff,” said Independence Mayor Chris Reinersman. “But I just wanted to make clear,… our point of view is not that we plan on a police academy within the next year. We need to get the ball rolling… It’s only going to get worse. We’ve got to start thinking about this now.”
Shawn Butler, the executive director of the Kentucky Police Chiefs Association, and state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-Ryland Heights) attended the meeting to contribute to the discussion.
Butler gave a breakdown of the broader realities around training academies in the commonwealth.
“This is a major concern all over the state,” Butler said. “It’s not unique to Northern Kentucky.”
Butler described a meeting he’d attended in October with the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training and the Kentucky League of Cities. At that meeting, he said, the department prescribed some of the state-wide problems to setting up new academies.
Butler reported that the department was short 16 instructors state-wide, six of which were basic training instructors. Butler said the department believed this was due to pay competition from local departments.
Police recruits in Kentucky must undergo 80 hours of online work followed by 20 weeks of basic in-person training at an established training academy. The closest basic training academy is in Richmond, meaning there are no local options for recruits in NKY. Coupled with a long backlog for the existing academies, many contend this has unnecessarily extended the time it takes to get an officer on the street.
The virtual training requirement came from House Bill 565, which passed in 2022. Butler said that the chiefs had lobbied Rep. Kim Moser (R-Taylor Mill), the bill’s primary sponsor, in the hopes that it would provide some “relief,” but he said the chiefs took issue with the way the law was implemented. Specifically, the bill allowed for the virtual training to be completed over a period of five weeks, which he argued was an inefficient and ineffective way of rolling out the training requirements.
“So two weeks [80 work hours] is going to take five weeks,” Butler said.
Butler expressed concerns about other aspects of the training, too, such as how testing for the recruits is backloaded in the training process rather than being spread evenly throughout.
“Some of our concerns are why are they not testing them as they go through it?” Butler added. “We certainly don’t want a recruit the show up on the… first Monday that they’re physically there, fail the test and get sent home.”
Butler argued that there needed to be more options for recruits to get their required hours completed.
“I think we need to be open to expand our model, and I think we need to look at the model that Kentucky uses and see what we can do to make that model better to address it,” Butler said, “because I don’t think this is going away anytime soon.”
All of these concerns preceded other tangible concerns like funding and facilities, Butler added.
It was at this point that McDaniel chimed in.
“The idea of a training academy is far more complex than just opening a training academy,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel chairs the state’s Appropriations and Revenue Committee, meaning he has a lot of say in where state money gets sent.
McDaniel and Butler spoke about establishing a new training academy in Madisonville in Western Kentucky.
Butler said he’d been told that “… if the legislature funds it, it’s a minimum of five years away.”
“This is way, way more complex of an issue than anybody really thinks,” McDaniel said, after having met with the Madisonville chief.
McDaniel invited the mayors and other attendees to contact him with any projects they’d like to see funded over the upcoming session.
The next Kenton County Mayors Group meeting will occur on Saturday, Jan. 20, 2024 at the Fort Mitchell City Building on Dixie Highway at 9 a.m.