CHAMPAIGN — Of the 95 students who graduated from the University of Illinois Police Training Institute last week, nine have joined the Champaign Police Department, the largest group of rookies ever accepted into the department in recent history.

The new hires help bolster a police force that has been severely understaffed during the pandemic. While vacancies remain, Lt. Kurt Buckley said the large new class is a step in the right direction and shows the department’s efforts to attract more candidates have been successful.

“It’s a sign that people want to work for the Champaign Police Department and it’s been a team effort to get to where we are now,” Buckley said. “That includes not only our marketing and branding campaign, but also word of mouth.”

While Buckley declined to provide an exact number of positions currently filled, he said the department has yet to reach its full authorized strength of 126 officers and is still hiring.

The department last reported having 116 sworn employees in April. That included 23 officers who were “unfit to serve” due to training, injury or active military duty — ultimately leaving 10 positions vacant, an improvement from the 25 vacancies the department reported in 2022.

The increase can be attributed in part to the city’s investment in its recruiting efforts. Campaigns have advertised hiring and retention bonuses, and the recruiting process has been streamlined. The city used to hire just one class of officers per year, but now has a rolling recruiting process each month.

Still, hiring a new officer takes time.

Police Training Institute Director Joe Gallo, who retired from his position as deputy chief in Champaign in 2018, said the institute offers an “intensive” 16-week program in which students with little or no law enforcement experience complete 640 hours of curriculum mandated by the state training board and more than 100 hours of scenario training.

The 95 people who graduated Thursday must now complete field training with the departments that hired them. In Champaign, that requires more than 20 additional weeks of training, Buckley said, so “it’s not something that happens overnight.”

It’s worth noting that while Champaign’s department and others have seen staffing declines in recent years, Gallo said total student enrollment in the University of Illinois’ basic law enforcement course fell slightly from 207 in 2018 to 203 in 2019 and 200 in 2020, then rose to 258 in 2021 and 316 in 2022, before dropping again slightly to 294 in 2023.

As part of the August operation, officers were dispatched to 46 different law enforcement agencies across the state.

Locally, that includes one officer in Urbana, three in Rantoul and three in Danville, as well as one deputy in the Champaign County Sheriff’s Office and two in the Vermilion County Sheriff’s Department.

The class also includes one officer each from Hoopeston, Mahomet, Monticello and Sullivan, as well as a Ford County sheriff’s deputy.

The only other city to accept nine new officers from that cohort was Peoria. Next in line were six officers in Joliet.

Buckley said the new cohort and other recent additions to the Champaign department have transformed it into a much younger force. He said he and others in the city are “thrilled” that it has attracted those officers and hope to grow their efforts.

“In terms of having a certain number of officers with less than three years of service and how that helps the department — experience is worth its weight in gold, but at the same time, we can’t afford to have that,” Buckley said. “It comes down to hiring the right people, and I think that’s what we’ve been doing.”