Lake Michigan College is now looking for recruits for its next police academy.
LMC Police Academy Director Brad Byerle tells us the police academy program held its first session last summer. It went well.
“Overall, we didn’t have any major hiccups and considering it was the first session that we ran in over 40 years, we will take that,” Byerle said. “We ended up graduating 14 recruits and I think all of the local departments were fairly happy with what they received from us.”
The college decided to restart its police program amid a staffing shortage at police departments throughout the area. Prior to LMC’s academy opening, agencies in Southwest Michigan would have to send recruits to places like Kalamazoo to receive their training. Byerle would like to think this is making life easier for police locally.
“I‘m hoping it’s making a big impact. These departments could send their police recruits anywhere across the state, but now that they have a local option. At minimum, I hope that we’re a cost savings measure for them.”
Often, police departments already have agreements to hire recruits who enroll in the police academy, and once the recruits graduate, they already have a job.
Byerle says the LMC Police Academy is 16 weeks with more than 615 hours of instruction. Among the 14 recruits that it graduated this year, he says there was a mix of young students and older students looking for a new career.
Anyone interested in the LMC Police Academy can contact the college or reach out to a police agency that’s now hiring. Often, the police agency will pay for a recruit to attend the academy.
