Nantucket’s big summer events like the Boston Pops and the Fourth of July celebration this year could hinge on the Nantucket Police Department’s ability to hire nearly three dozen seasonal community service officers, otherwise known as summer specials. And so the department launched an unprecedented recruiting campaign this week in a bid to attract young, college-aged applicants to the island who last year soured on the prospect of joining law enforcement amid the nationwide debate over police reform.
“We’ve never put it out there like we are this year,” Nantucket Police Lieutenant Angus MacVicar told the Current. “We’re promoting this program bigger than it’s ever been promoted before.”
And for good reason. Last year the Nantucket Police Department had hoped to hire 34 community resource officers for the season to assist the department in a range of areas including crowd and traffic control, beach patrols, parking enforcement and more. But the department received a total of only 20 applicants, a massive decline in interest from prior years, and the impact was significant. Even as the state’s COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in the spring of 2021, the town announced that the Fourth of July celebration and Main Street activities were cancelled due to the staffing crunch. The town prevented Nantucket Cottage Hospital from holding its Boston Pops concert – the hospital’s largest annual fundraiser – in August, citing the lack of manpower to safely stage the event at Jetties Beach.
And so MacVicar and his colleagues at the police department developed a new flyer this year for the community resource officer program and have taken to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as online recruitment programs to connect with hundreds of college campuses, in a two-month campaign to cure the department’s seasonal staffing woes. Much is riding on its success.
“We’ve been having our pre-meetings this time of year for the larger events and what I’ve been saying is I’ll be able to tell everyone by March 4, the deadline for applications, whether or not we’ll have the numbers to support all these large events,” MacVicar said. “That’s the critical date, so we’ll know definitively by March 4.”
Last year’s precipitous decline in interest in the community resource officer program had nothing to do with the pandemic, MacVicar said, but rather the national debate over police reform in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and other incidents across the country. That environment and attitudes toward law enforcement in general among young people prompted a nationwide decline in interest in criminal justice careers, he said. Still, MacVicar is optimistic about the coming season and the new recruitment campaign.
“The way law enforcement was viewed and is viewed has created those challenges for young people wanting to become police officers and enter the field, but we recognize that’s the situation and in my opinion, I think things have been better in the last six months to a year,” MacVicar said. “I’m optimistic there will be a shift.”
This year the program is offering successful candidates a starting hourly rate of $19 per hour, and it provides housing for the summer at the LORAN barracks in Sconset at a rate of $95 per week. As MacVicar mentioned above, the application deadline is March 4, and interested parties can apply online at this link.
Below is the department’s new flyer for the Community Service Officer program:
