A former Vancouver police officer made a first appearance Wednesday in Clark County Superior Court on two first-degree perjury charges after allegedly lying about his job experience when applying for search warrants in some of his assigned cases.
Judge Suzan Clark placed Keith L. Kircher, 36, on supervised release.
Investigators believe Kircher has moved back to Colorado. Kircher’s attorney said he sold his house in Vancouver.
Records show he has surrendered his Washington police officer certifications.
An investigation found Kircher authored four search warrants in which he claimed to have previously worked for the police department in Aurora, Colo.
Other Vancouver police officers said Kircher had long told people he was an officer in Aurora, Colo., worked on the SWAT team and was one of the first responders in the 2012 Aurora theater mass shooting, in which a gunman killed 12 people and injured 70.
“This story is well-known throughout the department as Officer Kircher tells it frequently,” an investigator wrote in Kircher’s file. “In fact, he has told me this story several times with specific details such as he was the third person in the door and graphic details of the injured persons.”
The Camas Police Department investigated Kircher at Vancouver’s request following a 2023 internal affairs investigation into dishonesty allegations. A search warrant affidavit states internal affairs investigators found evidence that Kircher, who was hired by the Vancouver Police Department in August 2019, never worked as a police officer in Aurora, Colo.
Kircher had been scheduled to interview with Vancouver police’s professional standards unit Oct. 19. On Oct. 18, he submitted a letter of resignation, effective Nov. 1. Investigators notified Kircher that he would still be subject to the Oct. 19 interview, but Kircher responded that his wife and mother-in-law were suffering from unspecified medical problems, and he would be unavailable, according to hundreds of pages of internal affairs records obtained by The Columbian.
The Vancouver professional standards unit found Kircher violated multiple department policies, including those regarding truthfulness, insubordination and discriminatory harassment, records show.
The allegations arose during an internal Vancouver police investigation after a female officer reported she’d heard from others that Kircher was saying negative things about her. Some officers who were witnesses in that investigation expressed doubts about his employment history, according to Kircher’s file.
In several 2020 search warrants Kircher authored, he wrote that he had been employed with the Aurora Police Department as a code-enforcement officer in February 2014, two years after the shooting, records show.
When Kircher applied for specialty positions in the Vancouver Police Department, including as a K-9 handler and member of the neighborhood response team, his resume stated he worked for the Aurora Police Department from 2012 to 2015.
Investigators determined Kircher didn’t list any experience with Aurora police in his pre-employment application with Vancouver police, according to the file.
When Vancouver investigators contacted the Aurora department in August, Aurora leadership said Kircher had never worked for the agency and that code enforcement was not part of the police department, the file states.
Camas investigators said Kircher’s employment file indicated he was employed as a code enforcement officer in the Aurora’s Housing and Community Services department in 2014 and 2015.
