Bourne Struggles To Staff Police Department

BOURNE – The Town of Bourne is facing staffing struggles according to Police Chief Dennis Woodside.

He told selectmen last week that the police department is currently down eight officers.

Since becoming chief in 2010, he said the department has only been fully staffed once for a period of two weeks.

Total staffing of the department is 55 people and of that number, 37 are police officers. Woodside cited an increasing lack of interest in entering law enforcement as a major staffing issue.

“Staffing has always been an issue, the amount of people that want to be police officers has gone down significantly across the country, not to mention here.”

Seven of the eight open positions have been filled with candidates. However, the candidates will not be ready for full time duty until next fall.

Five will start training this week at the academy where they will train for five months followed by field training at the Bourne Police station.

Even in the infancy of this current hiring process positions continue to open up.

“Already since this process started we have had one person retire.”

The Bourne department prefers to hire locally which decreases the chance of spending resources on training an officer only for that individual to move closer to home in the future.

However, the Bourne department has already exhausted its local civil service list and proceeded to the state wide list.