LPD reviews community engagement in 2025
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.”
