photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Lawrence Police Chief Rich Lockhart interacts with the crowd at Lawrence chamber of commerce event on Dec. 10, 2025.

At one point, Lawrence Police Chief Rich Lockhart liked his odds.

His department had 10 police officer vacancies, but 100 people had applied to fill the positions. From that 100, Lockhart’s team selected 20 applicants to be considered for the Lawrence Police Department’s multi-month academy that trains new law enforcement officers. In other words, there was good reason to believe that when the academy begins in January, the city would be on its way to getting all the vacancies filled.

Then, the results from the background checks arrived.

Come to find out, only five of the 20 applicants had passed the background check required to become a police officer, Lockhart told a Lawrence crowd on Wednesday.

“We are getting the applications, but we are not getting the quality,” Lockhart said of the city’s recent efforts to fill empty positions on the police force.

The academy will begin as scheduled on Jan. 5, but it will have a class size of just five people, meaning the department will start 2026 with at least five vacancies, Lockhart said. The chief, who is about to start his fifth year as the leader of the Lawrence department, told a crowd of about 100 people at a Lawrence chamber of commerce event that he is aware of one issue that is hurting recruiting efforts.

“I don’t know if you know this, but our community doesn’t have the best reputation for supporting police,” Lockhart said. “When we go up to Johnson County to recruit, we hear ‘I would never work in Lawrence. They don’t like the police.'”

Lockhart said he doesn’t believe that perception is an accurate one of the Lawrence community. He told the crowd he is frequently thanked by residents, and on several occasions has been standing in the checkout line of a restaurant to learn that some diner already had paid for his meal.

“I don’t agree with it,” Lockhart said of the perception of Lawrence being negative toward the police. “But it doesn’t really matter if I agree with it, if that is what the perception is.”

Lockhart said the issue of community support is a key issue that applicants consider when choosing where to start their career as a police officer. Lockhart said he is making a point to urge groups, like the Chamber lunch meeting where he was the keynote speaker, to think of creative ways to show their support for the police department. He even showed a slide from one community where someone had rented a roadside billboard to thank the police department.

Lockhart said he didn’t expect that large of an effort, but rather said just thanking officers as you see them in the community could go a long way. He said in addition to making those officers feel good, it might help change Lawrence’s reputation among applicants. That’s because many serious applicants often reach out to current police officers before deciding whether to apply in a city.

“They’re our No. 1 recruiters,” Lockhart said of current police officers.

One issue that Lockhart doesn’t believe is hurting recruiting is current pay rates. According to the department’s online recruiting site, starting pay is a little more than $29 per hour and gets above $30 per hour after one year. Lockhart said a couple of years ago Lawrence did rank near the bottom of peer communities. But the department’s pay plan has changed since then, and he said it now has a goal of being in the 75th percentile of area departments in terms of pay.

Lockhart said the recruits who will begin training next month will go through 18 weeks of classroom and other specialized training. After completing the initial 18 weeks, recruits then go through another 18 weeks of training in the field.

Other issues raised by Lockhart during Wednesday’s event at KU Innovation Park included:

• The department expects to go before the Lawrence City Commission sometime in January to try to brief commissioners on a controversial program that uses doorbell cameras to help police gather footage of potential crimes. The program, known as Fusus Connect Lawrence, got an August hearing at a Lawrence City Commission meeting, where about 20 residents showed up to oppose the program.

Many of the residents were concerned about privacy issues, and whether the police would be directly tapping into the doorbell cameras and periodically watching the neighborhood surroundings.

Lockhart said that’s not the case. Rather homeowners voluntarily sign up for the program, and then are sent an alert asking them to check their doorbell footage if police believe a crime was committed in the area. It is always up to neighbors whether they want to share any of the footage.

Lockhart said the police department has been holding community listening sessions since August. He said in addition to the privacy concerns, residents have expressed distrust in the federal government, and want to be assured that the Lawrence Police Department won’t feed the footage to federal law enforcement. Lockhart said that’s not the intention of the program either. He said the department will continue with education efforts and hopes to present a full report to commissioners next month.

• The current size of the police force, including officers and other positions, is 152 employees. He said budget reductions for 2026 will shrink the total to 148. The department currently is down 13 sworn police office positions, but that will shrink to nine or 10 vacancies once the budget cuts occur in January, Lockhart said. When asked by the crowd, Lockhart said he thinks the right size for the department would be about 165 employees, if not for budget constraints. But he also said he’s uncertain that he would be able to fill that many positions in the current environment.

Lockhart said the areas he would like to add to first would be additional officers for the downtown Lawrence foot patrols, and neighborhood resource officers that could focus on specific areas of town.