Yeah, but who's gonna protect the citizens now from all the thugs and gang bangers? Now that they're jobless, the ex-police are gonna have way more time to harass brown people and shoot dogs without the constant need to fill out use-of-force reports.
I hear ya but it does take a bit more than that. People get sick or go on vacation plus they can get called out any time day or night. They had 3 Full timers and 2 part timers and it looks like they were doing Code Enforcement and Animal Control as well.
In many places, small communities will pay the state police to handle all police related business as getting proper police coverage can be difficult otherwise. Generally, if there is a local police station in areas like this, it is because the community is willing to pay for faster police response times by having police posted locally.
Pay depends on the area, if everyone else is making 13 then 22 is a kings salary. Should it work that way at this point? No but it does and being a cop statistically is less dangerous than my job.
It's not just the raw danger it's also the shit you have to deal with. I can't imagine the stress of it. I wouldn't do it.
Not to mention with this acab bullshit it's even less than thankless.
I have a client who was responsible for recruitment for the local police and she said it was difficult to find people, which leads to worse conditions, more overtime, and more stress for everyone in the department.
I'd sooner eat my own stool than be a cop, but it's more than $22 if you sit in your idling cruiser looking at your phone while racking up that sweet overtime
Do what job? Eat donuts in the only dunkin donuts in a 1000 person hovel and watch YouTube? Seems like a pretty cushy job for 22/hr. Let's not act like this place is the height of crime...
Don't ever make the mistake thinking that cops have a hard or dangerous job.
So right now with our current — trying to hire at $22 an hour, you're never going to see another person again walk through those doors. That's it," Smith said. "Unless you guys do a dramatic change."
Smith stressed the urgency of the matter and said smaller police departments he has looked into pay at least $30 an hour.
I wonder if these cops support raising the minimum wage.
Yeah, except I know plenty of people who have gone into policing bright eyed and idealistic. Your coworkers are regular police who reinforce every bad thing you hear about.
I mean in fairness, our local McDonald's is paying 16-18 an hour... So getting 22 to do a job that most people wouldn't want to do and forces you to deal with people you'd normally try to avoid, doesn't sound like a hard ask.
I'm all for police reform, but you "fuck the police"/ACAB types are just anarchist idiots with serious inferiority complexes. Nothing in this article said anything about the police in question being corrupt of abusive of their power. They were just underpaid.
Adequately paid when you account for all their OT and other forms of compensation. plus the perks of being unfirable and immune to 99.9999999999% of prosecution. Since police corruption is systemic, and these cops are a part of that system, these cops are by definition corrupt.
Part of the reason we have issues with the police force and their policing is that they aren’t treated like professionals and held to professional standards. We need to pay them like the professionals too, even if that means we hire less.
If we demand higher police pay, we better be raising EMT, social work, and teacher salaries too.
And yes, I know this is whataboutism, but it feels wrong to fund police while some of the support system workers that prevent crime in the first place would be thrilled to be making the hourly rate these cops were.
The posted article complains they were offering $22/hr when similar towns are offering $30/hr. Here’s another article (from 3 years ago) that ranks average police salary in Minnesota as pretty high, just behind Massachusetts, which has a much higher cost of living. seems reasonable to complain is pay much lower than state average or typical of their peers
Oh, I definitely think we need to raise those too. These systems are all needed and aren’t attracting the minds they should because we aren’t paying them.
Source? Is this really a common enough thing, or just an edge case? How much overtime is required? What about the $20-something/hour mentioned in the article?
Politicians should have the same income as they did before becominh politicians
This means they to get out and get a real job before going into politics. Seeing how things work.preventing dumb career politicians from having no clue how people live.
True but again, they can easily contract out with the county. It is a fairly sparsely populated county and according to policescorecard.org, they have 2.3 officers per 1000 people which is better than 73% of departments.
The town I grew up in has about 2500 people and has not had a police department since the 90s. The last Republican candidate for governor here in Washington was police chief of a town of 1000 people and the town decided it made no sense to even have a department so they ended it while he ran which he did not expect. Both towns are still doing perfectly fine.
2 Full-time and 4 part-time employees quit. The population is 1,000 people. They should find 2 solid officers and 4 crisis workers. They will accomplish more for the community than the people that quit.
The US needs stronger labor laws, if these guys were unionized (and the government wasn't made to cripple them) they could be paid a living wage in the first place.
The cops have the only union that will do everything to ensure they aren't held accountable for anything. Think about it. Of all the industries that need unionization and the corrupt fascist cops are enjoying it every day.
I'm a strong labor advocate, for everything but police. The police are the ones that are called to assault, coerce, and (historically) kill labor organizers. Those class traitors don't deserve a union. And they primarily use their unions to keep their worst cops on the job far past any reasonable assessment of them as anything other than evil people.
And yet things like volunteer fire departments exist all across the country. These are just entitled cops who feel the world owes them something because they chose this job over another one. Obviously they don't give a shit about the community they police or they wouldn't have all quit before talks about pay raises could even occur. I suspect this is a ploy in conjunction with the city council to 'reform' the department operations and give huge pay bumps to all the 'new hires.'
Are you implying that police forces should be volunteer units? Holy shit this is the worst case of pure, untreated brain rot I've ever encountered. Police need more professionalism and accountability, not less
Obviously they don’t give a shit about the community they police or they wouldn’t have all quit before talks about pay raises could even occur.
They resigned and it's not effective until August 24th, giving the City Council time to either work out pay raises or contract with the County for policing responsibility.
I suspect this is a ploy
I suspect that it's a clear signal from Labor to Management that they're tired of working for $22 an hour when similar job opportunities are paying $30.
You are not entitled to their labor. They may choose to work for free, as many volunteers do, but they are by no means required to work for a pay they don't agree to.