Two dozen retired Ohio Highway Patrol vehicles have recently been donated to The Owens Community College Department of Criminal Justice.
Ohio State Representative Haraz Ghanbari donated the vehicles for Owens to use for its Ohio Peace Officer Training Academies program.
“I am deeply grateful to The Ohio State Highway Patrol for their generous donation of two former patrol vehicles to the Owens Community College Police Academy,” Rep. Ghanbari said. “This contribution greatly enhances the training capabilities at Owens and supports their mission to prepare future law enforcement professionals. I look forward seeing these future officers out in our communities.”
Around half the current fleet of training vehicles are aging with high miles, according to Mark King, manager of Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy in the Department of Criminal Justice, however with the cost of vehicles, the academy is unable to purchase new vehicles yearly.
The donation will allow the academy to rotate the older vehicles out with the incoming donated vehicles.
“We don’t use them a lot, but when we do, the use is intense,” King said. “We rely upon these types of donations because the equipment for a public safety program is expensive. We can continue our basic driving program, which we do for our basic training academy, and we can offer advanced driving courses as well.”
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Other public officials and representatives have come to Owens to tour the Center for Emergency Preparedness.
“We need people like that to help us get the exposure so our programs become well known,” King said. “Our academies are some of the top open-enrollment academies in the state, but if people don’t know that it doesn’t help us that much. We’re a state agency, we don’t receive a lot of funding streams, so we have to rely on things like this to help us. Representative Ghanbari can touch thousands of people.”
For more information, visit owens.edu/news-releases/tag/ohio-highway-patrol.
