The Commission on Race and Access to Opportunity, held its first meeting of the interim session in Frankfurt, focusing on crime.

Police chiefs from Kentucky's three largest cities, Louisville, Lexington and Bowling Green, testified about their approach to community policing.

They also shared what the Kentucky General Assembly can do to support them.

Here's more from Kentucky Edition's Clayton Dalton.

Michael Delaney became the Bowling Green police chief in 2020, shortly after getting the top job.

He said he knew his department needed to change.

I had a command staff meeting and I went around the room and I asked them.

I said, name one thing that we do that's not driven by the public, that's self-initiated from our police department, that's community community policing.

And it was silence.

Community policing is a philosophy where police agencies and the people they serve work together to prevent crime.

Rather than officers only responding after something has gone wrong.

It requires cops to be engaged with residents, businesses, schools and churches.

To really solve crime.

In my opinion, you have to be involved in the community and we started a community engagement team.

In the last five years, they've participated in over 3000 events.

We went from solving 33% of our homicides to 100%, but that's based off of the community trust and people believing the message and the vision that their police department is sharing with them.

The police chiefs in Louisville and Lexington said they've had to shift recruiting efforts to seek out new officers.

Traditionally, our recruiting method has been people who want to do this job come to us and at a certain point that becomes a repeating prophecy of you become more of who you are.

And so until you're able to reach out and have people that are willing to go into the community and say, hey, this person might not look like me, talk like me, sound like me.

But I think they can do this job well.

That's key.

We want people that love the community that they're in.

So when they become police officers, they seek out those connections.

They still try to maintain that, caring attitude and that love of the community.

And that's what community policing is about for us.

State Representative Michael Carney, a Democrat from Louisville, asked how these departments are addressing fear of law enforcement in immigrant communities.

We want our community to come into the police department and learn about their police departments, not ours.

It's theirs.

We're servants of the public, and we were still not seeing the population of people, the diversity of people to come through our community police academy.

So, we had a bright idea.

Why don't we have a Hispanic only, community police academy?

You know, we had 30, so 30 people for our first class.

And it was like, okay, that was good.

A lot of tough questions we answered.

Honestly and openly.

And they took something away from it, a sense of confidence in knowing that we were there for them.

This year we're going to have to community police academies, regular one Hispanic, community police academy and one for Bosnians.

Our job is that when you need the police, we come and we serve you.

We don't ask your immigration status.

We don't ask where you're from.

We're here to take care of you.

And making sure that that is a continuing, ongoing message of who Lmpd is and what we're here for is extremely important.

When asked how the General Assembly can support Kentucky police departments, the focus shifted to growing concern over juvenile crime, particularly in Louisville.

The juvenile detention center in Louisville absolutely needs to get built as quickly as possible.

It is a disservice to the kids that we are arresting that one.

There they are getting the message that there are no consequences because of the turnover and putting them back out on the street to.

It's unfair that they have to travel as far as they do be away from their family, be away from their representation, and then have to get on a bus at 3 or 4:00 in the morning to go to court.

That's not right.

They also have better access to the services that will keep them from being involved in a life of crime in an ongoing way.

Plain and simple, that needs to get done.

Not just because the police want it, but because it's what's best for the kids.

The juvenile facility Humphrey referenced closed in 2019 due to staffing and safety issues.

In 2023, the General Assembly directed $40 million to reopen it for Kentucky edition.

I'm Clayton Dalton.

Thank you so much, Clayton.

Last year, the Louisville Metro Council passed a bipartisan resolution calling on Governor Andy Beshear to expedite reopening the facility.

State officials say the Youth Transitional Services Building should be operating in the spring of 2027.