zlacker

Police are praised as heros and, when you count the pension, make 5x more money than the typical immunology PhD student (without whom we would likely literally be entering a new multi-century dark age).

Lots of people do hard society-critical jobs that take an emotional/physical toll at wages far below that of a typical officer. Only one of those occupations has a serious violence problem.

I can’t even imagine a world where there are protests in the streets asking immunology PhD students who have no pension and make 19K a year with a college degree to stop killing people. And there will never, ever be a parade for those folks.

Stop excusing police. They are paid better than most for the job they do, even if most of that comp is back-loaded.

>>throwa+(OP)
I couldn't believe when they found the salary of the San Jose policeman that shouted "fuck you bitch" at a protester it turned out to be something like $250,000. Like holy fuck I thought bayarea frontend engineers were paid a lot, god damn. Dude looked 25 years old!

>>throwa+(OP)
Definitely not excusing any behavior by the police. But if you lump all officers, departments, and cities together you are never going to get anywhere with reform.

I only have a vague idea what police officers make. Generally, I avoid begrudging anyone's salary.

>>komali+h2
At the risk of sounding like I'm defending a guy I think should have been fired for conduct unbecoming an officer, I looked at the breakdown of his compensation. To be accurate, his total compensation (not just salary, but includes health benefits and probably things like reimbursements, uniform, etc); last year was closer to $230k. The $250k was the previous year. Remember that police unions have strict employment contracts where all of their overtime must be paid (they don't just make salary and work a variable number of hours).

SJPD has been chronically understaffed since at least 2008 when there were large layoffs. The department prefers to hire fewer officers, but work the existing ones longer hours (hence lots of overtime).