Current Events > The True Cost of Policing in New Jersey

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.nj.com/data/2022/01/the-true-cost-of-policing.html

State Police Superintendent Patrick Callahan oversees New Jerseys largest law enforcement agency, with 4,000 employees and a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
For responsibilities that span the breadth of the state, he earned $190,000 in 2019, pay that places him in the upper echelon of public officials in New Jersey.

Yet nearly 1,500 local cops and 115 state troopers actually made more money that year than Callahan. They did so largely under the radar of public scrutiny, in departments with as few as 11 officers.

Among them was a lieutenant in Clifton who pulled in nearly $200,000 in overtime, doubling his salary; a police chief in Bernards Township who added $105,000 to his pay by manning traffic details paid by utility companies; and a Teaneck officer who made $8,300 for hours he didnt even work.

With little notice, police regularly add tens of thousands of dollars to their paychecks through overtime, off-duty jobs monitoring traffic and a raft of contractual perks, NJ Advance Media found during a two-year investigation into the true cost of policing in New Jersey.

Those extra earnings are in addition to the six-figure salary the average officer makes, which is among the highest in the nation and which already accounts for a significant portion of many towns annual budgets. But the full scale of police income has long been all but impossible to track, buried in payroll records that 463 local police departments keep separately.

Today, NJ Advance Media is publishing a first-of-its-kind database that captures every dollar earned by each of the states 21,000 local police officers and 2,900 state troopers, an effort that involved more than 700 public records requests and a team of reporters.

Across New Jersey, the average officer made $123,239 in 2019, the most recent year before the disruption of the pandemic. Thats far higher than has previously been disclosed because the state only publishes data on officers base salaries the earnings on which their pensions are based understating law enforcements real price tag.

The review revealed an opaque system of pay that, in departments with lax oversight, permits the most enterprising officers to work exceedingly long hours with little upside to public safety. The investigation also showed potential abuses officers who put in more hours than their departments anti-fatigue policies allowed, and officers who were double paid for working extra shifts while already on the clock.

Statewide, 104 cops earned more than $250,000, 13 of whom exceeded $300,000.

Income was the greatest in high-cost North and Central Jersey particularly in Bergen County, where a typical officers compensation reached $151,000. In the highest paid departments, average earnings topped $180,000, on par with a school superintendent.

Of those dollars, 20% came outside of an officers regular pay, usually through taxpayer-funded overtime and through off-duty details, in which third parties hire uniformed cops to provide services such as traffic control or security.

But in some departments, the gap was even more striking: In Emerson, officers on average added more than $74,000 to their salaries in 2019. In Plumsted, officers doubled their pay.

And for the highest earners, their sheer number of hours was often staggering: By loading up on extra shifts, there were cops who recorded workweeks of 100 hours or more, or who worked for weeks at a time without a day off. One officer was credited with working 24 hours straight on five occasions.

For this project, NJ Advance Media conducted 59 interviews, including with law enforcement officials, municipal managers, finance directors and experts on policing. It sought comment from dozens of others, including every police officer named in this article, as well as their police departments. If they responded, their comments were included.

The accounting which captures $2.94 billion in spending comes as New Jersey continues to try to rein in public-sector benefits that drain government coffers and spur the highest property taxes in the nation. Police now account for as much as 40% of some municipal budgets, which critics charge peels resources from other public needs.

Somewhere down the line, these towns have to have the will to understand and see that you have to have a greater imagination about what public safety is, said Jason Williams, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University. Because otherwise theyre really just wasting the money.

Union strong!

Imo the offduty details shouldn't really be as scrutinized. Kind of just freelance work.

The guys logging overtime hours into the 100s of hour work weeks seems like a bigger problem, but I guess the question is how are they able to work so much?

Is there a lack of officers and thus a big demand for work hours? Or is there preferential handing out of these OT hours?

Police routinely take advantage of overtime policies and it's something that happens in every city in America. They teach each other how to do it. My dad was a cop for 30 years and did the same thing. It wasn't a secret. It will take major reform to change this

So basically the police are now a bunch of rich people terrorizing the poor and literally stealing tax payer money by claiming to work 24 hours a day. And off duty work by police should be illegal it creates conflicts of interest and makes the police look like mercenaries for hire.

SergeantGander posted...

Imo the offduty details shouldn't really be as scrutinized. Kind of just freelance work.

The guys logging overtime hours into the 100s of hour work weeks seems like a bigger problem, but I guess the question is how are they able to work so much?

Is there a lack of officers and thus a big demand for work hours? Or is there preferential handing out of these OT hours?

Probably sleeping on the job so they can work OT

Quicksilver posted...

So basically the police are now a bunch of rich people terrorizing the poor and literally stealing tax payer money by claiming to work 24 hours a day. And off duty work by police should be illegal it creates conflicts of interest and makes the police look like mercenaries for hire.

Some off-duty work makes sense, like for example directing traffic, but I've never been a fan of uniformed officers working private security

eston posted...

Some off-duty work makes sense, like for example directing traffic, but I've never been a fan of uniformed officers working private security

a few years ago my dad and a couple of friends put on an event at a local park to fundraise and just have something cool for the community thats never been done before. The city made them hire 2 off duty cops as security and having to pay for them and their exorbitant price they ended up hardly raising anything.