If you live, work, or go to school in Lacey you may be eligible to attend the Lacey Police Department’s Community Academy (Academy). The Academy offers an inside look at a full range of law enforcement-related topics and you’ll even get a chance to try out some of what you learn. Registrants must be at least 18 years old, and have no felony convictions, pending criminal cases, or outstanding warrants.
Police Records Specialist Lindsay Palmer, from the Lacey Police Department’s Community Resource Unit (CRU), plans all of the department’s events and serves as the primary organizer of the Community Academy. The department restarted the Academy in 2022 after a hiatus partly due to the COVID pandemic. “We were trying to get re-engaged with our community after being separated for so long,” she says. “It was a good way to reconnect and have people know what we do here.”
Palmer works closely with Sergeant Alex Ficek, a special operations sergeant who oversees the Community Resource Unit. Ficek began teaching classes in the Academy when it restarted in 2022 and started serving as the supervisor of the CRU this year. “I think a lot of folks in our community don’t really understand what we do in our profession and why we do things a certain way,” he says. “This sheds a small light on our operations.”
The Training Will Include Presenters from Inside and Outside the Lacey Police Department
The six sessions this year will take place on Wednesday evenings from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. and from September 30 through November 4. The curriculum includes lots of hands-on training culminating in mock scenarios during the final class, where participants will have an opportunity to act out what they learned.
Sessions will cover information on department structure and hiring, homeless outreach, a presentation about the judicial process by city attorneys, hostage negotiations, virtual reality simulations, impaired driving test demonstrations, emergency vehicle operations and detective investigations. Presenters come from within City departments, as well as from community partners such as Olympic Health and Recovery Services.
Participants Use What They Learned After the Community Academy Ends
The firearms segment of the curriculum includes practice with less lethal tools such as tasers and deescalation. Academy participant Dan Solie found the deescalation portion to be particularly enlightening and continues to use some of the strategies he learned in his day job as the Director of Design and Development with Capital Development Company, where part of his work involves managing commercial construction crews. “Things can get heated,” he says. “But using some of the techniques that law enforcement uses in my own career (has been) pretty amazing.”
Participant Sarah Morgan, who managed a business in Lacey when she attended the academy, says she liked the building of the trust that occurred. “I appreciated the questions we were able to ask, the different perspectives from the community, the officers, everyone involved,” she says.
Community Academy Core Curriculum Remains the Same but Adjusted and Growing Each Year
Ficek says the core classes have stayed the same since they restarted the academy in 2022 but they sometimes make adjustments. For instance, they’ve added a chaplain to the 2026 speaker lineup and will adjust the virtual reality block to make that fit in the same schedule.
He says participants learn a lot during the six weeks, which could be described as a much-distilled version of the 720-hour academy and 60 hours of field training that officers go through. “It’s like drinking through a fire hose, to be honest with you,” he says of the Community Academy. “But they get to learn a lot and they come away with a positive outcome.”
Some other police departments offer longer programs. The City of Olympia PD offers a seven-week academy and the City of Tacoma PD offers a ten-week program. While both Palmer and Ficek agree that increasing the time commitment for participants might present challenges for the department and participants, Ficek said adding a passenger version of how police officers learn how to drive at the Shelton facility used for officer training would be “kind of cool.”
“I think the majority of the people who attend really enjoy it,” says Palmer. “We do a survey at the end of the class to see what we can do differently, and it’s overwhelmingly positive.”
At least part of the 2026 Academy will take place in the new Lacey PD building. As of mid-August, Palmer said they didn’t have a move-in date but hope that will occur before this year’s Community Academy starts on Sept. 30. “I think having more space will give us a lot of new opportunities that we haven’t had before, so it’s exciting,” she says.
“We have a lot of people that we’ve gotten to know through the academy that come to our events later and say hi. We’ve gotten to know them and their families and it’s been a great way to connect with the community,” says Palmer.
For more information, visit the Lacey Police Community Academy website.
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