A series of serious emergencies have strained the Martha’s Vineyard community this summer, and understaffed departments of first responders across the Island are raising concerns about public safety.
Many local chiefs are saying the severity and complexity of the calls have increased, even though the total volume of calls, according to data shared with The Times by local departments, has not surged Island-wide.
July brought some of the most severe incidents and emergencies so far this summer.
A fight outside the Ritz Café in Oak Bluffs left a man paralyzed from the waist down on July 17; Kevin Agatep was charged after allegedly punching Daniel Serusa in the face during the incident. Days earlier, a woman was struck in a crosswalk in Oak Bluffs, and on July 10, an electric dirt bike had collided with a truck, sending the two bikers to the hospital, including a child, who was placed in an induced coma. The family of the young boy, Nolan Ellis, and his father, Michael Ellis, has said they are doing better now, but the recovery journey will be long.
Most recently, on Friday last week, at Long Point Wildlife Refuge in West Tisbury, a swimmer, Kevin Foster of Cambridge, died after getting caught in a rip current. Late in June, an alleged knife attack in Tisbury resulted in an attempted murder charge and an injured victim. The alleged attacker, Brandao Geraldo Alves Caldeira, was arraigned on June 20 in the Edgartown District Courthouse, where he seemed to still have blood from the attack stained on his shirt. The police report states that Caldeira released the victim only after he was physically separated from her by officers.
Fire departments also responded to a series of car fires throughout July, including a box truck on Barnes Road, a fire in the beach grass at Inkwell Beach on July 4, and a fire on Chappaquiddick that burned a house to the ground in early June.
On July 8, a 91-year-old woman crashed her vehicle on board the Steamship Authority Ferry into a side wall of the vessel after suffering a medical emergency. The passenger, identified as Ann Lees, later died at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Additionally, a series of false alarms occurred in early July. Reports of a woman stranded on a paddleboard outside the Oak Bluffs Harbor dominoed into multiple false alarms, including a call about a young boy being swept out by the current. By the time officers arrived, the boy had swum to shore by himself. In Tisbury on July 6, a single call dominoed into more serious incidents. After an ambulance responded to a medical call near Five Corners, it struck a car on its way to the hospital. Not long after, a traffic officer called in to assist the ambulance leaving the busy intersection was struck by a gray Prius. Luckily, he wasn’t injured. And early last month, an individual demanded $2,000 be brought to the roof of the hospital, temporarily locking down the building, but described no plan to pick up the demanded money, in what was deemed a hoax bomb threat.
“We’ve also experienced periods where multiple incidents occur simultaneously, requiring officers to prioritize calls while maintaining coverage throughout the town. From the perspective of our officers, this has been one of the busiest seasons in recent memory,” said West Tisbury Police Chief Bradley Cortez.
West Tisbury Police numbers show a steady increase in police incidents in the past three years from around Memorial Day to Labor Day, reporting 897 in 2025, 878 in 2024, and 716 in 2023.
“Statistics tell only part of the story,” said Cortez. “While the total number of calls for service may not show a dramatic increase, the nature and complexity of many of those calls have required significantly more time, resources, and personnel.”
Island-wide figures from the Dukes County Sheriff’s Office (DCSO) communication center, which fields the entire Island’s emergency calls, show that the number of police response calls haven’t actually increased. From mid-May to mid-September, or around Memorial Day to around Labor Day, calls peaked in 2021 at 12,951, then fell to 11,136 in 2022. In 2023, call volume was 11,750; it was 11,122 in 2024, and the lowest was 10,857 in 2025. A partial count through late July stood at 6,053 calls so far this year. Emergency room visits to the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital over the summer have remained relatively flat for the past three years, but in terms of incidents that required a response from police, fire, or EMS, those are up. From May to around the end of July in 2022, there were 308 visits that came from a police or fire response; in 2025, there were 404, and in 2026, there were 407.
Still, during some of the busiest months, several departments are recording a steadily large volume of calls. Tisbury Police have already logged 2,039 incidents from Memorial Day, May 25, to the end of July this year, one short of the department’s 2025 total from the same time frame of 2,040. The most notable change came in motor vehicle accidents, which have almost doubled, from 17 in 2025 to 33 this year.
One problem several departments are discussing is staffing. Tisbury Police are down five full-time officers. Lt. Bill Brigham said remaining staff are covering the gaps through a lot of overtime hours. “We are down five full-time police officers right now,” he said in an interview with The Times. “We have three that we are hoping to send to the academy in the fall, but we won’t have them graduated and back until this time next year.
“Everybody is working additional hours,” Brigham said. “Some people may be working a 16-hour day above the 40 hours to maintain coverage. Everybody is dealing with a ton of medical calls. There’s all kinds of different accidents, car versus car, car versus bicycle.”
Brigham suggested that calls are up because there are more people here on the Island. “Traffic is noticeably higher” and there are more pedestrians, he said. But data from the Steamship Authority has actually, so far, shown a decrease in visitors. Traffic to the Island decreased in June, with 562 fewer vehicles (down 1 percent) than last June and 9,489 fewer passengers (down by 3.5 percent). According to the Steamship Authority, from Jan. 1 of this year through June, Vineyard vehicle traffic is down 7,725 (3.2 percent) from last year, and passenger volume has dropped by 55,375 (5.5 percent).
Tisbury Fire Chief Patrick Rolston reported increases in calls. From Jan. 1 through July 28, the department handled 505 fire incidents, compared with 357 during the same period in 2025, an increase of 41 percent. EMS calls in Tisbury also rose from 402 to 443, up 10 percent. From Memorial Day through July 28, fire incidents increased from 149 to 199 (34 percent), and EMS calls rose from 164 to 186 (13 percent).
“Our calls have jumped a significant amount, especially in the summertime, but overall this year, it jumped extremely high,” Rolston said.
Local fire departments have sought to fill the gap by relying heavily on volunteers and per diem staff.
“It can’t just be strictly volunteers, because the volunteer base is somewhat dying a little bit,” Rolston said.
Edgartown Chief of Police Chris Dolby described the incident rate this summer as “typical,” but he noted the department is two officers short of their ideal strength. “It would be more ideal if we were fully staffed, but we’re lucky to have a great staff that continues to rise to the challenge,” Dolby said.
The Edgartown Fire Department is reporting a consistent increase to its incident responses, recording 476 emergency incidents from Memorial Day through July 27 this year. The summer total from May 25 to Sept. 7, in 2025, reached 803 total. In 2024, numbers were a little lower at 760, and in 2023, 662.
Chief of Edgartown Fire Alexander Schaeffer said the greater challenge is not the number of calls but the severity of the incidents, alongside the shrinking pool of on-call members across the Island. “There are fewer and fewer of us,” Schaeffer said. “I have been raising concerns about that for a while now.”
Local fire departments rely heavily on volunteer and on-call members, and with a dwindling year-round population and higher age demographic, it makes it hard to find new volunteers.
“For Edgartown, we aren’t doing that great for people stepping up, but every community is different. In Edgartown, we have a huge summer population, and in those spaces that are for short-term rentals, those are places year-round residents can’t have, and that translates to less community-based people in town,” Schaeffer said. “We may have enough for an initial response, but after that first five to 10 minutes, we need another string of people to go in, and whether we are pulling mutual aid or volunteers, that’s a daily gamble.”
On top of that, Schaeffer said, volunteers have other jobs, businesses, and responsibilities, and aren’t always available to respond to incidents.
Oak Bluffs Fire Chief Stephen Foster said his department is running ahead of last year’s pace. From Memorial Day weekend, May 25, through late July, the department recorded a total of 472 responses to calls, compared to 455 through the same time period in 2025, and in 2024, 454. Full year totals were 1,659 in 2025, 1,591 in 2024, and 1,255 in 2023.
“The numbers have increased, and I think that’s a growing trend,” said Foster. “We’ve seen a steady amount of motor vehicle accidents or accidents involving e-bikes or scooters. I suspect we will be up 30 to 40 runs.”
Other departments are showing more consistent numbers or declining totals. Oak Bluffs Police calls for service from May 1 through Sept. 1 have dropped in recent years: 1,302 in 2021, 893 in 2022, 1,057 in 2023, 863 in 2024, and 822 in 2025. Chilmark Police recorded 1,582 calls in 2024, 1,520 in 2025, and the department has handled 478 so far in 2026.
Chief Jonathan Searle of the Oak Bluffs Police Department echoed the same sentiment as other departments, saying the incidents this summer are “probably more intense, rather than more in numbers.”
Searle said that the department has handled the summer bustle well, but similar to other departments, they are working a lot of overtime hours. “Are we comfortable? Yes. Are we hard-worked? Yes,” Searle said in an interview with The Times.
Searle said overtime hours are used to offset the busy months, and Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, and Tisbury amount to a similar number of overtime hours annually, at approximately 500 hours a year.
The industry standard benchmark for police staffing targets 2.4 officers per 1,000 residents, but there is no state mandate. Searle said that if they were to follow the benchmark, it would call for roughly 57 police officers in Oak Bluffs during the busy summer months. They currently have 19.
“In the summer months, I speak for the Cape and Islands especially, with our population influx, we miss the former special police officers,” said Searle.
Since the Police Reform Law was passed in 2021, special officers are required to train as full-time police officers. “You can still have special police officers, but they have to be trained as full-time police officers, and if anyone has full-time training as a police officer, they find a full-time job,” said Searle.
A possible new camera system to be installed on Circuit Avenue was discussed by Oak Bluffs Police and the Oak Bluffs Select Board at a meeting on Tuesday, July 28, in response to the serious incidents occurring on the busy street.
Chief Searle clarified in an interview with The Times that if they did eventually plan to install cameras, they should be “town-driven” and accessible only to authorized town employees.
“We have zero town-owned cameras, and I think we should look into that,” Searle said in the interview. “We are behind the times — we are understaffed in the summer months, due to the lack of number of police officers, so now [that] we can’t line the streets anymore, cameras could be a useful tool, and it would be a closed system and not shared anywhere.”
For Aquinnah, the numbers tell a bit of a different story. Aquinnah’s annual total of incidents have stayed in the low 300s: 275 in 2020, 277 in 2021, 279 in 2022, 333 in 2023, 308 in 2024, and 302 in 2025.
The police department in Aquinnah, however, has dealt with severe staffing issues. Aquinnah Chief of Police Randhi Belain described 2025 as an “unprecedented” staffing crisis in that year’s annual report. Office David Murphy retired in April of that year, Sgt. Paul Manning left on medical leave in June, and Detective Steven Mathias left for West Tisbury in October, leaving Belain as the sole Aquinnah officer for nearly a year. According to annual reports shared with The Times, as a result of the department’s lack of personnel, motor vehicle stops fell from 225 in 2024 to 67 in 2025, citations dropped from 85 to 12, and parking tickets from 274 to 171.
Belain was at the Aquinnah Select Board meeting Tuesday to ask that several officers from Chilmark and the DCSO be designated special police officers. Belain told The Times after the meeting that this is a standard mutual aid request with Chilmark, but he wanted to make sure that DCSO officers were also designated for the winter months. Belain also announced that his last day of work with the force is Nov. 6, 2026, and he’s going to start advertising for a new chief as he enters retirement.
“West Tisbury seems to be busier,” Gregory Pachico, West Tisbury Fire Chief, said in a message to The Times. “However, the numbers show that the incidents are what’s expected. Volunteer fire departments are always looking to add members. West Tisbury has been fortunate enough over the last six months to take on five new recruits.”
The West Tisbury Fire Department has two full-time officers — the chief and a fire prevention officer. The deputy chief, three captains, six lieutenants, and 30 firefighters are all volunteers.
Interviews with department chiefs across the Island showed that while there might not always be more calls year to year, there are increasingly more difficult calls, made even harder by staffing shortages on an Island that sees huge population shifts between the winter and summer months.
The numbers presented from local departments incorporate all calls to service made, including all activity recorded in the departments systems, not just serious emergencies. The data included crashes, arrests, noise complaints, motor vehicle stops, burglar alarms, welfare checks, disturbances, alarm checks, property checks, all 911 calls, and other law enforcement actions, and should not be interpreted as representing only emergency calls from the public.
