Police Chief Timothy Jackson is pictured, discussing with the city council during Monday’s work session about the police force’s current manpower issue. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

The Jamestown Police Department is still having trouble filling vacancies.

For now, that means leaving the nuisance officer position vacant for the time being. The issue of not having the nuisance officer position filled for next year was brought up Monday at both the Public Safety Committee meeting and City Council work session. Police Chief Timothy Jackson said the plan is to have this be something that is temporary only.

“Not only do we have a manpower issue, we have two officers that are injured,” Jackson said. “So not only are we short on getting up to our manpower minimum standard, we have two officers that are not on the road, so we can’t even handle the call volume as it is right now.”

The ability to safely handle any calls that come in takes precedence over any nuisance calls, Jackson said. Once a few more police officers are hired the nuisance officer will return to his position, something that Jackson added will hopefully not take the entire year to happen. If two more police officers were hired tomorrow, the nuisance officer would return to that position.

Jackson said the department started 2024 with 65 officers, but that number is down to 58 right now. The 2025 city budget includes funding for 62 officers. Six officer interviews were scheduled for this week, with another interview held last week. Jackson said ideally he would like to get back to 65 officers.

“I don’t know if that’s going to be possible this year, because we are going to lose more this year, at least some through retirement,” Jackson said.

Discussion was also held regarding the length of time it takes to get the results back from the civil service exam, taking almost a year, and council member Russell Bonfiglio, R-At Large, asked if there was something that the council could do to help with that. Council President Tony Dolce noted that it has always taken a few months, but that it might have used to have gone a little bit quicker because of having more people to pick from. He added that it is similar to anything else with the state, such as the teachers that are also still experiencing a shortage, and that while they could send a resolution, there is probably not much that can be done.

“Other municipalities are probably in the same boat,” Dolce said. “It’s frustrating, but I think one of the biggest problems is recruitment and getting young men and women that want to go into that line of work, whether it’s the fire department or police department. Public safety is a difficult line of work.”