Pity the underpaid New Jersey Police… [View all]

[Jackpine Radical]

Last edited Sat Apr 12, 2014, 10:47 AM - Edit history (1)

(Title edited to reflect the fact, pointed out by several posters, that cops in most parts of the country, especially in Flyoverland, remain rather poorly compensated.)

http://www.alternet.org/wheres-outrage-about-obscenely-high-police-salaries?akid=11710.187861._HRw7W&rd=1&src=newsletter980698&t=7

In this era of government austerity, particularly at the state and local levels, the median police salary in the small township of Saddle Brook, New Jersey, is more than $120,000. Virtually the entire force enjoys six-figure annual incomes. In North Brunswick, about an hour down the Garden State Parkway, the median police salary is over $110,000. Francis “Mac” Womack, the Democratic mayor of North Brunswick since 2012, defends this seemingly excessive compensation on the grounds that, while he “can go to sleep at night if we cut a recreation program,” he can’t sleep if his township is “doing without public safety” (the mayor did not specify who, exactly, was advocating a policy of no public safety).

The people who work at or attend recreation programs in North Brunswick must have felt all warm and fuzzy after hearing that. One expects this kind of sentiment from a law-and-order Republican, but this is a Democratic mayor of a blue city, with a relatively low crime rate.

In Suffolk County, New York, where I live, the police unions just secured significant raises for all levels of officers, despite persistent fiscal deficits causing genuinely dangerous recent cuts to social spending. Compensation for Suffolk County cops, already astronomically high by both state and national standards, was apparently insufficient. Now, base pay for sergeants will exceed $160,000 by 2018; detectives will make well over $200,000. These public servants now find themselves in the top 2 percent of the income scale (no doubt this level of pay is necessary in order for them to effectively Protect and Serve™). There was virtually no serious resistance to these raises, which are indefensible on the merits, from either side of the local political class.


The fact that influential conservatives are reliably silent about the issue of police salaries further illustrates how their austerity agenda is just a cover for ideological warfare. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has spent his entire tenure in office railing about teachers and their nefarious unions - accusing them of “19th century thinking,” ridiculing teachers who ask for raises, and bullying them at every opportunity. But if Christie had even a shred of political integrity, he would direct some of his wrath toward the state police, and their union, for the money they are soaking from taxpayers. New Jersey State troopers are the highest-paid in the country (N.J. has the distinction of having both the highest-paid municipal police and the highest-paid state police). During Christie’s first term, in a particularly appalling scandal, it was revealed that six state troopers had cashed in nearly $276,000 in overtime pay alone while overseeing a construction project on the New Jersey Turnpike. Imagine the kind of rage we would have seen from Christie if teachers or lowly bureaucrats had done something similar.