Politicians react to their constituant's desire for a free lunch.
CEO's react to investors who want to maximize ROI.
And if either argues the point they're out of a job.
The boogeyman is overrated IMO.
I'm not sure what "boogeyman" you are referring to.
You are correct that politicians love to sell snake oil to voters in the form of programs and services at no taxpayer expense. They leave the consequences for the next administration. When the voters finally figure out the truth, the salesman has long since moved on.
But there is a life cycle of consequences to robbing Peter to pay Paul that I've seen several times in my career:
Administration A decides it has to cut the budget and stops hiring, or cuts pay, or defunds certain functions within the agency. Bad stuff doesn't happen overnight, and in fact might take several years to come to light. But quality people decide to work elsewhere, or they reduce their output, or people are forced to take shortcuts to make up for the lost capabilities.
Administration B comes along and inherits a ticking time bomb. The crime rate goes up (slightly at first but then accelerates), people are wrongly convicted based on crappy police work, people and business stop moving to town and the tax base goes to hell. Only after the people and media are in an uproar does Administration B discover the problem. Only then does Administration B discover that you can't just hang out a shingle and hire the kind of people you need today because it takes years to attract them, train them, promote them, etc. Meanwhile Administration B has to stretch the budget by paying overtime to the people left on the job so they will work the extra hours to cover what new hires will eventually do. And/or it pays out millions in taxpayer dollars to satisfy judgments.
The MegaCorp comparison is accurate about the measurement. However, the number of MegaCorps is shrinking, the number of MegaCorps offering DB plans is few, the number of MegaCorps offering plans similar with colas and health benefits is what?
So, I think the MegaCorps comparison is not useful anymore for comparisons.
I agree. It wasn't my comparison, I was just responding to Midpack's comments, which were in effect a comparison to what has happened to many MegaCorp DB pensions. I was trying to point to the reasons why the comparison wasn't valid.
In the past government employees were able to improve their benefits and salary by pointing to the private sector - MegaCorp -and saying we deserve more.
Given all the different state, county and city governments in this country, and an even larger number of employee bargaining units, and God knows how many different concepts of bargaining there are - I would not be surprised that any number of sales gimmicks have been used to sell people on salary increases for city employees. I can only talk about what happened in one city, and most of that only for one group of employees.
And, to reiterate, I'm only talking about cops, and not firefighters, EMTS, ditch diggers or trashmen.
If somebody is motivated to pay me more because they think I deserve it, than I will be pleased and genuinely honored to take that money.
But from what I know of the actual negotiations between the city and my MBA, the conversation centers on competing against other employers. Even though we are a local agency we compete nationally for applicants for the same limited pool of applicants. Remember, police agencies reject more than 95% of all applicants as being unsuitable for the nature of the employment. When I was in Recruiting years ago we ran though nearly 15,000 applicants a year - at that rate it doesn't take long to go through everybody locally.
When it comes time to figure out salaries they would first look at what it took to lure people away from the recruiting offices of Dallas PD, San Antonio PD, Ft. Worth PD, and also places like Los Angeles, CHP, Miami, Chicago, NYPD, etc. Entry-level salaries will help to set what salaries are for more senior employees and upper ranks.
In the future this will work against the government employee as the taxpayer questions why the government employees have a better total compensation (salary + benefit) than the taxpayer.
That kind-of, sort-of sounds like the whole fairness thing again. But based on the way you phrased your question, let me ask you this: What does that matter except for it being another way of expressing fairness?
Given the widely varying incomes in the population, which taxpayer's salary do we choose to make the comparison? Yours? The part time secretary at the local charity? The owner of the local football team? How does this line of reasoning
not turn into: "it's not fair because they make more than me."
IMHO, as an employer, the average taxpayer should be concerned if he is getting the service he asked for and paying the commensurate price. Nothing more and nothing less. It's the same standard I assume that everyone applies to anything else they buy - "did I get what I asked for and did I pay the right price?"
Which prompts one to wonder - what is the right price for police service? And not just police service, but all the different kinds of police services.
I think people stay in the PD (or the PD field local, state, federal) for the same reasons as in the private sector. If a person starts out as an basic accountant and then through education and experience they become a CPA they stay in the field because of the same economic factors (not the only factors) as a person in the police field who has advanced.
Sorry, but I'm not 100% clear on what your point is here.
As to the corruption aspect - if the police are not paid adequately -, there is corruption now as you point out. The question is: what is the proper level of compensation?
As long as human beings are in charge there will always be the danger of corruption. Too much power, sex, and money out there to think that everyone will always be immune to the lure.
Corruption has numerous causes - poor compensation is just a piece of it. I've seen rookie patrolmen making a few bucks an hour air some major public laundry, and then I've seen supervisory federal agents making 150 grand a year do some rotten stuff.
I don't know how other agencies justify their hiring practices, but at my agency we spent a lot of money in the late 1970's to hire a group of academicians to come up with legally defensible BFJQs that were specific to the job in this city. That was followed by similar studies on what training was required and where the standards should be set in order to best indemnify the city against lawsuits for inadequate training. The same was done for field training. Add applicants and stir to see how successful you are at a certain salary.
Retention rates and why we lost people before normal retirement were a continuing study for the HR people and the command staff. The goal was always to hire the right people with the right backgrounds, train them adequately, supervise them adequately. The ultimate goal being to retain the experienced qualified people for a normal career, motivate enough of them to transfer or promote into more demanding positions so there was a continuity of experience and leadership, and minimize the lawsuit factor.
On years when the numbers went south on the front end of careers they knew it was time to boost salaries. When we would lose people earlier than normal at the end of their careers they knew it was time to re-plate the gold on the retention handcuffs.
Of course all of the above negates the realities of budgets, economies, politics and public opinion. So, you get years when it goes all wonky on the back end and 15% of the most experienced people put in their retirement in one year. That results in nightmares in the quality of supervision, management, and the more demanding investigations like homicides, sex crimes, etc.
Or, you find you can't hire adequate replacements just to keep even with normal losses and then the above scenario plays out in the middle of an economy that still has adequate jobs that are in the "don't get shot at" categories. Those are the years when salaries are raised and signing bonuses are paid (up to 30% annual salary at my employer in 2008).
Then you get years like the current one, and they have more people than they can handle down at recruiting. Of course the lost tax revenues mean they're not hiring that many people anyway, but at least they don't have to worry about salaries.
Then there are special cases, like New Orleans PD in the 80's and 90's. I'm not sure what standards they had on pay, hiring or supervision, but we used to joke that the recruiting division's job must have been easy:
Open window, throw badges out, hire whoever picks one up.
It's about the money, but it's not all about the salaries. Even though most of any police agency's budget is spent on salaries, how you spend some of that other money is important too. In hiring, do you conduct thorough background investigations or do you literally phone it in? Some places they just call the local PD where you used to live and ask if they know anything about you. My agency sent two investigators to every place you ever lived or worked and knocked on doors asking "What can you tell me about Jane? Is she honest? Is she sane? Does she make good decisions? Would you feel okay knowing she had a badge and gun?
We polygraphed and drug-tested applicants for decades before federal agencies like the DEA ever did. Other agencies would get away with the state law minimum of any licensed physician signing off on your physical and mental suitability to be a police officer. We had on staff physicians and pshrinks back in the 70's - our first psych became a national expert on cops and their particular brands of craziness.
We spent oodles of money training supervisors, managers, and programs to try and catch problems early. Still, there were incidents and some of them doozies. Because the men and women who wear badges are still just human beings and we still toss them into a cesspool of temptation.
Despite knowing that you will never be 100% successful, you continuously strive to improve the quality of the people and the systems. All of that costs money - the good people to do the job, the training and tools they need, and equally good supervisors and managers to watch them like a hawk and make sure they're getting what they need to do a good job and are not out there running amok.
There is no-set-it-and-forget-it salary or cost for this service. It's a constantly moving target that is propelled by the economy, the market for jobs as a whole, the market for the subset of people acceptable as police applicants, retention rates, promotion rates, etc. That's not even mentioning all of the political weirdness that goes with police budgets and hiring. (
There is a big switch out there, at least there was down at city hall in my city, on which one position was labeled, "CUT THE BUDGET NOW" and the other was labeled, "HIRE MORE COPS NOW!" There seemed to no middle position.)
