That was enough to establish that your relative is in an unusual situation to start with. As overtime is a function of the base pay, and most officers are not in a supervisory position, your example doesn't really reflect the typical police officer income.
Pointing to an overtime example from New York (the state with the highest base salary), and a record-setting overtime pay as well, is not useful as an average indication of what a police officer makes. Your position concerned average, non-"hick" officer.
It would be like me pointing to an instant millionaire software developer who won the startup lottery and saying that's typical.
You make good points regarding pension and healthcare. I also didn't include stock options in the software developer income, but none of my options were ever worth the paper they were printed on.
Remember too that your example was for a supervisory position. Most police officers are not in that situation.
I took a different meaning of '"crazy" money". I would have used the term "well-paid" for your definition. "Crazy" implies there's something extreme, no? What term would you use for police officers making $500K/year in base pay?
I think software developers should be unionized, but to start with, I think the programmer exemption for overtime pay should be abolished. Only software developers making less than $27.63/hour or $55,260/year have the possibility of getting overtime, which is about the 10 percentile for software developer income.
- Overtime. In many cases, police overtime exceeds base salary. Example from Schenectady, NY, which is city of 50-75k people in upstate NY. ( http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Schenectady-cop-s-pa... )
- Actuarial value of pension. Even using the BLS base salary data without overtime of $58k, you need to valuate the cost of a $30k annuity for 30-40 years, as most police have 20 year retirement options at half pay.
- Actuarial value of healthcare. Most jurisdictions provide no-cost healthcare for retirees, at least until recently.
When I say "crazy" money, I mean that being a police officer is a very well paid profession, both in terms of salary and total compensation with pensions & benefits. It's one of the last really good, broadly available blue-collar jobs. That said, the trade-off is that it is a very stressful job where you're exposed to significant risks.
On the flip-side, software developers are rarely unionized and get a lousy deal. How many software developers are paid overtime? Almost all police are.