San Diego’s highest paid city employees? Cops racking up overtime and earning over $400,000
San Diego’s highest paid city employees? Cops racking up overtime and earning over $400,000
Cops at my hospital are all in overtime. They bring in inmates for psych holds/psych eval and then supervise them hands-off for the entire hospital stay. Easy money. Then the really entitled ones try to act pushy and basically want us to give the patient shots for unjustified reasons. Just so they can sit and watch movies without being bothered.
They must already get a hazard pay designation by being there, or else they'd be looking for ways to create hazards. So it could be worse.
He surely did work 11,5hours everyday additionaly to his regular shift 🥴
Think about a surgeon. We put peoples lives in their hands. We expect them to be preposterously educated, able to perform extreme tasks under significant duress, to maintain ongoing technical and specialized training, to prove that the training is effective, and they are compensated accordingly. If they fuck up, they can be held personally liable for their fuck ups. There are consequences to the career and its not a role to be taken on lightly.
Hear me out.
We raise the amount we pay cops to 1.5 million dollars a year... but.
No qualified immunity. It no longer exists (guess what? it already doesn't exist for military service members). Any crimes they commit, the consequences are 10x'd and they are no longer allowed to engage in public service, ever. They can be publicly executed for any crimes beyond misdemeanor. They have to pay for their own equipment. They have to carry liability insurance for any violations of civil rights which might occur in the line of performing their duties.
The minimum qualification is a PhD in constitutional law. They need to be able to run a 6 minute mile, do 100 push ups in 2 minutes, 200 sit ups in 2 minutes, and 80 burpees in 2 minutes. They need to be able to carry 120 lbs for 10 minutes up an incline. They need to be able to recite the US Constitution, the state constitution, and the local city and county charters where they are stationed. They are expected to have advanced knowledge of any and all laws they are expected to be enforcing. They have to undergo annual psychological, physical, technical, and legal reassessments to prove their suitability for the job; these reassessments are maintained as a part of public record.
We 10x the pay and we hire 1/10th the number of cops. It becomes a career path somewhere between than a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut. Its not something a HS drop out should be able to consider as a career path.
Look, obviously, hyperbole. Or is it?
What about this, instead we just take that 1.5 mill a year and put it towards things that actual solve problems, rather than making sure we have the best and brights super soldiers doing traffic stops and taking notes on your break in.
Since we're engaging in fantasy, sure.
But I think you'll find no matter what you do, some version of a person whose role in society is to enforce the laws, a kind of "law enforcement", emerges.
The properties of that role can vary widely from society to society, but pretty much every society independently comes to the same conclusion, that the role is necessary, once the society determines a common and well structured code of conduct is necessary.
100% abolish the police. They are a corrupt institution which finds their roots in re-enforcing a slave culture. 100% let every prisoner free. The roots of the prison system in the US are the same as the police state.
But countries with no history of slavery have police forces and prison systems. They are an emergent property of large social systems. Society will re-invent the role. We might as well fill the niche in a manner we want, instead of a manner we dont want.
For a couple of teachers?
Maybe I'm too easy to please but I'd be happier if they took the money that currently goes towards tanks and "how to shoot first" seminars and put it towards ongoing education for officers on law, de-escalation tactics, and critical thinking in stressful situations.
I mean, I agree entirely with the "abolish the police" movement. I don't think policing in the US is recoverable. Its rotten to the core. Its a remnant of slavery. In that sense I'm an abolitionist.
But I also think its a thing that "law enforcement" is a thing that will be expected to happen. So if you are going to abolish policing as we currently know it, you need to replace it with something different.
This is the way. I can’t tell you how much it hurts me when I see an obese cop.
Practicality-wise though, if the police have recruitment issues now though, finding recruits with a PhD will be impossible. People really overestimate how many PhD’s are out here in the wild.
1.5 million dollars a year.
police preferentially dont hire people with that much education on purpose.
We are so bad about this across the board. Why is society so content to expect the worst from people like police and politicians?
Honestly, probably because we've been conditioned to get angry at the employees of the super rich rather than the hoarders themselves.
The problem is not getting paid overtime for time spent working wtf. The problem is being the fucking worst??
3000 hours OT would mean over 5000 hours worked or 14 hours every damn day of the year.
#doubt
Even if true, that’s terrible management from a budgetary view (they could hire a second person for less cost) and an operations view (stretching a “high stress” position very thin).
terrible management from a budgetary view? are you kidding? where are we supposed to spend all this money? feeding the poor? housing people? if we do that, where will the cops find the resources to arrest people for feeding the the poor and also shoot the homeless? they work so hard.
Gotta be something where their contract lets them game the system. Picking up extra time if someone calls out sick on a holiday night or something. Probably got a “cartel” going where officers group up to trade and manipulate schedules in order to maximize pay.
It's completely indicative of fraud.
They are almost certainly not actually working that much though. Look up the recent Massachusetts state police overtime scandal.
True heroes, these rich cops. Not like schoolteachers, who are suspicious villains and possibly freeloaders, am I right?
*sigh
Not incentivizing our teachers/academics/social workers but highly incentivizing cops is going to devastate our country's output soon.
De-educating the populace has been a plan for decades. This is nothing new.
Cops be living in the 60s:
Sounds corrupt but they're the police so...I guess not?
Law in the US ceased to exist on January 20, 2025. The rest of us are just going through the motions until the reality catches up. (So, while in the past, something might have happened, now, they will get medals.)
It seems the whole world is at a fork in the road...rule by law or rule by power.
Okay, fuck it, I'm getting out of this software engineering thing, I'm moving to the US to become a cop. I think I'm white enough for Trump, definitely whiter than he is.
I've eaten oranges whiter than he is
Here's a test for you:
There's a chunk of cash in an envelope. Do you take it?
A non white person could be close by at any moment, are you fearing for your life?
You're walking outside and you hear a dog bark in the distance. Are you shooting wildly in the basic direction of the sounds?
You've just killed an innocent person and been given a paid holiday whoops, I mean 'suspension', where would you like to go?
That "No Tax on Overtime" pitch makes perfect sense now.
Yes especially when Project 2025 also wants to reclassify what counts as overtime hours to make it unachievable for most.
We need to cap police OT. They are making off like bandits.
Best part is, they're either overreporting it, or they're legitimately dangerous to society from being so overworked in a job that already seems to put them on edge.
I have no quarrel with people being paid for their overtime (in fact, it would be shady for overtime to NOT be paid out), but I don't think 19 hours of overtime per week over the course of an entire year (or 20 if they take 2 weeks off a year) for police officers is OK. Tbh I don't think it's OK for anyone who doesn't earn dividends or bonuses based on company profits, but it's even less OK for police.
Nah they definitely take it all. Usually just parked out side a gated community taking a nap or "working" the sideline at a sporting event or any number of other bullshit like "helping" at the dui checkpoint in the middle of the night chilling in the big air conditioned trailer maybe also napping. My buddy is a statie in another state overtime is plentiful but not actual hard police work like overtime at your job is just more of your job. For police it's just paid hang out
If I worked 5 hours overtime every week for a year, my entire combined income would be less than what these guys make in 2 months ):
No wonder that cop in Parks & Recreation moved to San Diego.
For some reason my lemmy app glitched as I was scrolling and I was seeing this title above This post
Since you can be 'too smart' to be a cop, can we get them to remove the america's finest from their cars and gear? Clearly that is no longer the case.
remove the america’s finest from their cars
They didnt say what they are the finest at. They seem to be the "finest" at getting paid.
Now do California Highway Patrol.
Paypigs
I want the police abolished and the prisons emptied today. I don't care what happens next.
If you're making wild suggestions, you should probably care about the effects it will have
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
the reason for my latter sentence is that any impediment stops this goal from materializing. the right will always have a worry, or question, or addition, or delay, and each of these impediments prevents achieving the end goal. that latter sentence is strictly necessary to achieve the result.
It's impossible to work 3000 hours of overtime in a year. This is fraud. If that person is actually working those hours, then it's incompetence by the Sergeant above them allowing them to work that many overtime hours for no reason.
The money is in police detail work And a lot of them are able to do it during their normal shifts. The person probably did legitimately log that many hours or near that many hours, the problem is that they were able to do it in the first place.
This is what I was looking for. My last duty assignment in the USAF was working physical security at a NATO facility in Va. Part of the agreement with NATO was that no one was allowed to carry weapons. When we had off base functions with the higher ups, we had to hire local PD since they were armed. I got to talking with one and he said they make a shit ton of money on this type of stuff.
14.47 hour days to the maximum legal amount of days before days off. And working on holidays is time and a half or double time by default as well. Could be done. Not good, but not fraud.
The trick I read before is to arrest someone at the end of your shift, then you have to process them at overtime and possibly wait for a judge or something. They know the tricks to draw it out.
Of course why didn't I think of arresting someone just to get overtime? Probably because I'm not a fucking psychopath