Law enforcement agencies across the state are recruiting new talent.

The Bowling Green Law Enforcement Academy started in 2020.

It's graduated five classes and nearly 50 new officers.

Class six is in session now and BJ GPD is recruiting for the seventh.

There are 945 hours of training involved, including traffic stop simulations like this one.

And then recruitment allows us to expedite the training.

When we were going through Richmond, sometimes there was a delay in getting recruits into an academy class.

While now we can plan ahead and say, These dates are our academy, We can take X amount of people and then recruit specifically for that.

Last year, the City of Bowling Green raised the starting pay for police officers to $60,000 a year.

The recruiting period comes as the Kentucky General Assembly is in session making decisions about public safety proposals and pension benefits.

Officers must also be trained on new laws that are passed and how to enforce them.

The state does a very good job of giving us updates on what's happening in Frankfurt.

So as new legislation comes out, it's sent to us from the state so we can read up about it.

There's usually a pretty good delay before the laws go into effect, typically in January.

So when it gets closer to that time, our local prosecutor, our Commonwealth office and our county attorney's office, they're very good about meeting with us and setting out the definitions of the new laws and then going through training of what the expectations are as for enforcing those laws.

Because the current Academy class graduates in March, the application deadline to join the next class is this Wednesday, January 10th, on the City of Bowling Green's website.