The Perry Police Department has been understaffed for some time now, but by the end of the month they will have 12 full time officers on staff.

Police Chief Eric Vaughn has hired three new officers.  Two of them will need to attend the police academy but bring additional skills to the department.

“Lourdes Clay, she’ll be a new officer.  She’s not certified, she’ll come from a reserve program in West Des Moines.  She has a two year degree and she is bilingual, so that will be a big help to us.  So she’ll go to the academy here in late April and she’ll be gone until about the beginning of August.  Josh Sienkiewicz, he’s a Pleasant Hill reserve officer and he’s also a part time West Des Moines fireman and EMT so he brings some good knowledge and good skills to us but he’s not certified either so after Lourdes comes back from academy in August, he’ll be going to the academy in late August so we’ll have him through the summer and put him through some training and maybe even get him out on his own before he even gets to the academy” says Vaughn.

And the third officer is certified and should be on the streets of Perry soon.

“Josh Moore from Woodward, he’s a certified officer so hopefully with a little training of the streets and how our organization runs here in Perry he’ll be able to jump right in and help us out quite a bit pretty quickly I think” adds Vaughn.

With two officers needing to be certified, Vaughn says they won’t be able to have 12 officers working the streets of Perry until the beginning of 2015, assuming there are no other personnel changes this year.