Kresten Spurling has nearly 10 years of law enforcement experience under his gunbelt, but for the past year he has been a rookie officer again.

Sort of.

Lawrence Police officer Kresten Spurling is a new officer on the force but he has years of on-the-job experience.

Spurling, 31, was one of 13 veteran officers hired last year by the Lawrence Police Department to fill vacancies in its ranks.

They were hired under a new plan the department designed to lure experienced officers and get them out on the streets faster than it takes to place raw police recruits with no experience.

“We always have a number of openings for officers, and we thought this was the quickest way to fill them,” said Lt. Kevin Harmon, commander of the department’s Community Services Division, which includes officer training.

There are about 120 Lawrence Police officers when the department is at full strength. About 80 are patrol officers. At any given time there could be from six to eight openings, and the department is rarely at full strength, Harmon said.

Spurling, who grew up in Perry, spent much of his career since 1993 working as a ranger at Yellowstone National Park and as a police officer in West Yellowstone, a small Montana town with a police department consisting of six officers.

Adjustments required

Despite his police experience, Spurling said he had to make routine adjustments for the Lawrence department.

“When I showed up for my first briefing during field training I saw more cops in the room than I saw in a month in Yellowstone,” Spurling said.

Recruits go through the Lawrence department’s own police academy. New recruits with no experience must go through 22 weeks of daylong classroom and physical training followed by 16 weeks in a patrol car with a field training officer.

Experienced officers recruited under the new program last year went through an accelerated training schedule. They had from four to five weeks of academy training followed by a month of field training on each of the department’s three patrol shifts.

The major differences “new” experienced officers had to adjust to involved learning the Lawrence department’s standard procedures and the city’s geography and demographics, Harmon and Spurling said.

In Spurling’s case, he also had to become certified as a Kansas law enforcement officer and learn police rules specific to this state.

“A lot of it also is how you conduct yourself in public, what you are allowed to do with your police car and the type of reports you are expected to take,” Spurling said.

Some of the new veterans came from larger city departments such as Wichita and Kansas City, Mo., Harmon said. There are differences in the public’s and the department’s expectations, he said.

‘More reports’

“As a big-city officer, you might not be expected to take a report from someone if their bird bath has been knocked over,” Harmon said. “In Lawrence, the people expect you to.”

The Lawrence recruitment of veteran officers is not new in the world of law enforcement. Johnson County police departments have been doing it for several years, Harmon said.

The Lawrence veteran officer recruitment program has gone well, Harmon said. The learning curve for some officers has been longer than expected, however, Harmon said. And the department still intends to seek inexperienced recruits, he said.

Spurling’s small-town police experience prepared him for much of what he does in Lawrence, he said.

“We didn’t have detectives in Yellowstone,” he said. “We started a case, and we took it to the end. It was a good department to learn with because you did everything.

“I haven’t come across any calls in Lawrence that I haven’t handled before I just handle so many more of them,” Spurling continued. “I’ve written more reports here than I did anywhere else.”