A former Vancouver police officer was sentenced Wednesday to 80 hours of community service for lying about his police experience on search warrant affidavits. Keith L. Kircher, 37, pleaded guilty to false swearing in Clark County Superior Court. He was originally charged with two counts of first-degree perjury. Judge Robert Lewis agreed Wednesday to let Kircher complete his community service in Colorado, where his attorney said he now lives. The judge set a hearing for May 1 for Kircher to show proof he’d completed his hours there. Kircher resigned from the Vancouver Police Department in fall 2023 and relinquished his Washington law enforcement certification in March 2024. His attorney, Jon McMullen, said Kircher has no desire to go back to law enforcement.

McMullen said Kircher didn’t intend to do anything wrong but that he wanted to take responsibility by pleading guilty to the gross misdemeanor. The two warrants that falsely said Kircher had worked for the Aurora Police Department in Colorado were authored at the beginning of Kircher’s time with Vancouver police, McMullen said. He said Kircher later began writing that he was a code enforcement officer with the city and then stopped including that experience in affidavits. McMullen attributed the change to Kircher learning more about how to write search warrants, and he said none of the facts about the investigation included in the warrants were false. The judge pushed back on McMullen’s explanation, saying the harm of Kircher’s actions is that any false statements cast doubt in the minds of judges who must approve the warrants about the validity of the entire documents.

An investigation found Kircher authored four search warrants in which he claimed to have previously worked for the police department in Aurora. Other Vancouver police officers said Kircher had long told people he was an officer in Aurora, 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.

When Vancouver investigators contacted the Aurora department in August 2023, Aurora leadership said Kircher had never worked for the agency and that code enforcement was not part of the police department, according to hundreds of pages of internal affairs records obtained by The Columbian. Camas investigators said Kircher’s employment file indicated he was employed as a code enforcement officer in Aurora’s Housing and Community Services department in 2014 and 2015. Kircher had been scheduled to interview with Vancouver police’s professional standards unit Oct. 19, 2023. The day before, he submitted a letter of resignation, effective Nov. 1, 2023. Investigators notified Kircher that he would still be subject to the interview, but Kircher responded that his wife and mother-in-law were suffering from unspecified medical problems, and he would be unavailable, according to the internal affairs records. The Vancouver professional standards unit found Kircher violated multiple department policies, including those regarding truthfulness, insubordination and discriminatory harassment, records show.