Is Jamestown a safe place to live?

It’s a question that pops up periodically in the city depending on what pops up in the police reports in a given month or which stage of union negotiations we happen to be in at any given time. Safety is a topic now after the union representing Jamestown’s police officers published their concerns in a guest essay recently in The Post-Journal that prompted a response from a couple of City Council members this week – including from councilman Bill Reynolds, a former Jamestown Police Department detective.

If we’re going to have this talk – again, we may add – it’s worth starting off on the same page. Simply using the crime rate is a bad way to compare safety in 2025 to safety in past years. As the city’s population goes down, the crime rate will go up whether crime actually goes up or not. So this discussion has to involve more than the crime rate, which is indeed up nearly 5% in 2024 compared to 2023 as a combination of an increase in Part 1 violent crime and another projected decrease in the city’s population.

The actual number of violent crime increased 6.69% in Jamestown from 2023 to 2024, with much of the increase coming in larceny/thefts and robberies. But a closer look makes one wonder if 2023 was simply a year in which crime was lower than usual and 2024 is a return to normal numbers. The 1,084 Part 1 offenses reported in 2024 are close to the number of arrests in three of the prior five years – 1,064 in 2019, 1,061 in 2021 and 1,089 in 2022. The outliers are 2020 (1,109) and 2023 (1,016). The 2024 crime report posted recently by the police department shows Part 1 offenses are a 1.52% increase from the city’s five-year average.

A decrease in calls for service doesn’t necessarily mean the city is safer, either. Calls did decrease from 41,412 in 2023 to 37,396 in 2024, but the 2024 number is still higher than any year since 2019, when city police officers responded to 34,778 calls. Police are still busy – just not as busy as 2023, which was the busiest year for the city police department over a six-year period. If call volumes decrease, it theoretically should free up time for officers to handle more difficult situations.

This discussion over safety isn’t new, nor is it going away. The city is in the midst of contract negotiations with its police officers, and it behooves each side to make its case.

Is Jamestown a safe place to live? The truth hasn’t changed. Jamestown is perfectly safe depending on where in the city you choose to live and the company one keeps. No statistic will change that. Safety, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.