My neighbor is a Sargent in the local PD. Town of 300K. He made $140K last year ($40K of it OT). I think the notion that police are underpaid is not accurate, at least here.

How about lawsuits against the police for bad behavior get paid out of their pension fund, instead of by the taxpayer?

I REALLY like this. Take it out of the pool of pensions for all cops in that department. Maybe they'll start to police themselves a little.

This creates terrible incentives, though. Are you going to proactively help with a civil rights case if it means your pension disappears?

If the person suing "dies in a random armed robbery, so sad", are you going to put maximum effort into investigating their murder?

If you see your coworker destroying evidence of misconduct, do you look the other way because reporting it costs everyone in the department money?

They already don't help with civil rights cases. You can make the rats not have their pensions impacted.

The problem with that is that impacts those who may have no influence on the situation (retirees receiving benefits from the pension plan).

Alternatively, you could require insurance, similar to medical malpractice insurance, that pays out for law enforcement malfeasance. If you’re uninsurable due to your actions (egregious and/or chronic), you’re no longer a cop. The cost to your colleagues (premiums) also goes up because of your behavior.

This takes the financial burden off taxpayers, but still uses economic incentives to encourage the behavior we expect from public servants.

> that impacts those who may have no influence on the situation

It puts a strong incentive on those to take responsibility for their coworkers. To cultivate a culture of integrity, through interactions, through hiring and firing, through setting an example for those you lead. Cops love to talk about having each other's backs; let's see them put those words into action where it counts.

Retirees are not the coworkers, they are already out of the system. You’re shifting risk from current employees to past employees unless you pursue an insurance model, which is intended to do precisely what you describe: pool and price risk, both individually and collectively, among active law enforcement.

I’m okay with retirees suffering if their colleagues are committing murder. They are incentivized to stay connected and provide guidance. At some point someone has to bear the burden. Right now it’s the tax payers, present and future. I would rather it be the police officers past present and future.

Past employees likely worked alongside current employees. They certainly placed the group's culture on its trajectory. They have a leg in the game.

I like your idea of malfeasance insurance.

Premiums could be priced in such a way that it takes into account your personal record, to incentivise your own behaviour; your local/metro PD's record, to incentivise them policing each other; and the state's record in an attempt to address systemic and cultural issues.

Your body cam "malfunctioned"? Congratulations, you just increased the insurance premiums for yourself and all your colleagues.

There's a lot of spread, but yeah: in general police work pays much better than jobs with similar qualifications. They're also almost universally union jobs with excellent job security and public benefits.

It isn't the union that makes the cost of police high, its that they're a select group: physically fit(when they're hired!) yet no criminal or antisocial record(surprisingly rare), and fairly intelligent. Add the expensive training that goes into policing and you get what you pay for.

None of what you said is factually accurate. We don't pay enlistees in the armed services high salaries, and they're usually physically fit. No criminal record? Depends on the department since each sets its own standards. Expensive training? Many departments have academy training that's 8 weeks. If a department uses a longer 6 month training cycle, the average tuition cost is around $7K.

My point is we should pay cops very high salaries, $300k+ to attract those that might go into other professions.

You seem to equate high salary with compassion. What is this notion based on?

It's less about compassion and more about risk. Risk in the sense of the physical danger an officer goes into, but also in the sense that we are removing protections for the officer and holding them to a higher standard.

The most common cause of death for police officers is traffic fatalities. Should we pay highway construction crews 300K+?

That’s a terrible analogy. Obviously they’re more at risk of dying a violent death and that’s why they need to pay more

Not really: they're safer at work than you are at home. Police work is very safe in the USA. But it can be very unpleasant and stressful.

The idea that policing is inherently dangerous is most useful to police when negotiating the next contract.

That is absolutely not true and I don’t know why you think that, other than you’re super sheltered. You have no clue what you’re talking about

Tell me why the Mexican Mafia has no teeth. Enlighten me. Tell me why the Aryan Brotherhood is less dangerous than Kubernetes

It’s not ever worth discussing with y’all, seriously. The privilege here is so insane, you’ve obviously never been anywhere near a ghetto

Your assumption is entirely wrong. I equate high pay to high expectations and higher quality applicants.

Why?

We can assume x% of applicants are actually qualified, instead of "Good enough and we need bodies". If we increase pay, we increase total applicants - which, assuming x stays constant, means we end up with more actually qualified cops.

Why not?

Judging from this thread full of compassionate people, it's pretty clear to me that they should be the ones being cops, and not the current cops.

So we should compensate cops the equivalent salary of a software developer, to create incentives for a career change, and then we can train former cops as software developers. We might end up with more bugs in software, but at least there will not be any police abuse any more.

Like the 'Blackwater' PMC/merc type of guys?

Maybe you are right, but it didn't seem to work in Hong Kong. Here a new recruit is paid nearly 6000 USD / month after tax, double that of a new software engineer. I think you've seen the outcome in the news.

Here's a police recruitment ad (admittedly from more than a decade ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk

(Newport Beach Police Department recruiting video, from 2008)

And the problem is just the salary and QI? I don't think so.

Bo-ya! I'm getting pumped to shoot and choke! Stop resisting! "We are a family of officers"

Troopers in certain states already make over 80-100k USD, how much money should it take to hire a decent human being?

They make above average salaries for their education level, their jobs are less dangerous and physically demanding than logging and refinery work, and they do not have to move outside of their communities.

Law enforcement is already a sweet gig.

It comes with additional benefits, as well. Both the official ones, and informal benefits like the ability for oneself and one’s family to get out of traffic tickets. Growing up in a small town I watched one friend (whose father was a cop) get out of tickets regularly in his muscle car. In Arizona, now, members of the ‘police family’ can purchase KOA-789 license plate frames [0] to be afforded the same privilege at scale.

[0] https://azplea.com/plea-news/the-plea-store-is-open-for-busi...

Not the USA, but I had a friend who worked in government but for the police as a developer. To get into the building everyone was issued a police branded lanyard with their ID on it.

He kept getting freebies and discounts on his after work shopping trips and he didn't realise why until he caught his reflection in his mirror and realised his police lanyard was showing, people thought he was a cop!

He also on more than one occassion got pulled over for breath tests and/or speeding only to get flagged on when they saw his lanyard. He reckons he would have looked like a sergeant(? Can't remember exactly) due to his suit and the car he had and the cops wouldn't have wanted to piss off a superior.

Almost like the LEM plates in WA

So much facepalm. I keep forgetting this a WASP hive, and one of the bigger ones actually

Anyway, anyone with half a brain can see that logging risks are accidental and not due to combat and violent confrontation

Unless these are LOTR ents of course

Does it matter where the risk comes from if the differences in risk are still there? A person dying due to falling off a tree is just as dead as one dying from a GSW. Police work is objectively less dangerous than many other much more mundane professions; why does it matter what the source of the danger is if the results are the same?

Of course it matters. There is far more probability that you will be attacked than you have of falling. This is just basic math. Let alone the source of the danger, one of them is far more traumatic.

Let's say you get hurt falling off a tree. You wont suffer violence.

You ever been in a fight? Ever? This is a real question. Answer it please.

The duality of good/bad cops is absolutely a distraction. It would be great to have a society with only good people. No bad people. Is that a solution? Is that even an option? There will always be cops who break the law. Let's start with that. The next question is: what, as a society, do we do with that. Allow cops to commit crimes without repercussions? Well, then we get riots (with good reason). Police unions, attorneys, judges who protect criminal cops - these are the institutions and the people who make the unhealthy situation (aka "bad cops") much worse.

I feel like the privilege to carry a gun and be allowed to use it should be an earned one as well.

Police need to remember they serve us, and by taking the job, they have vowed to put their lives on the line for people. We have no need for cowards who fear for their life and just shoot every possible threat.

In Britain perhaps, but I'm in the USA where anyone is (generally) allowed to carry a gun, especially police. Arguing that police should earn the right to carry a gun (especially when that right is so firmly established) in the USA would be a fool's errand.

I have the right to carry a gun as an individual. I do not have the right to carry a gun while working at my job. You aren't even allowed to have a knife or any other kind of weapon sometimes on the job.

Carrying a gun as a police officer is a privilege because of all the power and authority that comes with it.

Who determines when the right is earned? Civilian review boards have been resisted consistently and internal reviews are heavily biased (as evidenced by such things as rehiring officers who resigned amidst arguably criminal infractions).

Such details are to be determined over discussion from experts yes. I think that cops should undergo on the job training and experience how to handle people, learning to exhaust every non-violent option they have before escalating if needed. There should be at least one or two cops who do have the privilege to carry be around when they are on duty/training, in case of emergency.

Basically I think it would be good if we could separate cops into two classes, armed and unarmed. And to earn the privilege to carry a gun, they need to prove themselves to prioritize deescalation first and foremost. They need to live up to the badge, actually working to serve and protect, not be a coward who needs to pull out a gun to handle an unarmed civilian.

Training currently seems to actively preclude deescalation. This makes me skeptical that anyone currently within the organizations could adequately discern who else within their organization deserves the privilege to be armed.

https://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2016/09/11/Weirton...

You're right to be skeptical, as I am. In any case, since we can't change people, the best we can do is change laws and create systems that disincentivize bad behavior. Starting by taking away Qualified Immunity seems to be a good move.

That's the problem. Police don't serve us. "To protect and serve" is literally just a marketing slogan for the LAPD [0]. Police have no duty to protect the public, according to the Supreme Court [1]. Moreover, the origin of police forces in the US was not to protect the public, but to protect the social order and serve private property interests:

> More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to "disorder." What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. [2]

--

[0]: http://www.lapdonline.org/history_of_the_lapd/content_basic_...

[1]: https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...

[2]: https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united...

Is this something that we can't change? If police have no duty to protect the public, we should make it be.

Why do we pay for police with our taxes if they aren't obligated to protect anyone?

Any aspect of the law can be changed by some means. Those means range (non-exhaustively) from simply passing a new law or repealing an old one, to a constitutional amendment, to violent revolution. For the average citizen, those means are roughly the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the ammo box.

Maybe raising pay might lower other corruption as well. Georgia (the country) had a police notorious for demanding bribes like other former-USSR nations, but one of the ways their police force was drastically cleaned up and made similar to developed European countries was by boosting basic pay.

What are "higher quality cops"? People with more developed morals and ethics? Money does not necessarily attract more compassionate or kind people. There are plenty of other high paying industries where that's not the case (e.g. banks, real estate).

I think the idea is that low pay actively excludes many high-achiever types who are capable of making much more money in the private sector--without gambling their lives. You cannot recruit the best and brightest unless you can pay a competitive salary.

Paying more doesn't guarantee 'higher quality' but it sure helps.

That is a very unusual speculation. Do lower paid people have less compassion? Do high school teachers have worse understanding and appreciation of ethics and morality than bankers?

I would love to require LEOs to have a 4 year degree, and then attend an accredited police academy. Doctors spend far more time so that they can save lives, and it's only appropriate that police officers who are given the government sanctioned ability to take lives have higher education and training than the current piss poor standards.

The Nikansen center had a nifty idea: constitutional small claims court. If an officer violates your rights, there is a process to make them pay. Not the state, not their department, the officer who wronged you.

Just, Devil's Advocate, but would that encourage rogue police to not leave the victim alive? My understanding was that part of the reason many people get angry when they discover the right to privacy ends when you die, is because it is difficult, (maybe even non-sensical?), to file constitutional claims on behalf of someone who is deceased.

(Are there any attorneys on HN familiar with, for instance, the rights to privacy of the deceased? I'm pretty sure they don't have any.)

I think it's best just to file a civil suit rather than trying to set up a system that the Supremes could very well deem unconstitutional.

What might work is for municipalities to write into police labor agreements that XX% share of any civil judgement precipitated by your actions will be borne by you alone. You're still jointly and separately liable, but the municipality would be able to go after the officer in a separate action.

Something along those lines would accomplish the same thing without bringing constitutional questions into it.

Such a constitutional claims court would certainly be amenable to wrongful death lawsuits by the family, since no more QI is an obvious prerequisite, although one would obviously prefer to see a criminal prosecution in such cases.

American cops already seem to murder with impunity, it’s hard to see how more accountability could possibly make them worse.

San Jose:

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=san-jos...

Doubling the total compensation there would mean about 50% of those people would be making 500k+/year. I don't think they're as underpaid as you think they are. Most of those people on that list already make more than me as a non-FAANG Software Engineer in the region.

Average salary of police in Minneapolis appears to be about $60k. I don't know why you're just picking the highest salaries to talk about. https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/police-offi...

Cops are already paid extremely well.

By what metric? https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Po...

Interesting... It does look like cops's salaries are below average in most states: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Av...

Below median and average in all states, actually. The data here only shows median but I did it for average as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374398

Those numbers are significantly above median and don't include benefits or overtime.

Actually, 0% of them are even at median [1][2]. Here's the first few for comparison:

    State,PDSalary,Median,Difference
    Alabama,"42,383.00","49,396.00","-7,013.00"
    Alaska,"48,418.00","68,400.00","-19,982.00"
    Arizona,"44,987.00","62,311.00","-17,324.00"
    Arkansas,"42,668.00","49,778.00","-7,110.00"
    California,"47,600.00","70,001.00","-22,401.00"
    Colorado,"45,488.00","72,620.00","-27,132.00"
    Connecticut,"48,738.00","73,011.00","-24,273.00"
    Delaware,"45,549.00","65,002.00","-19,453.00"
    Florida,"40,904.00","54,401.00","-13,497.00"
    Georgia,"43,399.00","56,000.00","-12,601.00"

You can find the rest here: https://pastebin.com/wYcLzt6g

[1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Po...

[2] https://dqydj.com/average-income-by-state-median-top-percent...

Policemen salaries are already very, very good.

Meanwhile fast food employees on minimum wage get fired for much, much, much, much less.

I think the problem lays elsewhere.

Do you consider "below median in all 50 states" to be "very, very good"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374398

I do, also the median is highly skewed in US

Those salaries are also in line with the average salary.

Which is very very good in US, compared to the rest of the World.

For comparison, in Italy a policeman earns on average 60% of the lowest salary you posted.

it is supposed to be a working class job, with good men doing it, not a "professional highly paid killer's job".

p.s.: 50% of Americans earn less, 30% earn much less, than that.

So yeah, it's good, especially for being one of the worst police force in the western World.

Victims of police shootings in US 2019: 1.004

Victims of police shootings in Europe 2019: 60 (including Switzerland, that's never been EU - zero kills - and UK which is not in EU anymore - 3 kills -). But let's round it to one hundred, still an order of magnitude less, in the face of a comparable population size.

If I was the US government I would expect a better job from them, before paying them more.

p.p.s.

To be even more precise:

Total Line of Duty Deaths 2019: 147

Including 24 9/11 related cancer, 22 automobile crashes and 19 heart attacks.

Only 48 died because of a gunfire, so for every cop who died in a gunfire, they killed 21 people.

It looks scary to me, I don't know what do you think about it.

I consider the police in my country (Italy) to be quite brutal, but we had only 5 officers killed in 2019 and 3 people shot dead by the police.

Officers who commit crimes should be tried and held for significantly higher penalties -- multiples in my opinion.

I am opposed to punitive justice vis-a-vis restorative and rehabilitative but this is the system we are in.

A police officer who steals or murders is offending the community on multiple fronts.

Meanwhile in reality, some districts disqualify any applicant that can pass an IQ test: https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...