The Frankfort Police Department announced its upcoming $250,000 grant from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, known as COPS, for its 2023 hiring program.
Attorney General Merrick Garland and the COPS office announced that the grant will be presented to the Frankfort Police Department immediately, but the department will be granted one year to hire for the positions that will be supplemented by the grant funding. The department stated that the grant was awarded due to the outline of the Frankfort Police Department’s focus of resources on police-based response to persons in crisis, and Scott Shoemaker, Chief, released a goal to further its response by reducing the amount of people in the community that are incarcerated due to untreated mental health illnesses.
“Persons in crisis are increasing all over the country,” Shoemaker said. “The police are generally the only contacts for persons in crisis when they need immediate intervention.”
Every officer with the Frankfort department receives crisis intervention training, but the grant will be utilized to enhance the training for a small number of officers who will obtain a higher level of mental health response training to better address the situations the officers may encounter. The efforts to improve the department’s ability to respond to mental health crises have been supported heavily by the Healthy Communities of Clinton County Coalition, which the department credits with improving its chances to receive the grant as it was being written.
“The Frankfort Police Department is often the first line of defense in reaching individuals in need of services,” Lorra Archibald, Healthy Communities Executive Director, said. “These specially trained officers will be able to work in partnership with our Mobile Response Team to obtain the services needed to prevent unnecessary hospitalizations, incarcerations or people left in crisis without assistance.”
Frankfort Mayor Judy Sheets and her team at Old Stoney expressed their excitement about the department receiving the COPS grant for the second year in a row. Last year, the grant totaled $125,000 to hire officers for the department, and Frankfort was chosen amidst an applicant pool of 700 last year. This year, Sheets commented that the department receiving the grant twice within two years is a rarity for a smaller community such as Frankfort.
Sheets continued to state that the city’s collaboration with Chief Shoemaker has helped improve the response to mental health crises in the county, which has been one of the main priorities of Sheets’ campaign since she initially took office in 2020.
“I am extremely grateful to the Department of Justice for awarding this grant,” Sheets said. “The relationships between our police officers and community will only ground stronger in the coming years due to this funding.”
The department released its plans to position one officer on each of the four patrol shifts who will receive the training needed to support and partner with the Healthy Communities Mobile Response Team, which has responded to numerous mental health crises throughout 2023. Department leaders stated that the increased funds from the upcoming annexation will continue to cover the cost of the increased training as well as the additional officer salaries, which is expected to reduce the financial impact of the department on the general and public safety budgets once the grant ends.