Frankfort police speak on recent officer-involved shootings

FRANKFORT, Ky. (WTVQ) — The job of a police officer is never easy and never truly safe. Since the beginning of 2023, there have been a total of 14 officer-involved shootings in the state of Kentucky.

Capt. Scott Tracy with the Frankfort Police Department has seen a total of three during his time on the force.

Tracy says that when they get a call about a shooting involving an officer, the standard procedure is to call the Kentucky State Police to investigate as well as do their own internal investigation.

“It’s important that we look at each incident and be critical of ourselves,” said Tracy “What could we have done better, could we have done anything better, maybe we couldn’t have. When we look at uses of force, we look at what a reasonable officer would have done at that moment on those exact same circumstances.”

While KSP does the investigation all information goes through them, but police like to get as much information out as soon as they can.

Tracy says after officers have interviewed with KSP, they will have a debriefing before placing those officers on leave to come to terms with what happened.

“We always place any officer directly involved in an officer-involved shooting on administrative leave. There’s no set determined amount of time they can have off. Some officers may need more time, you know, there’s obviously there’s going to be a minimum. Usually that’s going to be a couple of weeks that we take them off the road and place them on administrative leave. And during this time we do send our officers to see a mental health professional.”

Tracy says this is important because these events have an effect on everyone.

“Anytime you have an officer-involved shooting it is going to have an effect. It’s going to have an effect on the officers, it’s going to have an effect on their peers, inside the agency, and it’s going to have an effect on their families.”

Tracy hopes to keep the number of officer-involved shootings low.

ABC 36 reached out to KSP. They declined to speak on the subject.