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N.Y.P.D. Officers Leave in Droves for

Better Pay in Smaller Towns
This year has seen the highest number of resignations in two
decades.

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for the first year
The New York Police Department has seen an extraordinary number of resignations
this year. Dakota Santiago for The New York Times

By Chelsia Rose Marcius

Dec. 9, 2022 Updated 9:07 a.m. ET

Earlier this year, the chief of police in Aurora, Colo., needed to find
a few dozen officers to join his force.

The chief, Dan Oates, was 50 officers short to patrol Aurora, a city
of roughly 400,000 people just east of Denver. But he knew limiting
his search to Colorado would not be enough: Like many other
leaders in law enforcement, he has found that fewer people these
days want to be cops.

So Chief Oates and his team began to seek recruits at agencies

where they believed pay and morale were low. They settled on New
York City, and in August, he flew about 1,800 miles to meet with
New York Police Department officers. He convinced 14 of them to
move out west.

“I feel bad raiding my home agency,” said Chief Oates, who once
served as a deputy chief in New York City. “But frankly it’s a
cutthroat environment right now among police chiefs to recruit
talent, and we all desperately need it.”

The departure of those officers was no anomaly. The New York

Police Department, with about 34,000 officers, has seen more
resignations this year than at any time in the past two decades as
other agencies have become more aggressive in recruiting from its
ranks.

Through November, about 1,225 officers resigned before even

reaching five years of service, according to New York City Police
Pension Fund statistics obtained by The New York Times. Many
left for other New York State agencies or police departments
Editors’ Picks
outside the state.
The Wednesday
That figure, which represents the largest such departure since at Dance Is an
Invitation. Be
least 2002, compares to 870 resignations last year and 477 in 2020. Weird.
The total number of officers who left the department through
November, including retirees, is about 3,200. It is the highest ‘Harry & Meghan’
Has All the Intimacy
overall number since November 2002. of Instagram

New York Police Department officers are particularly susceptible 2-Minute Bursts of
Movement Can
to being wooed by other agencies. Lower salaries for new recruits Have Big Health
are a big reason. So too are longer hours amid increased attention Benefits

to crime from the mayor and the public, particularly in the subway
system.

“Other communities are recognizing the talent and are poaching

our members,” Patrick J. Lynch, president of the New York City
Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents the city’s
police officers, said in a phone interview. “If we pay our police
officers a market rate of pay, they will stay here. We know that’s
the answer because that’s what these other departments and
jurisdictions are doing, with success.”

The New York Police Department did not immediately respond to

questions regarding officer morale, but said it was actively hiring.

“The N.Y.P.D. regularly monitors attrition and plans accordingly to

address the loss of officers who retire or leave the department for a
variety of reasons,” the department said in a statement. “Year-to-
ate we have hired approximately 2,000 individuals, including 600
individuals who were hired in October and have been training at
the Police Academy.”

Police departments across the country are grappling with

increasing resignations and retirements. And while hiring levels
rose last year after a sharp decrease in 2020, they have not made
up for the losses, according to a March report from the Police
Executive Research Forum , a law enforcement policy group. In
November, the organization’s director, Chuck Wexler, wrote that
finding the next generation of cops may be “the single most
daunting challenge that policing has faced in decades.”

The shortage has prompted agencies in less populous, less

expensive areas like Aurora to broaden and intensify their
searches for talent.

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Chief Oates, who retired this week, said the officers he recruited
from New York were partially lured by better pay. The starting
salary at the Aurora Police Department is about $65,000 in an area
where the average monthly rent is approximately $1,750 and the
average home sale price is about $624,000, according to an August
report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development.

Incoming officers with four or more years on the job can earn a
salary of around $100,000. Aurora also gives incentives to those
who transfer from other departments, including a signing bonus of
up to $10,000 and a $5,000 relocation bonus.

Dan Oates, the police chief in Aurora, Colo., successfully recruited more than a dozen
police officers away from New York City. Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post, via Getty
Images

That is more money than officers make in New York City, where
the median sales price for a home is $810,000 and the average
monthly rent is about $4,500. The starting salary at the Police
Department is $42,500, according to the most recent contract
between the agency and the officer’s union. After three and a half
years of service, officers can earn a salary of $47,000, and $85,292
after five and a half.

New York City officers were among the highest paid cops in the
country until the mid-1990s, when the rank and file saw periods
with little to no raises. In 1997, after a drawn-out battle between the
union and then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, an arbitration panel
ruled that officers should receive the same wage freeze as other
city workers.

That decision began to widen the pay gap between the New York
Police Department and other law enforcement agencies that
continued to increase officer salaries. The union has since
negotiated agreements and received arbitration settlements, but
those raises were not always enough to catch up with wages in
other police departments .

The current pay scale came about in 2017, when the union and
then-Mayor Bill de Blasio entered a contract in which new recruits
would receive lower starting salaries in exchange for raises later in
their careers.

But many officers are leaving the force before they can earn those
higher salaries. Some go to states like Florida, which promises
officers a $5,000 bonus after they sign on. They can also receive
other financial perks, including money for continuing education at
Florida police academies.

Spero Georgedakis, a former Miami police officer and the owner of

Good Greek Moving & Storage, works with the Florida Police
Benevolent Association to help cops relocate to the state.

He recently began running a TV ads in New York City to promote

his company’s services. The ad costs $20,000 a month to run, Mr.
Georgedakis said, but is an investment in an area ripe with officers
looking to leave.

“We don’t want to deplete New York City of their police officers,” he
said. “But police are needed everywhere, and we want them to
choose Florida.”

Law enforcement agencies outside New York City have long

recruited from its Police Department, said Maria Haberfeld, a
professor of police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
in Manhattan.

While there is little data on how many out-of-state agencies are

recruiting New York City officers, Ms. Haberfeld said there was
enough anecdotal evidence to show that “departments are much
more aggressive in their efforts than before.”

“They have become very familiar with how their salaries and
benefits compare to other departments, and they’ll tell candidates,
‘This is what we can offer you,’” she added.

Lower pay is exacerbated by other grievances, Mr. Lynch said.

Many officers must work longer hours to make up for the staffing
shortage to meet extra demands like patrolling the subway system ,

he said. Some officers feel frustrated when the people they have
arrested are quickly released, he added.

Since January 2020, about 9,400 officers have left, city pension data
shows. About 6,900 have joined, though some graduating classes
have fallen short of target goals.

The department this year put out a robust recruitment campaign

on social media to get people to register for the police officer exam.
But so have competitors. The Norfolk Police Department in
Virginia posted a video on Twitter in July showing a group of
officers on the job, including at the shooting range, on a boat and
riding four-wheelers along a sandy coastline.

The post directly addressed the New York City Police Benevolent
Association. “You should see what we are paying out-of-state
laterals! Brand new officers start at $52,105,” it read, along with a
link for how to sign up.

Chelsia Rose Marcius covers breaking news and criminal justice for the Metro desk, with
a focus on the New York City Police Department.

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