Kentucky State Police has begun training its largest class of cadets and nearly a decade.

A statement from the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet says the agency welcomed 103 cadets on Sunday, which is the largest class to arrive for training since 2014.

It comes amid heavy recruiting efforts and a recent $15,000 salary increase for sworn personnel.

Cadet Class 103 reported for the Kentucky State Police Academy in Frankfort yesterday afternoon.

We had 103 cadets report, which is pretty exciting.

It's the most we've had since all the way back in 2014.

I was actually at the Academy for a little while yesterday, and it was inspiring for me as a trooper to see this next generation of troopers and to see so many of them there.

I hope that's a sign of the direction that we are going because we have been struggling to fill maybe 60, 70 spots for some of these classes.

It's been a little bit more of a challenge in the last few years to recruit, but we just had our raise went into effect in July of 2022, and this was the first cadet class that was recruited after that went into effect.

So I think certainly that shows that, you know, those efforts were definitely helpful in us having more success in recruiting.

There's also the efforts of our recruitment branch.

They are working extremely hard.

They're going all over the state of Kentucky to try to recruit out of 120 counties in the state of Kentucky.

53 are represented by this cadet class.

Also, there are four states besides Kentucky that are represented.

We're trying new, different avenues to try to reach different people, to try to recruit for the agency.

They are very rewarding career to be a Kentucky State police trooper.

We're trying to give these guys the best training we can, give them, best equipment that we can give them so that they are prepared to go out and serve the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

So it's a 24 week academy that's over 1000 hours worth of training, both classroom and field training, skills training.

It's very challenging, both mentally and physically, but I would strongly encourage them to stick with it.

It's hard to predict where we'll be for the next cadet class, But I mean, yes, certainly we hope that that we can continue to have large cadet classes.

We're excited.

This is good news for us.

The more troopers we have on the road, the better we can, the better services we can provide.

This recruiting class will be the first to receive training on a recently purchased integrated video recording system, and they'll be equipped with body worn cameras when they graduate.