There are very real threads between the recently ended strike of state corrections officers and local policing that we’re seeing on our streets every day.

We noted recently that one thread that local mayors, county executives and town supervisors have to be watching carefully is what the wildcat strikes in prisons around the state mean for the state’s Taylor Act, which is supposed to prevent strikes by public employees like the wildcat actions that spread like wildfire in late February. The state’s unwillingness to simply invoke the Taylor Law quickly could, in our opinion, weaken the deterrent effect of the Taylor Law to the detriment of towns, villages and cities around the state.

But there’s another thread that we’re dealing with right now. State officials had to negotiate with the corrections officers because it’s impossible to fill vacancies for corrections officers. Prisons were already operating without enough officers, and while thousands of corrections officers will indeed lose their jobs over the prison strikes the state convinced about 5,000 striking officers to return to work this week.

We’ve been reporting on the difficulty to fill open positions in the Jamestown Police Department and other local police departments for the past few years. Read carefully city Police Chief Tim Jackson’s message to the community in the Jamestown Police Department’s 2024 annual report and you get a sense of how the lack of police officers, just like the lack of corrections officers, is having a very real effect on public safety. .

“Due to the lower number of officers, the department was forced to remove the DWI Unit as well as the street crime unit,” Jackson wrote in his annual report. “Patrol being the backbone of the police department, it is of utmost importance that road patrol is adequately manned to handle the needs of the community on a 24 hour, 365 days a year basis.”

Lack of officers is having a definite effect on public safety here, just as lack of corrections officers is having an effect on life inside New York’s prisons. For years good pay and good benefits were enough to entice people to take up careers in law enforcement. New York state just found out merely throwing more money at the problem doesn’t automatically bring easy solutions anymore. City officials can say tomorrow they’ll hire 20 more police officers – it doesn’t mean they’ll find people to fill those jobs We’re going to have to think outside the box to find ways to deal with the officer shortage – and that may include looking at department consolidations and more sharing of department resources than we already have.