New NY State License Plate Revealed—And Required On All Cars
Access-A-Ride Renders Bike Lane Inaccessible
Cops: Fort Greene Violence Sparked By Chicken Wing Promotion
The UWS Gets Its Very Own Apple Store
64 Things Restaurant Patrons Must NEVER Do
About 14% of new police recruits have dropped out of the latest Police Academy class of over 1,000 recruits, and some are worried that the city's crimefighting programs will be hurt. Notably, "Operation Impact," which Police Commissioner Ray Kelly credit withs helping decrease crime by 25-30% by concentrating cops in those "impact areas" may be without more police officers. Kelly blames the attrition partly on the low starting salary of $25,100.
Indeed, many police recruits find themselves scraping by. Still, Kelly said, "Most of the attrition does happen early on, which is in the first month two months of the class and that's what happened in this class. So we'll have to wait and see as we get closer to the graduation date as to whether or not we'll be able to field a full impact contingent."
However, the Patrolman's Benevolent Association believes that the starting salaries aren't even half the problem. PBA president Patrick Lynch told WCBS 2, "Top pay for NYPD is $59,000. Suffolk County is $100,000, 80,000 in Nassau County." Outside of the city, starting and top pay for police officers is much higher, not to mention usually less stressful, and that has led to many NYC police officers to apply for jobs in the suburbs.
As it happens, today the Daily News has an editorial that actually blames Lynch for undermining police pay and the bringing police recruiting to such a low, by forcing the police pay negotiations with the city to go through arbitration (other municipal unions have dealt with the Bloomberg administration directly and gotten favorable deals).
Photograph of the police station in Times Square by lachance on Flickr
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
that's what happens when you have an overbloated police force. they can do more with less but they won't.
Suburban salaries don't make sense. Why pay so much if the job is less stressful? Cost of living in certain towns is probably high but can't be much different from the city. Obviously they must be higher historically to lure applicants and towns with high taxes have the money. But you don't pay a high salary simply because you can. Economics has to be a factor.
In the suburbs, cops can't retire in 20 years with a healthy pension of almost 80% of their pay.
there's one answer as to why the starting pay is low, they get it back in the end.
when i started teaching 12 years ago i made about 26k and i had to work two extra jobs and my summer to pay rent and grad school tuition.
today i'm making about 75k and can't afford to keep myself or my family in brooklyn. how the heck are cops supposed to make it? from what i understand a working mother with one child needs to earn about 40k to cover rent and minimum daycare.
lynch is just doing a cya as it's the unions who create the salary schedules for their members after the city and the unions agree on a lump sum.
there's one answer as to why the starting pay is low, they get it back in the end.
The pay is low for only a few years and the union never includes overtime in their "calculations". Detectives, which make up about 1/3 of the force make an average of over $100,000 when overtime is included.
how come we never hear about the cop making 100K plus? because you know they do.
they're more secretive of their salary than bloomberg's tax return to the election committee.
add in all the benefits and it's much more than 26,000. that's how the private sector determines a salary.
People are money crazy. I make 60K, live by myself in Brooklyn, and live like a fucking king.
I would gladly trade my job for a teaching gig at half the salary, if it meant a nice, long summer vacation every year.
The answer is simple: Stop having kids and stop buying shit you can't afford.
People with extenuating circumstances like medical/legal problems and sick dependants get a pass here.
26,000/year is barely enough for one person to support themselves here, much less to be the head of a household. I'm not saying we're obligated to pay more, but it's not shocking that people aren't jumping for these relatively low-paying positions.
#3 is wrong, at least in NYS. It's 50% of pay after 20 years of service, but in some cases, it may be 30 years. If you're injured and no longer able to work, your disability pension is normally 75% instead. Don't know how it works in NJ or CT.
#9 -- I seriously doubt you'd make it for a month teaching anywhere, let alone in the city. You sound a bit too impatient and hubris-filled to deal with about 200 kids a day (about 6 classes), their parents, and your bosses. Especially if you're teaching in a ghetto. Remember you'll be paying for a lot of your own supplies on that $30k or even $60k you're taking home.
#6 -- what the PD and detective's union don't mention is that there is a department-wide overtime cap in place that limits most cops/detectives/bosses to as little as 10-20 hours a month. In some cases, that time can't be taken as cash, but only as vacation. And even if there was 20 hours of overtime a week available to boost pay, that's time that these folks spend working -- not home with their families.
My pops (rest his soul) went out with an 86K a year pension as detective first grade (admittedly, hard to get). He was a damn good cop, but adjusted for inflation his starting salary on the force as a patrolman in the housing authority (when it existed) was higher than what these guys are getting today.
Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester have it made. Police suburban towns, sleep in the squad car when you're supposed to be patrolling and pull over speeding rich kids in bimwahs.
That's alot better than responding to a call in Brownsville because the crackhead in 4B decided to try to microwave their kid again..and succeeded.
Oh and by the way, I neglected to mention he was a cop from 69 to 89. THAT's a real beat.
A few things:
1) Impact is already dead. They're trying to cover the old impact system by moving a much smaller amount of rookies around every month, and by painting "IMPACT" on some of the new cars.
2) The "raise" the city offered for rookie starting pay won't even take the starting pay back to where it was in 2003, and they want givebacks.
3) The city is losing cops so fast that they're actively preventing cops from going to other departments by refusing to release records (such as a disciplinary record) that they used to release.
4) The amount of police on the street has fallen dramatically- but the NYPD wants you to think that they voluntarily reduced the size of the PD after 9/11- not because they can't hire people.
Do any of the papers actually investigate the facts any more, or do they just read the NYPD or PBA press releases?
Some numbers:
Starting pay for NYPD officers in 2005: $39,000
Starting pay for NYPD officers in 2006: $25,100
Starting pay under Bloomberg's proposal: $37,929, funded by givebacks in vacation days and leave time.
That's still a $1000 pay cut, with givebacks, as compared to 2005.
The police union sold out the new recruits themselves - it wasn't Bloomberg.