South Bend police holding law enforcement academy to train influx of new hires

SOUTH BEND — In an effort to avoid what officials are calling a “caterpillar effect” of new recruits waiting to join the force, the South Bend Police Department is hosting its own training academy starting this week. This is the second time in the last two years South Bend police will train cadets locally as the department has seen a dramatic increase in the number of new recruits in 2022.

Over the next 17 weeks, 22 recruits will receive their state-mandated training in South Bend with local instructors teaching courses on the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy’s curriculum. Of the 22 attendees, 17 are South Bend police recruits, and training and swearing in those officers will go a long way toward the city’s projection that the police department will be at a full budgeted strength of 240 officers by the end of 2023.

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Under normal circumstances, police candidates are sent down to ILEA in Plainfield, Ind., to get training on everything from firearms to criminal investigations. ILEA, however, has a limited number of slots for each recruiting cycle and larger agencies often have more incoming recruits than the academy has slots available.

For the past few years, that hasn’t been a problem, with South Bend police receiving enough slots between ILEA and the Northern Indiana Law Enforcement Academy in Hobart, Ind., to get its recruits trained as they came in. But thanks to a large influx of new recruits, the department cannot send everyone who is ready to be trained immediately.

South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski said the department experienced this “caterpillar effect” during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when social distancing concerns greatly reduced the number of recruits who could train at ILEA. Like it did last year to alleviate that process, the department requested, and was granted, permission from the state to host its own training academy locally.

“It’s a little bit more laborious for us to do that here, but the results, I think, pay the dividends,” Ruszkowski said last month. “That slowdown caused a probably four-or-more year effect on officers getting sworn.”

When South Bend hosted its first regional academy in May 2021, training officers used a mixture of in-person instruction when an ILEA-certified teacher was available for a given subject area, but pivoted to video lessons or Zoom instruction when necessary.

For the current academy, cadets will still travel to Plainfield for the firearms and emergency driving courses.

Jennifer Fults, deputy director of ILEA, told reporters at the time that South Bend did a “phenomenal” job putting the academy together. Even so, she said, she didn’t expect individual police departments to host trainings once class-size restrictions in Plainfield were lifted. Fults didn’t respond to Tribune phone calls this week asking what caused the change in mindset, though Ruszkowski and South Bend Mayor James Mueller said the city’s request came down to the large number of recruits in the pipeline.

But even given the benefits of getting a whole class of officers trained, Ruszkowksi said the department isn’t planning to make the local academy a fixture because of its cost.

“We thought it was going to be a one-time thing, but now it’s a two-time thing, so hopefully not more because there is quite a significant cost to our budget to hosting that,” he said.

Of the 22 recruits in the current class, 17 will join South Bend police upon graduation. The rest of the recruits are from other local agencies including the St. Joseph County, LaPorte County police and Elkhart city police departments.

Courses being taught locally makes it easier on recruits, said Assistant SBPD Chief Eric Crittendon, because they don’t have to leave their families during the week to drive downstate. Ruszkowski added the SBPD recruits will gain an added familiarity with how the department operates, that they otherwise wouldn’t have gained in Plainfield.

“Everything is foundational no matter what academy. Officers being trained here get a little bit better foot in the door on how we operate so it helps with some post-basic things,” Ruszkowski said.

City leaders also noted the training academy wouldn’t be necessary without a dramatic increase in new hires. Since the start of this year, 46 new officers have joined the department — a number that sits in stark contrast to recent recruiting trends. Though a number of retirements are still expected, the amount of officers joining the force means the South Bend Police Department anticipates being at full strength for the first time in recent memory by the end of next year.

Officials pointed to the department’s new Prospect Days as a primary factor driving recruitment, with the initiative allowing potential recruits to fill out the majority of paperwork and take a number of required tests on a single day. A newly signed contract between the city and the police union — in which all union members will see an 8% raise in 2023 — will also hopefully bring in more hires, city leaders say.

Email Marek Mazurek at mmazurek@sbtinfo.com. Follow him on Twitter: @marek_mazurek

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: South Bend police hosts training academy to train influx of new hires