The Boston Police Department budget is absolutely massive, dwarfing every other department other than schools. ACLU Massachusetts lays it all out in a series of charts. These numbers have always been public knowledge. It’s just that now, people actually care.
And what is the city getting for that money? Look at these salaries, including overtime.
Even Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh can’t compete – 530 BPD employees made more than the mayor’s $199,000 earnings in 2019. All in all, in 2019 BPD employees made up 15 of the top 20 highest-paid Boston employees.
https://data.aclum.org/2020/06/05/unpacking-the-boston-police-budget/
What cop needs to make more than $300,000? Note that our second-place contestant here, John Danilecki, has been accused of wanton pepper-spraying after the “Straight Pride Parade” last fall.
Much of the post-event outcry focused in on the behavior of one particular officer, Captain John Danilecki, who was accused by witnesses of instigating many of the more aggressive altercations between law enforcement and counterprotesters. Danilecki, dubbed “Pepper Jack” on Reddit due to his apparent penchant for Mace, can be seen in many of the videos from the event, compiled here. Rollins said yesterday that she has “read some articles with respect to a particular officer,” and later confirmed that the officer in question was indeed Danilecki.
Well how are you doing to attract good [aggressive, pepper-spraying] cops if you don’t pay them $300k+, you might well ask. And what is the public getting for all that? How many social workers, librarians, teachers could you hire for $348,000?
This is indicative of a kind of circular logic/vicious cycle, a bit like the military-industrial complex: There’s always been endless cover for funding the police, not least because of the political power of the police themselves. There’s been no political upside to go after these crazy salaries and bloat. And so that likely means that many public-safety, public-health-related needs get “dealt with” by police — even though they’re ill-equipped and ill-trained to provide them. But you don’t have political juice to get those needs funded through any other agency. So the things that actually would obviate the need for tough-guy, threat-of-violence policing — education, health care, civic amenities, jobs — get short funding, while 530 BPD employees make more than $200,000.
As the old saw goes, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Police in Boston have apparently had unchecked negotiating power, due their own organizational political power, and the prestige they have enjoyed from the public. But now, because of national events and long experience in Boston, the public is paying attention, and starting to question the heretofore unquestionable. It’s long since time to ask if that money could be better, more safely, and more humanely spent elsewhere, for a higher quality of life. Is this time different? Are things changing, finally?
But the moral of the story for public employee unions is Protect Your Brand. That means maintaining internal discipline and high standards, aligning your own goals and values with those of the public. Extracting absolutely everything you possibly can from that next contract with the city — in money and employment protections — might not be sustainable in the long run. And it could be politically costly if it’s perceived that you’re protecting your worst, most dangerous members. When taxpayers see public sector players extracting high pay without no accountability, they get unhappy – so much more so when they see those employees actively threatening the public safety.
There are always three parties at the table: The union, the government, and the public. Don’t forget about the onlookers — they actually run the show.
*Though let’s face it: You’d have to be a magical cop to deserve $300,000.
Unfriggingbelievable.
This is yet another example of the pervasive legal corruption that makes residents absolutely refuse to raise — and in some cases, even pay — taxes.
This will all end soon with a new President.
Joe Biden has come out strong for . . . more police funding.
The last time I checked, the president has no role in Boston government.
This is about Boston, Boston “Democrats”, and perhaps state government.
Will you spend the rest of the 2020 campaign attacking Joe Biden at every opportunity? If so, then I’m sure the Donald Trump campaign welcomes your support.
I’ll call out his constant “please don’t vote for me” campaign so that maybe we have a chance to toss him aside and maybe have a chance to avoid going from the worst administration in history to the like sixth worst.
That may be the way you rationalize your commentary to yourself.
Nobody is asking you to say or do anything to support Mr. Biden given how you feel. Surely there are candidates for other offices that you support. Surely there are issues that you can continue to enthusiastically talk about and support (such as UBI, universal health care, wealth taxes, and so on). Your voice in support of what you value and believe is therefore not being excluded. It is your relentless attacks on the nominee apparent that are so troublesome.
What you’re actually doing is helping Donald Trump win.
I spend a lot of time and money on other things. Shockingly, including non-electoral stuff!
When I mess around on comments here, it’s not taking real time away from any other work and certainly not helping Trump.
Just trying to help some others see the disaster we could be careening toward this year. Those 90,000 black voters in Wisconsin that voted in 2012 but not in 2016. What’s Biden doing to have them come out, especially under situations that will likely see far fewer polling places?
If the answer is “he doesn’t need to do anything, Trump is doing it for him” we are being as dumb as dog sh*t about this year.
The Democratic Party is holding its national convention in Milwaukee in August.
Nobody but you and your fellow never-Biden agitators is saying “he doesn’t need to do anything”.
If we’re going to talk about “being as dumb as dog sh*t”, I’d say that ignoring the site of the national convention is an excellent start.
@” Nobody but you and your fellow never-Biden agitators is saying “he doesn’t need to do anything”.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/biden-mcauliffe-biden-stay-in-basement
A virtual convention.
Black voters made Biden our nominee. They’re with him.
Similar gap among demographics in 2016 primary. 2016 general was a different story.
Voters of color and young people who came out in 2012 did not come out to near the same level as in 2016, if they had, we’d have a different President.
Voters of color in Georgia just lifted Jon Ossoff to an upset primary victory there avoids a costly runoff, despite terrible lines and voter access. Voters of color in Milwaukee overwhelmingly rejected Trumps judges for progressives in a botched primary. My non-white sister in law in KY just filled out her mail in primary ballot. People are fired up and ready to go, by no means does that mean Biden should run on auto pilot like it’s the 90’s, but his campaign is incorporating BLM suggestions into policy.
According to consistent polling, the please don’t vote for me campaign is failing miserably.
Yeah, I can see current polls from June. They show a strong lead based on 60% of Biden supporters choosing him because they are voting against Trump, not FOR Biden.
November is a long way out, and I think we are vastly underestimating the chaos that will be created around polling places and mail-in voting. This could be a seriously low turnout year or a year where entire state tallies get challenged and potentially thrown out.
It seems like giving the finger to progressives, young people, and people of color and literally saying “no, not going to support that” when it comes to policies that could curb police violence or policies that could provide health insurance during a pandemic seems incredibly risky and dumb. But sure, the polls look good now, so it must be working . . .
You are turning what Mr. Biden says on its ear.
Nobody is “giving the finger to progressives, young people, and people of color”. Mr. Biden is most certainly NOT opposing policies to curb police violence.
You are similarly misrepresenting <a href=”https://joebiden.com/covid19/”>what Joe Biden says about health insurance during a pandemic</a> (emphasis mine):
Your attacks appear to be based on your own biases instead of reality.
I fear we are getting awfully close to DFTT territory.
People: Defund police.
Biden: Nope. Let’s expand community policing.
People: Medicare for All!
Biden: Absolutely not. I do not support it and will never support it. If you have insurance and lose your job, let’s expand COBRA.
People: Cancel student loan debt.
Biden: How about some debt relief for a smaller percentage of you?
Um, where you say “people”, it should more accurately read “liberal base”.
I don’t see Biden giving the finger as much as he is lending his ear and listening. Data for Progress founder Sesb McAlwee showed us how Bidens off to a good start but has much more work to do. That’s my take for now. He’s consistently positioned himself in the center of the party and the party has moved substantially leftward in the last few years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/opinion/biden-progressive-agenda.amp.html
I note that this thread, which is ostensibly about egregious abuse of overtime by the Boston Police Department, has been hijacked and turned into yet another sequence of attacks and rebuttals against the Democratic Party nominee in the summer of an election year.
I’ve seen this show before, and I didn’t like it the first time.
Federal money is transferred for local use all the time, however.
OK, it sounds like more money for exactly what we should be doing.
Community policing and defund the police are not mutually exclusive. That’s basically what Camden did, abolish the old department and fire everyone and then start fresh with a new community policing sensibility. It’s what Northern Ireland did after Good Friday. Abolishment and defunding and switching to a community safety model is what the defund movement is calling for.
Does community policing have a specific definition I’m missing? Doesn’t successful policing always have to involved the community?
I think it does. The general theory is to get officers out on foot, into limited geographical area, so that the people who are ordinarily there know the officers,and the officers know the people there: “Hi, Billy!” “Hi, Officer Friendly!” All the better if the officer actually lives there.
I think it was supposed to counteract the tactics of large-city departments like LAPD and NYPD in the wake of Rodney King. There, the notion was: why have a guy on foot and who can only cover 2 blocks when we can put him/her in a crusier and he/she can cover so much more? Especially LAPD, which then relied a lot on low-flying choppers with searchlights for routine patrols.
The problem is it is expensive because you need the personnel to do it, and so when the budget cuts came, it became something more like the occasional instagram photo-op, and nothing more. So much cheaper to install a lot of tech that might also work for an occupying army, and let ‘er rip. Even better if the DoD gives you a lot of that tech for free.
So now we have the situation in which, whenever something happens, you have a lot of guys in tactical gear who come swooping in in body armor, armored vehicles, etc., and storm the place like its a bunker in Fallujah. In my view, the mentality created by that kind of policing creeps into everything, including ordinary traffic stops, with tragic consequences.
It seems to me that huge budget cuts just reinforces our 21st century paramilitary police attitude, and are therefore unlikely to achieve the results desired.
I also suspect that the big salaries listed above come, in significant measure, from overtime work on construction details, which is a scandal all by itself, but unrelated to the issue at hand.
I guess in my experience policing has always involved to some extent what you describe in your first paragraph, so I just saw that as normal rather than a deliberate new plan.
I really hoped we could move past the “in my experience” citation since your experience comes from a place of privilege relative to minorities intersecting with police.
I never suggested my experience was universal, but obviously am better equipped to talk about what I know.
For me too, but I’m a white dude who lives in quiet suburbia, where it is far simpler for things to work that way, irrespective of the racial issues that have been obvious for some time.
It is tougher to do that in dense urban areas, and would be even without the racism that infects the whole system. I was in LA once, many years ago, and was shocked by the squadrons of helicopters, barely higher than the treetops, sweeping everything with searchlights every few minutes. Evidently things have not improved all that much.
I agree with all of this. As is so often the case here, CMD has said what needs to be said succinctly and clearly.
The money quote is CMD’s last paragraph.
THAT is, in fact, what this diary and comments WAS about until it was hijacked by exactly two participants. Surely each of those participants is able to start a new diary. Either of them could have written a diary about the national issue of defunding police departments, the national issue of police violence, the waves of demonstrations that are thankfully and belatedly sweeping America, or even just bashing Joe Biden. Instead, they hijacked this one.
The topic of this thread is police overtime abuse (including construction details) in the city of Boston.
What CMD calls “the issue at hand” was in fact primarily an excuse to bash Joe Biden. It is no accident that the two instigators fled the scene. They accomplished their mission of derailing discussion of overtime abuse by Boston cops and replacing it with yet another attack-and-defend exchange about Joe Biden. After being called out on that, they moved to attack-and-defend against the Democratic Party writ large. Anything except actually discussing what the thread-starter is actually about.
The thread-starter describes a scandal, just one more in a long sequence of scandals involving the many and creative ways that corrupt elected city and state officials pay off various constituencies in order to further their own political agenda.
This corruption is all legal — just like the Probation Department scandal was ultimately determined to be perfectly legal.
It is nevertheless corrupt, and just about anybody in Massachusetts who is paying attention knows it. The fact that the pervasive corruption is legal is itself a loud alarm bell, even if some of us prefer to ignore it.
The reversal of the Probation Department convictions does not mean that the behavior was not corrupt. It instead means that the metastasized cancer of corruption has spread into the judiciary.
Massachusetts residents will not agree to pay higher taxes to address the burning issues that face us while this pervasive corruption continues unchecked.
A rule that I don’t follow enough is to make my point and then to shut up. I can’t speak for my fellow “instigator” but I re-read this thread and I think I made my point. By no stretch of the imagination is this post, or the report it is based on, strictly a “BOSTON” story and strictly about overtime pay. The report itself puts the story in the context of national protests about police tactics and police funding.
If this were strictly a “BOSTON” story where does “SOMERVILLE” Tom get the right to stick his nose in?
It seems like every thread has a new refrain–“27 YEARS” turns into “This is just your white privilege” which turns into “BOSTON story”. These refrains really amount to very little and say more about the person using them than the people they are aimed at.
I want to call attention to what’s happening on this thread.
This is a post about a major BOSTON story, a story that needs to be talked about. It’s also a story that is, at least for the moment, being ignored by local media.
It is in danger of being derailed by an irrelevant attack on Joe Biden. Whether intentional or not, that diversion exemplifies the same self-destructive behavior that contributed to our loss in 2016 and is now being repeated in 2020. I’m going to resist the temptation to add more fuel to that irrelevant fire.
Tom, did you just call the cops on this thread?
I think it’s relevant if our Democratic nominee isn’t telling our mayors to cut back police budgets and in fact is saying the opposite. They need “more resources” he says.
Here is the funding that Mr. Biden proposes to increase:
Which part of this do you oppose?
I oppose all increased funding. I think police budgets in major cities should be cut AT LEAST in half. Fire the 580 Boston police making over $200K and you can reduce the overall budget and have plenty of funding for any of these token measures.
We’ve seen these reform efforts in practice for decades and they have had little to no impact.
Destroying the police unions and overwhelmingly defunding (and, of course, completely demilitarizing) should be the way forward.
I thought cut first, ask questions later, was a Republican tactic.
I agree with Christopher. Your comment is as offensive as any right-wing budget slasher — of which there have been a multitude.
I only support across the board deep cuts to two areas. Policing (which includes the entire prison industrial complex) and the military.
This isn’t about “waste” it’s about actual harm that these systems inflict. They need fullscale dismantling.
If you think that’s “offensive” please explain why?
Is constant violence against black and brown communities not offensive?
Are tanks on city streets not offensive?
Are cops in schools not offensive?
Is wide use of a substance banned in war not offensive?
Is the F-35 program not offensive?
What about, you know, bombing people across the world for 50 years, is that not offensive?
Yeah, I’m just like Paul Ryan.
Let’s start with you characterizing the proposal correctly.
“Yeah, I’m just like Paul Ryan”. Indeed you are. Like Mr. Ryan, you seem unconcerned about the truth and your commentary focuses only on your own agenda.
Like Mr. Ryan, you use any and every event to hype your own agenda. In so doing, you egregiously mischaracterize the proposal from Mr. Biden presumably because it does, in fact, address many or most of the items in your list. Like Mr. Ryan, you vigorously attack anybody who reminds you of actual facts about actual proposals.
The F-35 program and “bombing people across the world for 50 years” are completely irrelevant to police overtime abuse in Boston.
The fact that you get upvotes from bob-gardner does not strengthen your argument.
There seems to a pattern to all the threads on this blog lately. First, a series of personal attacks on anyone whose position doesn’t align with Tom’s latest fixation. Then a lot of whining from the attackers about how someone else (usually me) is lowering the tone of the thread.
Let me state this as dispassionately as I can. Tom’s assertion that the ACLU’s report is “completely irrelevant” to national protests is insupportable. It is contradicted by the authors of the report. Tom’s assertion flies in the face of common sense.
I agree that there is a pattern. I disagree with this description of that pattern.
A key characteristic of that pattern is to obscure a premise of the thread-starter (“The Boston Police Department is egregiously corrupt and must be reformed”) with a different agenda (“Joe Biden sucks”). This is typically followed by yet another agenda (“people who disagree with me suck”).
This is classic trolling, whether intentional or not. I share Christopher’s observation that we’re in DFTT territory.
Merely repeating the insistence that overtime abuse by the Boston Police Department is a “major national story” does not strengthen it, even when the repetitions are ever more strident.
Unconcerned with what truth?
I support defunding police. Joe Biden does not. It is relevant to this thread because it is apparently about the need to decrease funding for police.
Is it because I didn’t engage more with Biden’s bad “reform” proposals, which I stated before that they were bad and they absolutely should not come with any increased funding for police.
I’ll state it more clearly then. Community policing is bad. It is a friendly name for a whole host of programs that don’t work and produce other harms. More police presence in schools is actually part of ideas of community policing.
I mentioned the military programs as similar ones that I also support defunding, as I stated in the comment. I’d like to know what is “offensive” about supporting defunding of those programs in the same way as I believe we should defund policing? You said my comments about defunding police were “offensive.” I added more context. So, again, why?
Republicans attack programs for bs “waste, fraud, and abuse” to justify defunding. I am not doing that and instead supporting massive defunding for programs and systems that produce actual harm, in this case, policing and the military.
Thanks again for the personal attacks, though.
Sorry, Tom. This is a major national story. What the presidential candidates say about it during the campaign is certainly relevant.
The compensation of the top 20 Boston cops is a “major national story”?
I invite you to show some evidence of coverage from sources outside MA.
Hilarious. With protests all over the country urging that the police be defunded, you somehow pretend that this post has nothing to do with any of it. And not only do you insist that you don’t see the obvious connection, you attack anyone who does.
Equally hilarious is your omission of any evidence at all that corruption in the Boston police department is of interest to anybody outside Boston. The collapse of a building under construction in New Orleans does not make corruption of Boston building inspectors national news.
There is only one “obvious connection” — Joe Biden is the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, and both you and doubleman apparently feel compelled to attack him at every opportunity.
Maybe its just me. Has anyone else on this thread besides Tom seen the protest banners Tom claims to see? You know, the banners that read “Defund the Police Except in Boston because policing in Boston is a Local Issue”?
The ACLU report itself explicitly ties its findings to the national movement for police reform/defunding. You can’t get much more obvious than that.
Exposing massive police corruption in Podunk Iowa does not make that corruption in Podunk a “major national story” even if the reporting that exposes that corruption ties it to national events.
The major national story is the pervasive violence against blacks by out-of-control police. The streets of America are not filled with tens of thousands of people protesting police overtime abuse.
Boston is not the center of the universe and Joe Biden has nothing to do with the thread-starter.
Biden backed the police reform Pelosi and the CBC is pushing through the House. The other reality is the vast majority of police (and school and health and any funding) happens locally. Your voice and opinion would be far more constructive trying to convince your city councilor they the voters of your community want them to slash police funding and increase funding for other services.
I need to have a BA to work in my building and no union or tenure can save me if I lay a finger on a kid, let alone, shoot one dead. The cops should at least have to pass the qualifications that we do, and maybe we wouldn’t have a teacher or nursing shortage if they paid us more and breathed down our necks less and paid cops less and breathed down their necks more. That’s the story here.
So I actually think Bob and double man said a lot of good stuff about the specifics of defunding police, I think if you guys left out the Biden stuff, this would have been a good thread. At this point we all had our say in March and none of us can change the outcome of the nomination. The convention will nominate Biden. I think it’s one thing to say his policies aren’t bold enough and you want him to be bolder, I think it’s quite another to say he’s just bad on this issue compared to Trump or he’s beyond hope of persuasion.
Biden’s present position on reform is too cautious, but I think the 70% of Americans demanding real changes and the fact that his old allies in the police unions are digging in and backing Trump makes it inevitable he picks a black VP and listens to black voters and their allies.
It’s a safe state, you’re welcome to vote for someone else (although I encourage third party voters to partner with someone who dislikes Biden in a swing state to balance it out, there’s apps to connect you to that). This is a website with about 10-20 regulars now that used to have hundreds and it’s precisely because every primary season we devolve into tribes and continue to hijack threads to hold flame wars.
I’m awfully tired of it. I think Bob and Tom could be friends in real life and agree on about 98% of the issues. You two don’t even disagree all that much on Biden who was probably your last choice in the primary. Fine. Just don’t make everything about how Biden sucks, work with Biden supporters in issues we all care about.
My students are showing me the way. Vote for Biden and take to the streets to protest him when he’s wrong. The communities of color in Revere voted for Arrigo against Rizzo who was corrupt and a dog whistle Democrat and now they are holding Arrigos feet to the fire and giving him demands. He’s reinstating a civilian review board and mandating ne training for the revere police. That’s after one protest. Imagine what he’ll do after 20.
@.” I think Bob and Tom could be friends in real life . . .”
You really know how to hurt a guy, James.
You would think cops would be at least as restraint trained as some teachers are.
I think the bigger problem with police is that they ignore the training and their unions refuse to do anything to reform. Teachers unions by contrast agreed to standards and evaluations and make sure to consider the needs of the communities they served come contract time. I wonder how frequently cops are evaluated and by what standards they are evaluated on?
I think we are already seeing a shift with qualified immunity on the table, even with some Republicans questioning it’s utility, and DeLeo leading the charge on a statewide ban on chokeholds, an obligation to intervene to stop misconduct, and review boards with teeth.
Ultimately police contracts are entirely local affairs. You can whine about Bernie losing all you want, or you can call your city council and demand they do better. Even Cambridge funded police by six orders of magnitude over the schools. An affluent and self proclaimed progressive oasis with almost no crime. So many of these contracts were just passed on auto pilot. Boston has 500 officers making over 300k a year. It’s time for the people to take back control of our police forces and it starts in our cities and towns.
Fortunately I live in a city whose police department is already doing what needs to be done (https://www.thesomervilletimes.com/archives/100623). The mayor and city government are similarly doing all the right things (https://www.somervillema.gov/policereform?fbclid=IwAR3LTaqy3x84tjsJPcOt_GoELG4cb0PhZYydDppbMYUCNOjtOpCjDZgVKks)
I also note that at least one of our local progressive leaders — Mark Niedergang, my own city councilor, is nevertheless calling for large cuts in the police department budget (from email distributed on 10-Jun-2020):
I asked Mr. Neidergang to share with me some specifics about the “major hit due to revenue shortfalls from the Covid 19 pandemic” he references. That’s because nearly all of the city’s revenue comes from sources like property and excise taxes that are not impacted by the pandemic — so far as I know, no Somerville property owners have received notification from the city that their property tax payments are not due, and so far as I know every Somerville automobile owner received their 2020 automobile excise taxes just as they have in the past. The primary impact of the shutdown has been on local restaurants, bars, and businesses. The revenue collected from those sources totaled about $11M in FY19, out of total revenues of about $220M. It looks to me as though the impact of the pandemic on Somerville revenues will be about 5% — hardly a “major hit”.
It leaves me with the impression that too many “progressives” are more committed to attacking their favorite targets than encouraging actual changes.
Lowell’s police chief has just issued a duty-to-intervene order. Fortunately I’m not aware of the department making the news for the wrong reasons.
Let’s not fall into a misprision here. There are three categories on that chart: ‘Regular’, ‘Overtime,’ and –wholly unspecified– ‘Other’; without the slightest indication that this unspecified ‘Other’ pay comes from coffers of the City of Boston.
If I’m reading this chart correctly the highest paid cops in Boston make a base salary between 100K and 150K, which I don’t think is unreasonable for an organization of this scope and task, given seniority, training and leadership.
The overtime, while potentially lucrative for the individual, is a potential problem for the organization: on the surface such circumstances may be suggesting too much work for too few employees. Then, again, on the other hand, the job is fluid and responsive, not static and predictable. Cop work is: A) training intensive; 2) often involving specific tasks and/or details without specific time frames; and iii) it is considered hazardous. If one cop has to undergo training, or court time, another cop might be given the overtime to cover. If two or three cops are detailed for a specific task, two or three other cops might have to take the overtime to cover. If a cop is injured on duty, other cops cover. It could be a situation where simply hiring more cops might not be the answer because the situation is so fluid and overtime really is the answer.
As for the wholly unspecified ‘other.’ I’m given to understand that one of the ironies of George Floyd’s murder is that, Chauvin, the Officer who murdered Floyd, worked security at the very same nightclub where Floyd was a bouncer. Cops moonlight. I don’t know begrudge them that, but I’m less willing to hold that salary against their base salary for the city they serve.
In the original article linked in the thread-starter is another link to the actual data (https://public.tableau.com/profile/dawngraham#!/vizhome/2019CityofBostonPayroll/BostonPoliceDepartmentemployeeearningsin2019). By hovering other the various segments, you can see the source(s) of the “other) category.
It is, so far as I can tell, primarily “Quinn/Education Incentive”. A portion of that is paid by the state (through the “Quinn” bill) and the remainder is paid by the city or town.
So it all comes from public funds.
It appears to me that your concluding paragraph is not what we’re seeing here.
Regarding overtime, while I served on the Finance Committee of the Town of Billerica (in the early 1980s), various town departments eagerly and aggressively sought to keep their head count low in order to ensure high overtime amounts. A major component of the compensation and annual review criteria of the Town Manager was the size of the annual payroll he or she supervised. There were, therefore, strong incentives built into the regulatory structure of the town to maximize, rather than minimize, overtime and salaries.
The salient mechanism at play here is that policing the City of Boston requires a certain total number of hours. When those hours are provided by fewer cops, then the overtime provisions mean that those fewer cops get higher income per cop.
Let’s not forget the absurd requirement that prohibit civilian flaggers at construction sites. That provision alone explains a significant portion of the overtime abuse.
Many or most police details could be replaced with civilians. More cops could be hired to further reduce the overtime requirements.
I’m mixed about the “Quinn/Education Incentives”. I can see the benefit of a one-time education benefit for a given person. I have a much harder time understanding the necessity of $40-50K PER YEAR for each cop.
There is no way around the simple reality that this is legal corruption.