The Goodhue Police Department resigned due to issues with the city’s pay, Mayor Ellen Anderson Buck said at a city council meeting Monday.
The Goodhue Police Department resigned due to issues with the city’s pay, Mayor Ellen Anderson Buck said at a city council meeting Monday.
Part of the reason we have issues with the police force and their policing is that they aren’t treated like professionals and held to professional standards. We need to pay them like the professionals too, even if that means we hire less.
If we demand higher police pay, we better be raising EMT, social work, and teacher salaries too.
And yes, I know this is whataboutism, but it feels wrong to fund police while some of the support system workers that prevent crime in the first place would be thrilled to be making the hourly rate these cops were.
The posted article complains they were offering $22/hr when similar towns are offering $30/hr. Here’s another article (from 3 years ago) that ranks average police salary in Minnesota as pretty high, just behind Massachusetts, which has a much higher cost of living. seems reasonable to complain is pay much lower than state average or typical of their peers
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2020/04/23/police-officer-salary-state/?sh=72e0096b2010
Oh, I definitely think we need to raise those too. These systems are all needed and aren’t attracting the minds they should because we aren’t paying them.
Police make hundreds of thousands of dollars with overtime in many places even low level officers.
Source? Is this really a common enough thing, or just an edge case? How much overtime is required? What about the $20-something/hour mentioned in the article?
This is a problem in Massachusetts, because we require officers for every road construction project, instead of flaggers, but I also thought this was an exception