SAN JOSE — The latest academy numbers for the San Jose Police Department are evoking memories of the agency’s salad days of exactly a decade ago, marking what brass hope will be continued growth after several years of steady reduction.

The class that begins this week boasts 54 recruits, the most for an SJPD academy since 2007, when the department topped 1,400 officers and was coming off a multi-year stint when San Jose claimed status as the nation’s safest big city. A similar class size was reached in 2013, but that was born from a backlog of applicants following a three-year academy freeze, and ultimately 43 reached graduation.

“We’ve been rising slowly and steadily,” police Chief Eddie Garcia said. “What this signifies is that we’re back. It’s tangible and symbolic at the same time.”

But there’s still a way to go: The department is authorized to have 1,109 officers. When the new class graduates, it will field 983 officers. The chief said he is encouraged by the fact that between the two current academies and a crop of recent graduates from April who are currently in field training, as many as 110 officers are in the pipeline.

That should more than offset anticipated officer retirements, providing a much-needed net gain. That momentum has allowed a “great department to thrive again,” Mayor Sam Liccardo said in a statement.

“I’d like to thank all of these new recruits for answering the call to serve our community and to keep our neighborhoods safe,” Liccardo said.

The new class joins the force after a decade marked largely by protracted political battles over pension, pay and disability benefits between the city and police union. That was seemingly resolved by an agreement earlier this year that will enact significant officer pay increases over the next three years.

“The size of this academy validates our collective efforts to restore our police department to try and keep our neighborhoods safe,” Sgt. Paul Kelly, president of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, said in a statement. “It has been a long slog and there is still much work to be done, but after years of strife, our department is headed in the right direction.”

While recognizing upward staffing trajectories that couldn’t have been imagined two or three years ago, Garcia also thanks officers who endured years of understaffing that stretched the ranks tight as a drum. Because even with 983 total officers, the department is still fielding its lowest numbers since the mid-1980s, which was the last time that the rank-and-file numbered below 1,000.

“As excited as I am for these growing academies, I am even more thankful for the men and women who stuck it out,” he said. “I will never forget the men and women who stayed here through the dark times.”

Those dark times were as recent as a year ago, when the department graduated an academy class of seven officers. The darkness has also entailed a contracted investigative bureau, diminished traffic enforcement unit, and a patrol staff that still needs to assign 160 overtime shifts a week to keep the city minimally protected.

Garcia hopes that the infusion of officers will not only help the department beef up key functions such as patrol, but to restore its ability to pay attention to “quality-of-life” problems like drug dealing and prostitution.

“We do the big things well, but those little things, like those neighborhood nuisance calls that take us 20 minutes to get to, we’ll carve that down,” he said. “We can grow our traffic unit to 40 to 50 officers like it used to be instead of five or six. Restore our undercover burglary unit.”

But Garcia is careful not to look too far ahead.

“We’ve been a boat taking on water, and the leaks have been stopped, we’re bailing the water out now,” he said. “But we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”