The starting salary of police officers in the NYPD is $31,305 -- too low to support a family of four in most city neighborhoods. How did this happen to cops in the most famous -- and once best paid -- police department in America? And what should be done about it in the next contract?
Police officers, who have been working without a contract since July 31, 2000, are now having their fate decided by a state board under binding arbitration. This will be the first time ever that a state panel has ruled on a city police contract. The board's preliminary recommendation, leaked in early August, was that the police should be offered the same 5 & 5 percent wage increases over two years that had previously been given to the 13-union Uniformed Forces Coalition. (Constituting about 39,000 uniformed employees, the coalition includes the unions representing firefighters, sanitation, and correction officers.)
The raises would be retroactive over the previous two years. The board also proposed that cops work another 10 shifts a year in exchange for a 3.5 percent bonus increase. Cops with six or more years experience would get an $1,800 increase, yielding a 14.11 percent increase to veterans.
This set of proposals enraged the rank and file sufficiently to turn out thousands (the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association said 15,000) demonstrators in Times Square on August 15. Chanting "Too much praise, Too little raise," demonstrators carried signs saying, "They say, 'Never forget,' We say, 'Already forgotten.'"
Greg Tarpinian, executive director of the Labor Research Association, a consulting group for unions, says that September 11 "deferred the PR strategies the police might have pursued to complete their contract last year." Instead, all effort turned to making the city safe once more, with the contract on the back burner. Yet, says Tarpinian, "the fundamental problem is that the only way the public employee, without the right to strike, can leverage influence is by going to the public. The cops have wakened up to this. Cops are not feeling disrespected by the public at the moment. They're feeling disrespected by the political establishment."
The media have been full of stories about low police morale and the defection of NYPD cops to the Port Authority, neighboring jurisdictions, and even private security firms. This is ominous for the city. Professor Dennis Kenny of John Jay College notes, "It's reasonable for cops to expect that if they're making an exemplary effort the city would appreciate it. That said, management people would say that salary is less a motivator than a de-motivator. Giving them a raise wouldn't necessarily motivate them, but not giving them a satisfactory salary could be a serious de-motivator."
The $31,305 entry level salary for police is indeed far too low. But it moves up fairly quickly initially, reaching $49,023 after five years, and then slowly -- topping out at $55,268 after 20 years.
The benefits are good, even excellent. Police have unlimited sick leave (though the average usage is only 8 days a year) and excellent health benefits. They can retire with a full pension after 20 years service. (This is standard among police departments. Like the military, from which the 20-years-and-out system derives, police departments require cadres of physically fit young men and women, whose usefulness on patrol will decline as youth fades.)
Since the year 2000, police officers leaving the force with as few as five years have been vested with partial pensions.
This year the city agreed to add a benefit to the other end of the job. Officers can now continue to accrue credit for pensions beyond 30 years service.
The benefits are fine but they don't make up for the low salary and subsequent low take-home pay ($411 per week), says the PBA, which argues that its members need a 23 percent pay raise to bring the NYPD into line with other police departments. It has been helpfully posting job openings elsewhere on its web site.
The starting salary in Seattle, for example, is listed as $46,146; Irvine, California, offers $46,463; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, $39,686.
In negotiating with the Giuliani administration, the PBA had asked for a 39 percent salary increase over two years, to bring officers to parity with officers in neighboring Newark. Giuliani was having none of it. He had forced through a wage freeze in the 1995 contract and showed no sign of relenting from the small 2 percent and 2.5 percent increases he was offering for the next contract.
John Jay Professor Eli Silverman, author of "NYPD Battles Crime" (Northeastern University Press, 1999), says that Giuliani "wanted to hold the line as much with the police as with CUNY professors. I suppose in his mind this was across-the-board equity. But the police felt they were producing far more for the city in terms of tourism and economy, and that they weren't getting rewarded fairly."
In 1998, in the midst of their battle with Giuliani, the PBA pushed through legislation in Albany securing the right to have contract disputes go before the New York State Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). The PBA liked its chances with the three-member board that has only one member selected by the city, one by the union itself, and a third by the state board. The city challenged the legislation in court, and lost before the New York State Court of Appeals, which last year upheld the law.
The city, which is facing a $5 billion deficit next year, is now overseen by a mayor who is very confident of his management abilities, and who is not easily swayed. On his weekly radio show on WABC-770AM, Mayor Bloomberg said the PBA had not wanted to negotiate with "Giuliani, and they certainly didn't want to negotiate with my administration for seven months. They insisted on going to binding arbitration. They got themselves in a situation where win, lose or draw - when you go to binding arbitration - you have to live with it." The PBA denies this, saying they have always been open to negotiation, but as Bloomberg says, "Once you go to binding arbitration, you don't have any choice - you got to accept what it is and get on with it."
Bloomberg's problem is not just that a 23 percent increase would cost the city about $445 million, it's that a substantial raise for the cops would break the sacred principle of pattern bargaining by which the city offers its labor unions roughly the same percentage in raises. If the city deviates from settled contracts to pay the cops a jump, the other unions will come back for more. The PBA demands would cost the city about $257 million above the cost of the pattern settlement. Bad enough, but were the PBA proposal to be applied to all uniformed employees, it would cost the city over $1.3 billion for this contract period alone.
After seeing its hopes for a better deal from the state dashed in early August when the New York State Public Employment Relations Board floated the 10-percent-over-two-years proposal, the PBA rallied its troops for the public demonstration in Times Square. More quietly, its lawyers pressured the board to reexamine some 75 hours of testimony -- which the board has agreed to do, postponing any final ruling.
As serious as the financial implications of these negotiations are, the operational problems may be even worse. Will the NYPD be able to continue its successful (but personnel-heavy) crime-fighting strategies if its pay is uncompetitive? The city and the PBA have been arguing for months about whether the NYPD does indeed have a recruitment and retention crisis. The PBA says yes, the city says no.
The test-taking numbers alone confirm there's a problem. In his March 19, 2002, testimony, former NYPD First Deputy Commissioner John Timoney pointed out that the number of people taking the test to become police officers has fallen precipitously, to 12,000 in the last couple of years from 37,000 in 1995. This is potentially disastrous because traditionally only 10 percent of those taking the test go on to the academy. (In 2000, the academy was unable to fill a class for the first time that anyone could remember.)
Further the drop-out rate at the next stage -- those actually enrolled in the academy -- has doubled from the historic rate around seven percent, says Timoney, to about 14.7 percent today.
Perhaps even worse, the rate at which recruits have been cited for infractions during their time in the academy tripled since 1997, says Timoney.
And all this despite the lowering of age and education standards during the last years of the Giuliani administration. Noting that he and Police Commissioner William Bratton had raised the standards in the first place, Timoney criticized the city's November 2000 reduction of the minimum age for police applicants by a year (from 22 to 21), and the substitution of two years as school safety officers or traffic enforcement agents for two years of college. Yet even with these lowered standards, applicants have been few.
Similarly, the NYPD has been grappling with a retirement problem for several years. The year 2000 saw the beginning of a surge, which extended well into 2001, in the number of officers eligible to retire. The overtime produced by the Sept. 11 terrorist attack then accelerated retirements further, since pensions are based on the last year's salary, in many cases, inflated by 9/11.
In sum, the NYPD is having trouble recruiting the youngsters and keeping the veterans.
Economists like to say that there is no such thing as a labor shortage, that any shortage is immediately correctable by raising pay. Indeed, New York City recently brought an end to its long-standing teacher shortage by hiring some 8,000 qualified candidates for the fall. The deluge in certified applicants was due in part to the new contract agreement raising entry-level teacher salaries to $39,000 from $31,910. Even at $39,000, New York's teacher pay is below that of neighboring jurisdictions (Yonkers pays $40,000, for example) but the jump was enough to attract those who wanted to be here. Plus top pay is high at $81,000.
But the teacher settlement was helped out by the state, which kicked in supplemental money. The police settlement is not being helped by the state, and there are no more of the federal funds that long fueled Operation Condor, the overtime initiative that paid cops an extra $100 million a year to work a sixth day. The city is on its own with cop pay, unless Senator Schumer's federal aid proposal comes through, which even he admits is unlikely.
The city only has three ways to pay for a better contract: (1) state or federal aid, for which it is surely negotiating as ferociously as possible; (2) savings within the NYPD itself; and (3) productivity savings. There has been almost no talk during negotiations about savings within the NYPD, although Newsday's Leonard Levitt regularly points out the extravagant round-the-clock use of officers to protect former police commissioner Howard Safir and former Mayor Giuliani, his girlfriend, former wife, and children. That leaves productivity savings, such as the proposal for an additional 10 shifts a year.
The good of the city requires productive, dedicated police officers -- and a contract that says they're appreciated. New Yorkers should be paying attention.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.
The two men convicted in late June of killing three people and wounding two others in an execution-style murder and robbery above midtown's Carnegie Deli have been sentenced to life in prison. Each murder count carries a prison term of 25 years to life. The two counts of robbery carry 15 years each, as does the count of criminal possession of a weapon. All the terms will be served consecutively.
The Carnegie Deli slayings had focused attention on the anti-death penalty stance of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who refused to prosecute the triple murders as death penalty cases. Arguing after the trials that there had been insufficient evidence to prove that a single shooter fired the shots, he said that "The statute's pretty narrow. People who are for the death penalty don't want to understand that. We couldn't prove who the shooter was and we can only charge the actual person." Prosecutor David O'Keefe said the two would have to serve 116 years before being eligible for parole.
Addressing the killers during sentencing, the father of one of the victims said, "The only thing I regret is this isn't Texas." Texas is the country's foremost death penalty state.
During much of the summer the future and fairness of New York's death penalty has been discussed in the news, on radio and television talk shows, and at academic conferences. Where it has not been discussed above a whisper is in the state's gubernatorial campaign. You would hardly know from following the campaign of George Pataki, our sitting Republican governor, that he is presiding over the state today in part because he strongly supported the death penalty in 1994 when then-Governor Mario Cuomo opposed it. Nor would you know this from following the campaigns of Democrat Carl McCall or even Democrat Andrew Cuomo, son of the anti-capital-punishment former governor.
Quiet as the gubernatorial campaign has been, the courts at all levels have been unusually active. The U.S. Supreme Court handed down two momentous decisions -- one banning the execution of retarded criminals, the other saying juries must find all facts leading to a death sentence.
Neither applied to New York State's shrewdly written law, which already forbade execution of the mentally retarded and which already placed capital punishment squarely in the hands of juries.
Then Federal Judge Jed Rakoff, sitting in the Southern District in Lower Manhattan, declared the federal Death Penalty Act unconstitutional -- the first ruling [pdf] to do so -- citing "an undue risk of executing innocent people" and various procedural problems, most of which New York State is thought to have avoided in the implementation of its statute.
New York's own Court of Appeals was not far behind the feds, throwing out the death sentence of Darrel K. Harris, who had murdered three acquaintances in 1996, a year after Governor Pataki succeeded in bringing the death penalty back to New York.
Harris had been tried under the 1995 law, whose flawed plea-bargaining provisions encouraged defendants to plead guilty rather than risk a death sentence after a trial. Because these provisions unfairly threatened capital punishment to any defendant exercising a citizen's constitutional right to a jury trial, they were struck down in Hynes v. Tomei in 1998, right after Harris's conviction.
Writing for the Court of Appeals in early July, Judge Richard Wesley, a Pataki appointee, noted that Harris's guilt was established beyond a reasonable doubt. Still, wrote Wesley, "All seven of us have concluded that there is no reason to retreat from Hynes; all of us agree that the statute at the time of defendant's trial impermissibly discouraged defendant's assertion of his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. Accordingly, the trial court could not constitutionally impose the sentence of death on this defendant."
The facts of the case are undisputed, even by Harris, then a 39-year-old decorated, former corrections officer. He had no criminal record and had been honored in his job for saving a fellow officer during a prison riot. Nonetheless, in the early morning of Dec. 7, 1996, he murdered two men and a woman (a mother of five children) at Club Happiness in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The jury had found him guilty of first-degree murder and voted for death by lethal injection, rather than life without parole.
Harris's case is being sent back to Brooklyn for resentencing by Acting Supreme Court Justice Anne Feldman, who can sentence him to life without parole or to something between 20 to 25 years and life. The possibility that this murderer of three people might some day walk free from prison has not yet been widely commented upon.
Parole for violent felons has not been a major political issue since the summer of 1998 when, despite initially strong Democratic opposition, the governor and the Republican leadership secured passage of Jenna's Law, which eliminated parole for first-time violent felons.
Now the imminent release of Robert Rodriguez, the landlord of the Lower Manhattan couple who disappeared in 1997, is putting parole back in the news. Rodriguez had refused to cooperate in the investigation of the couple's disappearance, according to the NYPD. Nonetheless, the cops succeeded in getting him on overlapping state and federal tax and credit card fraud. Since he was not convicted of a violent felony, he is being released early, and over angry objections from the NYPD and the Manhattan D.A.'s office. Barbara Thompson, a spokesperson for the Manhattan D.A., said, "Obviously, we objected to his parole, and we recommended that he serve the maximum sentence, as we did at his sentencing." He is being released Aug. 30, 2002. Were he not being paroled, he would have been released on Aug. 30, 2004.
Another recent Manhattan parole case is that of Daphne Abdela, a young woman who in 1997 helped cut the throat of a friend in Central Park. The parole board denied her release because of her poor behavior in prison as well as a "total disregard for human life." She was eligible for parole under pre-Jenna's Law rules because the murder occurred in 1997. Under Jenna's Law she would have to serve 6/7 of her sentence.
The two state laws restricting parole have dramatically changed the parole numbers. During fiscal 2001, only 21 percent of inmates convicted of violent felonies who came up on parole were released -- as opposed to fiscal 1992, nearly the end of the Cuomo administration, when 54 percent of the 7,227 the violent felons who came up were paroled. The state Office of Criminal Justice argues that Pataki's parole policy has been one of the factors in reducing the state's violent crime by some 43 percent since the Cuomo administration.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Dorothy Cropper's insistence that three undercover narcotics detectives give their names before testifying in criminal court has landed her in an ugly dispute with the NYPD. Obeying an order from Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the undercover detectives defied Cropper's instruction, which led her to toss out all their evidence and testimony in a felony drug case. This seems an odd case to go to war over since the defendant is accused of selling "$10 bags of cocaine" to undercover cops.
Still, there are arguments on both sides. The right to confront one's accuser is one of the oldest and most fundamental common law rights, and should be abrogated only for the most serious reasons. Further, say defense lawyers, the practical ramifications of the cops withholding their identity suggests to a jury that they are in danger from the defendant. As defense lawyer Robert Levy notes, "Anytime the courts increase security beyond normal, this gives an aura that something is wrong. Unless there's a showing of special circumstances, such as an important ongoing investigation that's being jeopardized, the simple status of an undercover cop in what is not even a big case does not deserve special treatment."
The NYPD argues that identifying undercover cops in court will undermine the NYPD's ability to fight crime and will put at risk the lives of the undercover detectives who are involved in larger investigations. Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes wrote a letter to the police commissioner saying he would dismiss a drug prosecution rather than endanger undercover narcotics cops by making them give their names in public. Queens D.A. Richard Brown said that in his 11 years as D.A. he has not seen any instance in which a court did not allow an undercover to testify by number rather than by name.
The vicious, nearly fatal assault of Abner Louima in the bathroom of a busy Brooklyn precinct house on August 9, 1997, brought the meaning of police brutality to a graphic new low. The main assailant, Justin Volpe, is serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison. But he was directly aided by a second police officer, identified (though not named) by Louima as the driver of the patrol car that brought him in. This second cop first beat Louima and then pinned him down while Volpe tortured him. Volpe was also indirectly aided by the dozens of police officers on duty that night, many of whom had to know that a brutal crime had been committed in their precinct house. Yet despite several trials and the deployment of the full resources of the federal government only one person,Volpe, is now in prison for the Louima assault.
Federal prosecutors believe the second cop to have been Volpe's partner (and driver of the patrol car) Charles Schwarz. But the jury in Schwarz's recently completed trial in federal court in Brooklyn found him guilty of only one count of perjury. The jury deadlocked on another perjury charge and on the two crucial civil rights charges that justified the federal prosecution in the first place.
The jury's foreman, Russell Birnbaum, wrote a front-page account in the New York Observer of the jury's deliberations. He said one juror had championed Schwarz's innocence from the start, and had not deliberated fairly with the other 11 jurors, all of whom were congenial and serious. She forced the jury to deadlock on the more serious civil rights charges, and would only agree to find Schwarz guilty on a lone perjury charge.
U.S. District Court Judge Reena Raggi has scheduled a retrial of Schwarz on the civil rights charges and the other perjury charge for September 23. Resisting defense arguments that they needed time to raise money to pay for the defense, Judge Raggi said that jury selection after a mistrial typically starts the next day. She is giving them six weeks, with the initial questioning of jurors to begin September 9.
The NYPD has been through a lot this year, and now it must contend with an 88-page draft report from McKinsey & Company, the business consulting firm, that it suffered from lapses in leadership and coordination on September 11. Using interviews with more than 100 department commanders as well as interviews with some 700 police officers of different ranks, McKinsey says that many cops did not know who was in charge after the attack, and that many officers in the field acted without direction from field commanders.
The New York Times quoted a senior police official who noted that 25 percent of the officers interviewed by McKinsey were unsatisfied with their supervision that day. The official said that on most days more than half of the department's officers would say the same thing.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.
A year in which the governor and all 211 legislators are up for reelection is generally not the politically preferred time to introduce legislation perceived as soft on crime.
Nonetheless, in his January State of the State address Governor George Pataki called once again for reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which mandate harsher penalties for drug convictions than for most violent offenses. Someone convicted of selling two or more ounces of heroin, for example, or possessing four or more ounces of cocaine faces a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 15 years -- and may be sentenced to life. Someone convicted of selling a single bag of heroin or a single vial of crack faces five years or more. Pataki's emphasis has been on bringing sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses into line with sentencing for other nonviolent crimes.
You might think this reasonable reform would have been a slam dunk. Yet despite the impression given in the media of widespread support for reform (helped by the hundreds of articles in major newspapers on the unfairness of the laws), proposals have come and gone over the last two years without any law clearing both the Assembly and the Senate.
The antagonistic positions are pretty clear. Democrats in the Assembly tend to believe in rehabilitation and treatment, even of felons with several convictions, and Republicans in the Senate do not. The Democrats have been pushing for greatly reduced sentences as well as judicial discretion to assign an offender to treatment--which they would like to have far more generously funded--rather than prison. (Nearly everyone, even prosecutors, agree that treatment programs are underfunded. Some upstate counties have no drug treatment clinics whatever.) Under the current sentencing system judges are bound by the weight of the drugs seized and the defendant's felony record. Any treatment option (called "diversion") lies with the prosecutors, which is where many Republicans in the Senate intend to keep it. Republicans tend to oppose most decreases in prosecutorial discretion as well as any increases in judicial discretion.
In an attempt to end a stalemate with the Assembly in early May, Governor Pataki softened some key elements of his proposals. While prosecutors would have still determined which defendants deserved treatment, defendants turned down for treatment would be able to appeal to specially trained judges who could overrule the prosecutor (who could then appeal, however). Pataki also proposed substantially lighter sentences--and eliminated the possibility of life imprisonment--for non-violent drug offenders. But in the old-time Rockefeller spirit, Pataki also urged a mandatory five-year sentence for anyone carrying a gun while committing a drug offense.
The Assembly Democrats weren't buying. They said the benign-looking proposals were in fact coercive and counter-productive. Very few drug felons, they argued, would be able to appeal to a judge for treatment rather than prison because only those with either no criminal record or only one prior felony conviction were eligible. Most addicted felons, say Democrats, have more than one conviction- -- a status that Republicans regard unsympathetically. Roughly 1,600 people imprisoned on drug convictions in 2000 were first-time offenders who would have benefited under the governor's proposal. Another 1,750 had more than one conviction on their records and would not have qualified.
Over 94 percent of imprisoned drug offenders are African-American (about 9,700) or Latino (7,800). Most are from New York City, making this look like a classic upstate-downstate issue with New Yorkers pitted against the rest of the state. Yet not everyone in New York City wants the drug laws abolished. While a 1999 Zogby poll concluded that Rockefeller reform was popular among all ethnic groups, nearly half (49 percent) of Latinos called reduced prison sentences for drug offenders "soft on drugs." This compared with 32 percent of blacks and 29 percent of whites. So while Governor Pataki has been targeting his drug proposals to minorities, he has been treading carefully.
Quiet opposition to softening the drug laws also comes from small businesses in neighborhoods affected by drug use. A West Side flower dealer, for example, recently complained to the police about being repeatedly robbed by recently released addicts. "They plagued me ten years ago," he said. "And now they're back. Do I want more of them out? No!"
Much of the public (and media) discussion of the drug laws has focused on sympathetic youngsters--young mothers, for examples--with plausible stories for how mistaken judgment landed them an unfairly harsh sentence. Republicans (and prosecutors) say that three-fourths of first-time drug offenders do not serve any time in prison. They are either given probation or sent to special drug courts, where judges nearly always divert them to treatment. The other one-fourth of first-time offenders who actually do time do far less time than is commonly thought, say Republicans. First-time offenders released from prison last year had served an average of 27 months. Repeat offenders had served an average of 39 months.
The real political debate has been over the most serious felons, who constitute about 28 percent of those incarcerated for drug felonies. The most serious felons were the stumbling block that caused reform to fail last June as well as this June. The Democrats want judges to have the discretion to send such felons to treatment instead of prison. The Republicans, including the governor, want the assent of prosecutors, who argue that at least two-thirds of those imprisoned on drug charges are dealers with two or more prior convictions--in other words, bad guys, not just misguided youngsters.
The district attorneys say they should be in charge of diversion decisions because they know the defendants far better than the judges do. What's more, they say they have been generous with treatment, sending some 2,400 people indicted on drug charges last year into treatment programs. About half had prior convictions. Yes, say the Democrats, but another 11,600 people were sent to prison, and at least some of these should have been candidates for treatment.
To the chagrin of many New Yorkers the legislature has adjourned without touching the drug laws. But there are some who say privately that this is for the best. New York's major crime continues to plummet at least in part because the state has taken so many drug dealers, couriers, and users off the streets. Those on both sides of the debate agree on one time bomb: thousands of felons sentenced harshly are now being released to inadequate treatment and social services.
Last June Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made a triumphant announcement: The city's murder rate had fallen 13 percent over the first six months of the year. The police department had logged 289 murders through June 24 -- or 46 fewer than in the first six months of 2000. Were this rate to continue, the city would experience 581 murders by year end, far fewer than the previous year's 673. When Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik predicted that the city would have fewer than 600 murders, he was harshly reprimanded by Giuliani, who called the goal "very highly unrealistic."
This June Mayor Bloomberg quietly announced that murder had plummeted 12.6 percent in the first six months of the year (the duration of his administration so far). With 256 murders through June 26, 2002 (as opposed to 293 through June 30, 2000) the city may well experience the lowest number of murders for any year since 1965, which had 549.
Robbery was down 8.6 percent, felonious assault down 12.7 percent, and grand larceny down 4.3 percent. Rape, however, was up five percent--a very troubling statistic. Rape data vary substantially by borough. While rape was down 5.6 percent in Staten Island and 1.2 percent in Queens, it was up over eight percent in both Brooklyn and the Bronx--and a tiny, though perhaps ominous, .07 percent in Manhattan.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.