Quickly, quietly, Mayor Kim Ecklund has named a new Jamestown police chief. What a difference from the last time the city hired a police chief.

For those who have forgotten, after the retirement of former chief Harry Snellings, the city cast a wide net to find a replacement. Candidates were brought in for multiple rounds of interviews. Not only did the process drag on for months, but the potential candidates were increasingly unlikely to uproot their lives in other, bigger cities to come to Jamestown. Eventually, members of the search committee pushed for Mayor Eddie Sundquist to name Tim Jackson, a name familiar to those around the Jamestown Police Department.

It was a good choice even if it took far too long to make it. Jackson served capably for nearly six years as the city’s police chief during a time that included a lot of additional scrutiny of local police departments around the country and during a time when recruiting new police officers has become increasingly difficult.

Last week Ecklund named Scott Forster, who had most recently served as deputy police chief and then interim police chief after Jackson’s February retirement, to the position. In our view Forster is a good choice. He’s well known in the community through a range of volunteer activities, has proven more than capable appearing before the City Council during meetings and been part of important community discussions over the past several years. He’s a familiar face for all the right reasons.

More importantly, by acting quickly Ecklund didn’t create any sort of doubt about the candidate she chose. A national search implies that local candidates aren’t up to snuff. We say implies because, as we saw over the past six years, Jackson was a capable police chief. But we have no doubt that there was a feeling among higher-ranking Jamestown police officers in 2020 that the search for a new chief almost made it seem as if the city would be settling if it chose an officer who had spent an entire career patrolling Jamestown’s streets, raised a family either in Jamestown or in its surrounding suburbs, and who felt they had earned a chance to be considered for the promotion. Ecklund likely looked outside the Jamestown Police Department for Jackson’s replacement, but didn’t make a spectacle of the search.