Most Americans are grossly underpaid. The subject of pay has no bearing on this article, or the parent comment, though.

Edit: Reading comprehension issue on my part...I wrote this comment before my first cup of coffee. As others have pointed out, the parent comment does mention pay, and I was wrong about the parent comment. I stand by the core message in my comment about pay in general, but clearly I missed the mark here.

>>> They are well paid and in a position of great authority.

>> I would argue that they are absolutely nowhere near paid enough

> The subject of pay has no bearing on . . . the parent comment

No ill intent, and my comment completely missed the mark. I edited my comment.

The parent comment says they are well paid, the BLS has police officers and detectives grouped together at 67k per year. For contrast the often cited as underpaid high school teacher is listed at 62k. The average across all occupations is 41k.

Police often have benefits packages that few would try to negotiate with a straight face. They typically have an excellent pension and full medical. They also typically rack up a lot of overtime. $67k/year isn't bad when your savings and medical is already taken care of and you still have the prospect of overtime or privately hired side gigs.

The same is true about teachers with the exception of the side gigs and overtime, however summers off allow for similar casual employment opportunities.

A large number of teachers need second jobs, that hardly strikes me as highly-paid especially as many(most?) teachers have master's degrees. Further, "summers off" is not really correct given curriculum development, PD, grading and the like which often extend far past the end of the semester.

Most teachers only have a bachelor's degree according to BLS, the same level of education required to be a detective. Most of my high school teachers used the same curriculum year after year, even including the USSR on maps they would hand out with instructions to ignore it handwritten on the top of the page. None did any grading over the summer as school was out and no work is being produced by students.

Most teachers have a bachelors, most cops are not detectives.

I don't know about you but the curriculum absolutely wasn't the same each year with my teachers, it couldn't be.

Beyond that, overtime is paid for cops and unpaid for teachers.

It's true that they don't do much work over the summer, though they have to come in 2-3 weeks in the summer more than the students.

My point here is that groups in the US often say either teachers are underpaid and cops are overpaid or the other way around but a simple Google search shows they make about the same. I've never found someone making this claim that could tell me how much either made, just that it was either too much or too little.

If you feel teachers are undervalued, fine but teachers being underpaid and cops overpaid simply isn't logically consistent.

> If you feel teachers are undervalued, fine but teachers being underpaid and cops overpaid simply isn't logically consistent.

I'm not making this claim. But this statement has no logical problems, at least not as stated. Just because they might be paid a similar amount (or even if teachers are paid more) doesn't mean that the statement isn't logically consistent.

For example, Lebron James gets X and Nico Mannion gets paid Y (which is much less than X). Many still argue that Lebron is underpaid and Nico maybe overpaid. They deliver different value, and there's the notion of scarcity to provide the level service they provide.

If you think the average teacher (or some percentage of teachers) provides more value then the average cop, then you could make that statement and it not be logically inconsistent.

Unfortunately both have civil servant types of roles, which are hard to valuate in terms of financial impact.

Yes, they are well paid. At least in Seattle where this event occurred. The entry level salary for a police officer is $84k/year (http://www.seattle.gov/police/police-jobs/salary-and-benefit...).

I also think teacher's need to be held to a higher bar. Not that they do a bad job on average, but when they do there appears to be little accountability. But that's completely irrelevant to the article.

Becoming a teacher requires significantly more education than a police officer. In addition, teachers work long, unpaid hours often to create classes and to correct assignments.

Base pay vs overtime. Cops work a lot of overtime.

Please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. We ban that sort of account because we're trying for at least a bit of a different internet discussion here.

Personal attacks are particularly not allowed, so please don't do that again—regardless of how wrong anyone else is or you feel they are. You may not feel you owe them better but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Seattle has some of the highest pay for police in the country, their median pay is $150k and some make more than $200k.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/374-seatt...

Source?

I know a cop outside of Redding, CA (not near any major cities), and he has more money than he knows what to do with.

Most police in major US cities receive high pay and lavish retirement plans. However, they rarely live where they work, which should change.

>However, they rarely live where they work, which should change

That's a feature not a bug.

When you have a lot of unfair and unjust laws you need jackboots with no stake in the community in order to enforce them.

My state has some fancy words for justifying and obfuscating it but this is how they justify their policy of assigning state cops far away from their hometowns and residences for the first decade of their career. They want the cops to police the way the state wants them to police. They don't want them to think about what's best for the people being policed.

This is true, but I'd rather move to a society where the police officers have aligned interests to treat people as they want to be treated and the community as theirs too. Ending civil asset forfeiture, war on drugs, over incarceration, and qualified immunity would do a lot to nudge them.