Pictured are members of the community that approached the Public Safety Committee during Monday’s meeting with concerns about Fulton Street. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

Fulton Street residents are continuing to ask City Council members for help with ongoing issues with drugs and vandalism on their street.

Residents spoke during Monday’s City Council Public Safety Committee meeting. Comments began with concerns regarding vandalism at a condemned building and another on the street with the water shut off, but with children still living in the house. Both properties are near the area of Eighth and Fulton streets. Two employees of Southern Tier Environments For Living, who work at a residential building on Prendergast Avenue near Fulton, talked about building a fence by the alleyway, squatters, and more police presence being needed, with employees needing to prepare themselves to go outside. They also discussed how easy it is to access drugs and needles just outside of the building.

Dawn Thompson and her tenant Danielle Ellis, two more residents of Fulton Street, reported hearing about all of the problems happening on Fulton while also experiencing some themselves.

“I can’t blame one entity,” Thompson said. “The cops can’t be everywhere, and there’s so much of this. It’s a plague of Jamestown.”

Thompson said a specific problem for her was one drug addict coming into her yard naked, and another was the next door neighbor’s porch reaching over onto her property, along with problems with overgrown trees and foliage there, letting people come up from STEL and get into the back of that property. People have also been lighting fires and leaving needles around.

Her tenant, Ellis, who lives in the same house, also has a 3-year-old son, and Thompson said they do not feel safe letting him go outside. Thompson said this is not just a police problem but an everybody problem and that they need to be a community that wants to fix it.

“I have never felt so unsafe going outside with my son,” Ellis said. “I had one of the drug addicts outside in our lawn at 10 p.m., rolling around, grunting and doing an interpretive dance, swearing up a storm. My son’s window is right there.”

Ellis said Thompson has been doing what she can, adding that there were two undercover cops that came and things did die down, but it is now starting back up.

During the work session with the full City Council that followed, Councilman Jeff Russell, R-At Large and chair of the Public Safety Committee, discussed the issues brought before them at the committee meeting again, saying that the area of Fulton, Eighth Street and Prendergast Avenue is an “epicenter of issues going on.”

“I completely understand their frustration,” Russell said. “It just sounds like there’s a plethora of activity down there that needs to be addressed. I feel for the men and women of the Jamestown Police Department. I’ve spoken with them at length about how frustrated they are.”

Russell said in his opinion some of the quality of life issues being seen in the city are a direct result of the New York State bail reform, and that some parts need to be amended to allow police to be able to deal with these issues a little bit better. Police are currently only allowed to give appearance tickets and not make arrests.

Russell also presented some statistics from the police department to the board, including that from Jan 1, 2025 to June 9, 2025 there were a total of 126 police calls to Fulton Street.

“That is just mind-boggling that in six months the police have been down there 126 times,” Russell said. “It’s very frustrating for them. A lot of it is quality of life stuff, and frankly some of it is just these people aren’t getting along. They don’t know how to be neighbors.”