NYPD Blues

[Anchor:Yang]
The city is calling for more cops, and fewer are answering.  More, when we come back…

[Anchor:MARTHA]
The number of cops on the streets of New York City is at its lowest level since the nineties. In our Focus Report this week, Eliza Browning looks into why new cops are hard to come by.

[TAKE PKG]
The NYPD is the nation’s biggest police force, but it’s having problems attracting new recruits. Fewer than 1,000 cops joined the force last year.

The main reason:  a starting salary of $25,100.

That scares off people like Hugh Bishop, who took and passed the police qualification exam.

“I make more right now working at Bloomingdale’s than what they’re making,” said Bishop. 

And police departments around the country are catching on, stepping up their recruiting efforts here in New York.

Seargent Glenn Beatty came all the way from California. He’s at a local job fair to entice prospective and current NYPD officers with a salary that’s more than three times New York’s.

“We do pay well,” said Beatty. “And we do have a good benefits package. We’re looking for people though that are qualified.”

San Jose pays its new officers $70,000 a year. Seattle offers more than $47, 000 to start.

Beatty knows he came to the right place: he used to be a New York City cop.

“I do know when I started out in 1983 in NYPD, I was making 24,000,” said Beatty.

Today it’s exactly $1,100 more. For many cops, that’s just not enough.

More than 750 New Yorkers, signed up to take Seattle’s police department exam last month. Gregory Giacopolus is one of them.

“A lot of my partners in the precinct, they’re leaving, a few are going to Connecticut. A couple of others are actually taking this here now. There are a lot of people who are doing it,” said Giacopolus. “This just pays so much better. Not that I’m happy about leaving, but the opportunity is once in a lifetime opportunity.”

The police union has spent three years trying to pressure the city for a new contract with near total support from police manpower experts.

“It’s a market economy,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “You get what you pay for. And to be paid $25,000 is just totally absurd.”

O’Donnell says the size of the force is one of the reasons for the lower pay. There are 36,000 officers in the NYPD, compared with 1,200 in Seattle. The benefits package is competitive with other departments, but O’Donnell says salaries in New York have been low for years.

“During the Giuliani era, police officers here got several years of zero, zero, and zero raises,” said O’Donnell. “So even though he was a self-professed, pro-police person he actually really helped to really take the job and make it what it is today, which is not even a middle-class job in the city.”

That’s why the pool of new recruits is drying up. Last year, more than 20 percent of all new recruits dropped out.

The union claims when a single officer leaves the NYPD, it costs the city $100,000 to recruit, screen and train a replacement. Many believe that money would be better spent increasing salary levels to keep experienced officers on the streets.

Bob Ganley is the vice-president of the sergeants union. He says it’s not just the starting salary, but the top salary that has to change.

“If you have a police officer with four or five, six years on the job and he’s at top salary, If he’s looking to leave, the reason he’s leaving is because he can go to the next place and make more money than the top salary as a NYC police officer,” said Ganley.

After five years on the job, pay for New York City cops tops out around $59,000.

The City’s Office of Labor Relations did not return phone calls for comment, but it has been working with a panel of arbitrators to agree on a new pay scale with the police union.

No announcement is scheduled, but one is expected in the coming weeks.

Eliza Browning, Columbia News Tonight. 

~ by supermann on May 2, 2008.