‘Safer Jamestown Now’

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JAMESTOWN, NY (WNY News Now) – The city of Jamestown held a Public Safety Initiative press conference Tuesday afternoon to go over plans to help decrease the city’s crime rate.

Mayor Eddie Sundquist laid out the plans for the safety initiative, Safer Jamestown Now, which will rely heavily on community involvement.  

“So for the last three years, Jamestown has made really critical investments into public safety, outreach, and focused on root causes of crime. These investments have combated a rise in crime and are working as we start to see a decrease in some of our violent crime rates,” said Mayor Sundquist.

The Mayor touts that the city’s crime rates are already on the decline. 

“We as a city can and will do better, and focusing with Safer Jamestown Now we are committed to a community that focuses policing with residents and police working together to make our neighborhoods safer,” Mayor Sundquist said.

The city hopes to revamp the neighborhood watch program.

“The first thing that we wanna make sure we do is we wanna double down some of the efforts that we are already doing, and you’ve heard all of the achievements we’re already doing but we want to empower our community by dedicating additional resources to revitalize our neighborhood watches,” Mayor Sundquist explained.

Mayor Sundquist also would like to get the children involved in a preventative program. 

“We also want to work and partner with our faith based organizations, our community groups, and Jamestown Public Schools, to provide violence interruption programs in our community,” said Mayor Sundquist. “As I mentioned the Human Rights Commission, we want to engage our Human Rights Commission to hold community meetings to help us develop a more responsive city wide programs that help us deal with public safety.”

The Safer Jamestown Now initiative is a collaboration project.

“We are calling on our community to take back our neighborhoods, that’s what this is about. Safer Jamestown Now, neighbors on watch. It is not enough for us just to rely on our police, but our police need our neighbors as partners,” said Mayor Sundquist. 

The initiative was met with varying degrees of receptiveness, with some Republicans stating the Democratic mayor has ‘neglected to pursue opportunities to provide adequate funding to the Jamestown Police Department’.