ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
A community’s emergency personnel works hard throughout the year, and 2024 kept Liberal Police Department officers busy, according to Liberal Police Chief Chet Pinkston.
“Overall, 2024 was a good year for the LPD. We saw an improvement in our staffing numbers – we hire some people, but not all of them work out, but we did end up hiring more people than we lost for this year, which is the opposite of what we saw in 2023,” Pinkston said. “Going into the start of 2024, we down 25 to 30 percent on staffing and we even have employees who stay for a few years but end up transitioning out due to other opportunities and/or other circumstances. So overall, 2024 was a good year in terms of staffing. We also put a significant emphasis on recruiting, which ended up taking us out of state, and we pulled applicants from California, Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma, so we went rather far and wide in that regard. For the most part, I would say 2024 was pretty on par with what we've experienced the past few years with only some minor variations as far as our numbers go. One of the things that's particularly problematic for us, especially when we're short-staffed, is it seems we have no time for breaks and we're constantly going from call to call to call. We were fortunate, since I've started here, for the Seward County Sheriff's Department to step in and give some help when we're in a bit of a bind, which is a huge benefit. But the call load has been pretty much consistent with what we've already seen.”
Pinkston said there were multiple changes made throughout the department in 2024.
“We're working on leadership development for the command level officers and supervisors in the department, and we're also working on officer wellness and peer support and overall department morale. In my experience, happy employees are better employees, especially in this line of work, and they'll be more willing to interact with the community in a more positive manner,” Pinkston said. “We seem to have a lot of support from the community, and we want to maintain that. We have also updated our body cameras and transferred to leased vehicles from Enterprise, which is for the LPD vehicles that were originally slotted for this year, and it allowed us to phase out some of the older vehicles that were particularly worn down and needed replaced. I know the City of Liberal has committed to that, and it allowed us to get those newer vehicles more quickly – we actually thought it would be 2025 before we would have that opportunity. In terms of staffing, even in Investigations, was a little low, but due to the hard work and efforts of our recruiting team, we've been able to increase the Investigations staff by two more people, which we're really excited about. The School Resource Officer (SRO) we had with USD 480 left for a different position, but we were able to find a replacement for him and get him trained, and we'd like to have more SROs at some point in the future if our staffing allows for it.”
And the work did not stop there, Pinkston said.
“With our Cadet Academy, we're continuing that, and 2024 was the first year we've been able to have an Advanced Cadet class for those students who had graduated through the basic program – that advanced class was a lot more work, but we felt good about how that ended up,” Pinkston said. “We had a pretty big case in Investigations from this past summer that involved the theft of several catalytic converters, which we ended up solving, and we felt really good about that case because it took a lot of time and manpower. With the surveillance cameras we have for Investigations, we updated one and added two more, which allows us to put those up in areas that are needed in case there's more coverage needed. With our cell phone investigative technology, that machine was aging out, and we were able to update all of that, which will greatly help when we have a case that involves the need to download cell phone data. Maybe the biggest step back we've had in Investigations was our increased partnership with the Western Kansas Child Advocacy Center, that's something that's very important to us and something we strive to do a good job on. We've seen the benefits of that in multiple ways – we used to have about six people on staff who were trained in interviewing children, but it's one of those skills you have to use or else you lose it.”
Among the biggest successes seen by the LPD in 2024 was in staffing, Pinkston said.
“Hands down, the biggest success was the increase we saw in staffing, especially on the officer side. We don't have as much turnover on the professional/office side, it's the officer positions we struggle to fill sometimes,” Pinkston said. “With that in mind, however, we do have five people currently in the academy and while they're not helping us with our call load at this time, they're in the pipeline for us to recruit when they do make it through the state academy and then our hiring process. Something else we did was we had two employees who were waiting for their opportunity to go the state academy, and we were able to work with the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center and Kansas Commission on Peace Officers' Standards and Training (KS·CPOST) and implement a program to send those two to the part-time academy, which qualified them to be commissioned officers in Kansas in an expedited manner while training locally instead of the full 14 weeks at the state academy. Those two employees did really well there, and they'll have a great foundation when they actually get to the state academy later on since they'll have that knowledge and experience with everything.”
All of that work, Pinkston said, should help the department going into 2025.
“For 2025, we're going to start implementing our new report writing and video review software, which was approved by the Liberal City Commission at its Dec. 10 meeting, and we think that's going to give us an opportunity to review body camera footage without having to sit there for the full physical time and watch it, because we also like to do keyword searches and other things the software will be able to tell us about,” Pinkston said. “It's accountability for the officers, which is important for the community to know, and it'll also help the officers by transcribing those videos, which is an enormous benefit when it comes to working up paperwork and reports and all of that work. Another thing we're excited about is we're a part of a regional investigators group that includes the entirety of Southwest Kansas into Oklahoma, and it's very all-encompassing. We're working with that group on a case right now that involves property crimes, and there are a couple people we're looking for who we've identified and have cases against. With us being so close to the Oklahoma state line, it's not uncommon for people like this to move frequently between the states to evade our efforts. Through our recruiting efforts, we also feel like we can get to the point where we're fully staffed, and there are some things I've talked with city management about as far as what we'd like to do as a department when that happens.”
Among all of that, Pinkston said he would like to see the officers be more visible in the community.
“When we get fully staffed, I'd like to see the department implement some more personal touches and have officers more out and about in the community and more visible to everyone and interacting with them,” Pinkston said. “I'd love to find more ways for us to engage more with the community. Even before I got into law enforcement, I was always rather hesitant to approach a police officer – I didn't look at them in a negative way at all, but it took a while for me to realize these officers were people too and had lives and families and all of that instead of just authority figures. We want to continue breaking down those barriers and help people realize our officers are neighbors and friends and might even attend the same church. I would also love, at some point in the future, to get a couple of motorcycles for the department because not only are they just handy to have, but they'd also be great to use in local parades and other similar events. I'd also like to see either some enhancements to our current firearms range or the construction of a new range, because our current location isn't entirely ideal.”
Overall, Pinkston said, he hopes 2025 will be successful for the LPD.
“In 2025, we're definitely going to continue our community outreach and do that in multiple ways, including throughout social media pages, which I know a lot of people in the community pay attention to,” Pinkston said. “I want the community to know everyone in the Liberal Police Department is someone they can interact with and trust not just in their capacity as an officer but also as people. Keep an eye out on what we're doing because we do want to be that presence for people.”
