ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
The Liberal Police Department works hard every day to help keep the community safe, and as Liberal Police Chief Chet Pinkston tells it, 2025 was no exception.
“If I had to put a word to it, 2025 was very fast paced, and I'm very surprised at how fast this year has gone. The City of Liberal transitioned to the Enterprise fleet vehicles, so we upgraded our fleet of police vehicles and the administrative vehicles, the detective section, and our property and evidence section,” Pinkston said. “We've gotten probably more than half our vehicles replaced already, and that's been a very nice thing to have happen for us because some of our cars were desperately needing replaced – I've done three repair orders in the last three or four days, and $1,700 here, or $2,900 there, it starts adding up, and those are all of our older vehicles. We also increased the size of our Cadet Program, and we have two classes going – we have the basic cadet program, and then the what we call the advanced cadet program. It's a learn-through-opportunity situation for us, because I think maybe we bit off a little bit more than we can chew. We have 55 kids in the cadet program, so it's gotten very large. And as you can imagine, with that many kids, it's hard to keep interest and it's hard to have opportunities for everybody to get involved. We asked the commission to support us transitioning our current handgun platform to a different platform, which was ultimately approved. We are still waiting on the final arrival of some of the firearms so that we can do a full transition, and it will probably be the first quarter of next year when we get it done.”
Pinkston said some of that work has also happened in terms of LPD policy.
“Our goal in that policy review is to ensure our policies are in line with best practices throughout the state and the country. We're trying for a national certification, but I just don't think we're going to be there – we're only about 75 percent of the way where we need to be, in my opinion, so I don't think we're going to make it there quite yet,” Pinkston said. “The state side is the same. We'll reassess that after the first of the year, see where we're at and what the next steps forwards are. We've made a lot of progress in the two and a half years that I've been here, but just not enough that I feel comfortable with passing an assessment. We had a company called INA Alert that came in and put interior cameras in for us, and they also helped us with our door entry. Before, we had the manual push button entry, meaning anytime there were personnel changeovers, those had to be changed, so we've upgraded to keyless access, and that has allowed us to expedite that process.”
Pinkston said local LPD events were also successful for this year.
“Last year we did not have Liberal's Night Out, we had to cancel it due to weather – the first time we canceled it, the weather was beautiful and we really missed an opportunity there and then the second time we canceled it, I think was probably a little bit more appropriate due to the weather. But this year we got to have Liberal's Night Out, and it was very successful – we had a lot of people in attendance, and we love to see how many community members come out and engage, how many vendors come out and engage,” Pinkston said. “And then we had the Arkalon Trail of Terror in October, and that was also highly successful. That's also a fundraiser for us for our Christmas shopping opportunity with the children, so we were very happy that went through and was very successful.”
Work in regard to staff also continues, Pinkston said.
“Our staffing is currently the best that it's been since I've been here, and we have a lot of people in training. We've got six people out of 42 – one-seventh of our manpower – in training right now,” Pinkston said. “We've recently hired a civilian investigator for the LPD and we're trying to advance that spot maybe a little bit as far as reviewing videos, collecting evidence, going back to stores when the officers may not be able to get, for instance, a video or some other necessary piece of evidence. We're happy that we have that spot filled.”
Among all of that, however, Pinkston said there is one thing that happened in 2025 he’s particularly proud of.
“Maybe the best thing that we've done this year is we've instituted a program called Truleo, and with that, basically everything that gets said on all of our body cameras is now transcribed for us automatically through this service. And it's kind of expensive, but it transcribes it for us and then it gives us information on if there's noted professionalism, noticed restraint, highly professional interactions, and those types of things, so it's very beneficial to us,” Pinkston said. “It helps us spotlight where we need to look, and we can, we can omit where we don't need to look, so it kind of streamlines us in a way that allows us to continue to monitor how officers are handling calls and making sure they're in compliance with policy. If we find that there are shortcomings and that officer needs retraining, perhaps we do that retraining. If we find out the shortcoming is actually with policy and not the officer, then we address the policy side. Instituting that was very beneficial to us from the management perspective. It's also very beneficial to the officers, because they do get feedback on how the artificial intelligence is reviewing their interactions with the community and how they handle calls. So been very wonderful. That's probably arguably the best thing that we've implemented this year.”
Pinkston said he is also excited about the expansion of the Cadet Program.
“The Cadet Program is a lot of work on the part of all the staff that are involved with it, and my involvement is limited – I go in and talk to the cadet class to basically kick things off, and then they are the ones that show up week after week to handle it,” Pinkston said. “And what we're trying to do is we're trying to engage the community. These are high schoolers and they don't have a lot of life experience, and we want them to see what a police department is about, what we do, how we do it, and why we do it so they have a good understanding of the role of a police department. A side benefit is we always hope that that turns into some of them returning back to the community wanting to be police officers or joining the police department in some capacity. Our program is so young yet, we really don't have that experience with it yet, but we're expecting someday, we'll get that type of type of return. But that's not the reason that we do it – the reason we do it is for the engagement with the high school students, for them to learn what a police department does, to engage with us and have them hopefully not be afraid of police departments. I know as a kid, when I was growing up, I didn't have any engagement with police officers and I didn't know anything about them. I always assumed that they were like the super people, the best of the best, but when they get here, the students find out the officers are just like everybody else – we have families, we have bills we have to pay, and we take vacations by driving our car to the same places you want to go on vacation. It just helps with them to understand what a police department is, staffs, the police department, and how it's fully integrated into a society.”
Overall, Pinkston said, 2025 was very productive for the LPD.
“There is no doubt 2025 was very productive year for us, and I think the majority of people in the department are probably pretty happy with the direction we've gone and the things we've accomplished and experienced,” Pinkston said. “One of the biggest things for police departments is morale, and our morale is improving because our staffing numbers are improving. We have, in the last year, recruited in California, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. We got hooked into a pipeline in California from one person, actually from Colorado, who said 'I know someone in California,' and then that person said, 'Hey, I know somebody else from X and somebody else from X,' so that's worked out really well and helped us. 2025 was arguably was my best year here. When I got here, we were actually right at the tail end of remodeling this building. I was ecstatic when I walked in, because I was here before the flooring and some of the walls were done, and it was in shambles. When I actually walked in, they were probably 99 percent done and only had some painting touch up to do. But that seemed like I really just felt really excited for 2025 as far as what the department has accomplished, the overall vision we've implemented from the Liberal City Commission, because we still focus on community policing, we focus on problem solving, and focusing on empowering the officers to be the ones that go out there investigate and solve crimes. My view is 2025 was a great year for the police department.”
And there are no plans to slow down in 2026, Pinkston said.
“Our 2026 goals are simple. We will continue our fleet migration to the enterprise vehicles. We will complete our transition to a weapons system that we have. We're trying to implement more AI, not just our Truleo, but we've got another program we're looking at trying to implement as well so we can get more things transcribed and digitized so we can go back and review transcripts and look at what's going on. We want to try to ensure our officers are using the technology to their advantage to speed them up. Another thing we're working on is our records management system to try to see if there are ways we can gleaning more data from within the information we already have. We've been in contact with agency in another state that uses our same records management system, and we're trying to partner with them to see if we can get them to show us what they do, how they do it, etc., and whether or not they're overall pleased with its functionality, because records management systems are very expensive to replace, so we need to maximize what we're doing with ours.”
There is a lot of excitement going into 2026, Pinkston said.
“We're going to continue where our staffing. My number one goal since I've been here – and will be until probably I'm gone – is staying fully staffed, because I think the community deserves that,” Pinkston said. “The past few years, we've see a lot of younger people pulling away from the law enforcement community and we got a lot of bad press, which, unfortunately, much of it was deserved. I'm not responsible for someone else's misdeeds, but I understand the bad press coming our way due to the national incidents that happened and people questioning whether police departments may be getting more resources than they deserve. Staffing is my biggest concern, and my number one goal, after that, again, improving the delivery of service we have and improving the method of delivery we have. And again, hopefully technology will help our officers. The technology tells us as administration 'Officer X did a good job' or 'Officer Y needs improvement in this area or' 'This part of the policy should probably be reviewed.' So we will continue to work down that road, and then getting the handgun platform transition and getting a better review of our records management system with some training, are what we will be focusing on.”
