PITTSFIELD — Councilors will vote Tuesday whether to continue staffing the Police Department with five officers or drop to four.

With the recent departure of Officer Patrick Cumba to a position in Washington, D.C., it was suggested to council members that they may want to trim the department.

But Town Manager D. Dwight Dogherty said he believes the council will support a five-person department, and Police Chief Steven Emery said it is cheaper to have five than four.

Using full-time officers to fill Cumba’s shifts in one week costs $584 of the town’s overtime budget, Emery said. Filling the 288 open shifts that Cumba’s departure causes between now and the end of the year would cost $42,685. The entire overtime budget for 1996 is $19,896.

Rather than use up overtime, Emery said, he could hire a new officer for $489 a week, including benefits, which amounts to $25,428. He said he already has a reserve officer on staff who is academy-trained. He said that officer could begin the full-time position immediately.

Emery said that the 1996 budget was passed to include five officers and that the move to cut back to four was just one of several attempts to shrink the Police Department.

“At a time when our resources are stretched, when new laws say we must prosecute juvenile smokers, when we are being called on to be more active in the schools, when the community is demanding community policing, we shouldn’t be cutting back,” said Emery. He pointed to a recent attempt to eliminate the dispatch center as another of some town officials’ attempts to take money from one budget to fund other projects.

“They don’t want to raise taxes, I can understand that,” said Emery. “But they can’t continue to increase services somewhere else and balance it with a cut in police protection.”

Dogherty said an additional appropriation will have to be made later in the year to the police budget to offset the results of recent police union contract negotiations.

The council also will vote whether to authorize Emery to submit a grant application, funded by the Maine Justice Assistance Council, for up to $5,000 for computers and computer software. The grant, which would require an equal payment by Pittsfield, would buy equipment that could be used to track local crime statistics. By tracking factors such as the time of day that crimes occur, resources can be deployed in an efficient manner, said Dogherty.