Hi everybody!
Early this month, Kentucky State Police announced it was now accepting applications for what will be its 100th class of cadets, a major milestone for an agency that officially turned 70 last year.
KSP began when state leaders decided that the Kentucky Highway Patrol, which began in the 1930s, needed to expand its scope and do more to help complement the work done by city and county law enforcement.
There were about 200 officers who made the transition, and they earned a salary that would be the equivalent of around $20,000 today.
While both of those numbers are thankfully much higher now, the color of their uniforms has remained the same. That is why troopers have long been known as “the thin gray line,” and why a line of the same color runs along the sidewalks of their relatively new training headquarters in Frankfort, a symbolic reminder of the work the cadets are about to undertake.
Ironically, the training facility, which opened in 2015, was previously a minimum-security prison, meaning the property has now served law breakers and law enforcement alike!
Although the creation of KSP is a high point in Kentucky’s efforts to improve our collective safety, there are others. The mid-1960s, for example, are considered the start of the modern era of criminal-justice training. That work began on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University, which has since become a national leader in this field and which now trains thousands of law enforcement officers annually.
Over the years we have also become home to some of the latest ground-breaking technology used in fighting crime. Louisville, for example, hosts one of the FBI’s 17 regional offices that help law enforcement find the information they need on digital devices in criminal cases; and there is considerable work being done by KSP and others to track down those who break the law online.
This past spring, meanwhile, we became the first in the nation to use rapid DNA testing technology to greatly speed up processing of sexual assault kits. This follows efforts in recent years to wipe out a backlog of those kits.
Today, there are about 8,500 sworn law enforcement officers at the state and local level, and while they make up a fraction of one percent of our total population, our lives would be vastly different without them on the job--- every hour of every day.
If being part of KSP’s 100th cadet class interests you, more information can be found atwww.kentuckystatepolice.org/recruitment/. There will be an open house on Aug. 22nd in Frankfort that will provide even more information, and applications will have to be turned in by Sept. 13th to qualify for next year’s class, which will begin training in May.
As always, I encourage you to contact me if you have any questions or comments about this or any other issue affecting Kentucky. You can email me at joe.graviss@lrc.ky.gov, and you can leave a message for me or any legislator by calling the General Assembly’s toll-free message line at 800-372-7181. For those with a hearing impairment, the number is 800-896-0305.
Thanks for all you do and holler anytime.