Prosecutors have filed perjury charges against a former Vancouver police officer accused of lying about his job experience when applying for search warrants in some of his assigned cases.
Keith L. Kircher, 36, is scheduled to appear Aug. 6 in Clark County Superior Court on a summons for two counts of first-degree perjury.
The Camas Police Department had been investigating Kircher at Vancouver’s request following a 2023 internal affairs investigation into dishonesty allegations. The internal affairs investigation found four search warrants Kircher authored in which he claimed to have previously worked for the police department in Aurora, Colo. A search warrant affidavit states internal affairs investigators found evidence that he never worked there.
Vancouver police spokeswoman Kim Kapp said Kircher was hired by the department in August 2019.
Kircher was scheduled to interview with Vancouver police’s professional standards unit Oct. 19. The day before, 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 for the interview, according to hundreds of pages of internal affairs records obtained by The Columbian.
Records show he has since surrendered his police officer certifications with the state.
Kircher did not respond to a call from a Columbian reporter by presstime on Friday.
The professional standards unit found Kircher violated multiple department policies, including those regarding truthfulness, insubordination and discriminatory harassment, records show.
The allegations about false work experience arose during an internal Vancouver police investigation after a female officer reported she’d heard from others in the department 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.
The officers said Kircher had long told people he was a police officer in Aurora, Colo., worked on the SWAT team there and was one of the first responders in the 2012 Aurora theater 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.”
In several search warrants Kircher authored in 2020, he wrote that he was 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, investigators found that his resume in those applications stated he worked at the Aurora Police Department from 2012 to 2015.
Investigators determined Kircher never listed any experience with the Aurora Police Department in his pre-employment application when he started with the Vancouver police, according to the file.
When Vancouver police investigators contacted the Aurora Police 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 received Kircher’s employment file, which they said showed he was employed as a code enforcement officer in the city’s Housing and Community Services department in 2014 and 2015.
The summons for the perjury charges states investigators believe Kircher has since moved back to Colorado.
