Public Safety Salaries

Daniel Foster at National Review deserves credit, I think, for taking on the topic of compensation for police officers and firefighters. As conservatives have started focusing more attention on the alleged evils of allegedly overpaid public sector workers, there’s been a tendency to shy away from these kind of tougher questions, even though it’s the folks in uniform who often draw the highest pay. And the article is a commendable survey of the underlying political dynamics. I also agree with his point that it would be better for states and cities looking to cut police compensation expenditures to reduce salaries across the board rather than to lay workers off.

That said, this is in many ways a disappointing analysis. Jon Cohn raises some doubts about Foster’s presentation of some of the numbers, but the bigger issue in my view is that these discussion of public sector pay need to focus much less on the numerator and much more on the denominator. Not “what are we paying?” but “what are we getting?”

In 2008, DC had 31.4 murders per 100,000 residents. Getting that down to the level enjoyed by Newark, NJ (23.9) or Atlanta (19.7) or Los Angeles (10.0) would be extremely valuable in my opinion. As a DC taxpayer, I’d be happy to spend more funds hiring additional police officers or increasing starting salaries so as to recruit a higher quality of officer in order to achieve that. Conversely, if taking money out of police departments and putting it into better parole supervision would reduce crime then we should do that. It strikes me as very plausible that Searsport, Maine is wasting money on its police department since the need for policing services in that community seems to me to be low. But I’m not familiar with the details of the situation—maybe the Searsport PD is doing something incredibly important.

Oftentimes a look at value makes these things look better than Foster implies, but sometimes it makes them look worse. Massachusetts State Police officers who get assigned to Turnpike duty earn $149,666 in salary alone on average which strikes me as positively harmful to public safety in the Bay State by making assignment to Troop E highly desirable relative to assignment to other Troops who seem to be carrying out more important and more challenging assignments. Similarly, if prosperous low crime communities are letting police compensation drift upward aimlessly they may be making it harder for higher-crime communities to hire the officers they need. But on the flipside, there are many poor jurisdictions in the United States that clearly need more and better policing—which will require more money for salaries—rather than cutbacks.

This is all just to say that while I agree this policy area deserves more scrutiny, I think it needs much more of a crime control policy frame than a budget frame. It would be a remarkable coincidence if the current allocation of resources were the most efficient one possible.