Boone County Sheriff’s Office to welcome first recruit class to $20 million training center next month
Olivia Hayes
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
The Boone County Sheriff’s Office gave an inside look at its new $20 million Law Enforcement Training Institute on Wednesday.
The facility will hold classes and trainings for prospective and current officers 48 weeks out of the year, sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Brian Leer said.
“We averaged just over 30 students per academy, so about 100 students a year that’ll come through here,” said Damon Reynolds, LETI’s director of training.
The institute will have 20 instructors from 15 different law enforcement agencies across the Mid-Missouri region.
Reynolds said about 30% of training will take place in the classroom, with their main focus on providing hands-on experience.
“If we don’t do the practical and scenario-based training, our folks aren’t going to be prepared,” said Boone County Sheriff Dwayne Carey. “So we’ve got to give them something to pull from in the back of their head in order to get through that incident when they’re dealing with it in real life, and that’s what this whole building is about.”
Boone County’s newest recruit class started Monday. Reynolds said the 31 recruits will move over to the new building in February. However, Reynolds detailed bigger plans for the building.
“The weeks that we don’t have the academy, we can open this thing up and have really large-scale, training conferences, classroom activities to a bigger group,” Reynolds said.
Boone County Presiding Commissioner Kip Kendrick said the funding for the building came from the state, taxpayer dollars and special bonds.
The state provided $4 million. Other funding was local, including special revenue bonds, Kendrick said.
Carey said Wednesday the building plans took two years to complete.
“We are getting students from as far as four or five hours away that are coming to us,” Reynolds said. “We have students that are coming from Steeleville, Cuba, even locally, Randolph County Sheriff’s Department, Moberly Police Department.”
The new facility also comes with new mandatory training. Carey said all Boone County Sheriff’s personnel are now required to complete two hours of defense tactical training each month.
“We can talk about our use of force, our policies, our laws and then we can go right to the mat and we can recreate and start working through some of that,” Reynolds said.
The new defense tactical training room will also be open to other law enforcement officials in the region to use.
“What we want is all of our people, jail staff and on the road to be comfortable when they have to use levels of force to where we’re not making mistakes that we’ve seen at the national level,” Carey said.
Austin Kidwell, an instructor for LETI, explained that the tactical approach is multi-faceted with a heavy jujitsu influence.
“You’re going to limit liability for every agency and every law enforcement manager, and it’s just such a big piece of what they do every day,” Carey said.
Driving and firearms training simulations will also be apart of training at the facility.
Boone County is also using virtual reality simulations.
The push for hands-on training extends beyond law enforcement with the incorporation of joint communication trainees. The new facility has a mock joint communication setup for dispatchers to train alongside law enforcement recruits.
“This is going to be critical for the joint communications dispatchers as well as for law enforcement,” Kendrick said.
Reynolds said they hope to have a cross-training simulation between dispatchers and law enforcement take place once a month.
“We can do the most basic of how to do a car stop when we’re talking about the academy students. Where do you stand? What are you supposed to say?” Reynolds said.
They’ll also train prospective Department of Corrections officers at LETI.
“We are going to be training detention staff from both Boone County and surrounding area. So we have created a jail cell so we can do scenario-based training for jail officers,” Reynolds said. “We can learn cell extraction, we can do de-escalation.”
An on-site child care facility for Boone County public safety workers is also under construction. Kendrick said the child care facility should be complete and open by August.