Texas Proud said:
... don't get me wrong... I think the police are paid little for what they do (not sure of NY, but for Houston it is true)…
Amen, Brother!
Texas Proud said:
but a pension should NEVER be based on anything but base pay...ever...
Not saying who still puts paychecks into my credit union account until I officially retire…but, I do happen to know a few things about how HPD salaries and pensions are calculated (I collect weird trivia). It’s an interesting story and explains why that agency’s pensions include pays other than just base salary. It also illustrates how such things tend to come about.
Prior to 1998, HPD pensions were calculated as a percentage of base pay. In the early 1980’s, it was one of the best paying major city departments in the country and attracted lots of applicants from across the nation. That’s a good thing, because 2,500 applicants will produce 75 new hires for the academy. However, by the late 1990’s the department was not even competitive within its own county and the pool of interested applicants was shrinking while active employees were leaving for better paying jobs at other agencies.
In 1998, then Mayor Lee Brown agreed to give HPD a much needed pay raise to try and stem the tide of trained and experienced employees leaving. He told the police union that there were X dollars in the budget available to fund the raise and they should make some proposals as to how it would be allocated. The major proviso being that increases to base pay should be kept to a minimum. The main reason for that provision was that Houston local law requires that police and fire base pay always be equal. Every dollar budgeted for police base pay equals about 50 cents going into the fire department budget. Since the fire department was well paid compared to other big city departments (and the mayor and the fire union hated each other), the money would have to be allocated in new pay categories to insure most of it went to the police department.
Some of the extra pay is not considered when computing pensions (equipment pay, most overtime, training pay, etc.) but others, the ones that directly contribute to improving the department’s ability to do its job are part of the pension. Most of those are based on individual employees achieving higher levels of education, being awarded upper level licenses from the state licensing authority, working in hazardous assignments, learning a foreign language or ASL, being assigned to night or weekend shifts (when it’s busier), or filling jobs that would normally go to a higher paid/rank employee. Overtime is only added in if it is part of a “strategic patrol” function that the department has identified as critical to operations, and then it is figured on a three-year average.
Some people did "game" the system for a brief period of time when there was transition from one pay and retirement concept to another. A few people took advantage of loopholes that existed for a brief period of time. I'm sure, hypothetically speaking, that if I found myself near retirement and saw such loopholes wherever it was that I worked, that I would have taken advantage of as many of them as I could. But, the loopholes are closed now.
What currently exists is a system of extra pays in addition to base pays, with the extras promoting more educated employees who want to work the busy shifts, who want to take on the more demanding and dangerous jobs and learn new skills that will directly benefit the people they work for. All new hires have associate degrees or better, most mid managers have bachelors degrees and all upper level managers have at least masters degrees. But that's just the minimum level. It's not too uncommon to have everyday uniformed patrol officers who have LLD's or PhDs.
Yet! 
