Thread by @DivestSPD

Let's take a closer look at the Seattle Police Officers' Guild (SPOG) contract

(THREAD)

(1/17)

But before we get to the contract: Let’s talk about $$$

1,330 SPD employees make > $100k.

360 make > $200k

Avg City employee: $86k

That's around what rookie SPD officers make their first year.
(2/17)
forbes.com/sites/adamandr…

Unions negotiate for workers’ share of the value they produce. Police produce something abstract and unquantifiable—“public safety”—so their union contracts aren't tied to productivity.

They're more or less arbitrary.

(3/17)

Seattle police salaries have gone up consistently by at more than 3% throughout the recession even in yrs of sharp drops in inflation

(4/17)

SPD raises outpace inflation

Inflation / SPD raise

2014: 1.62% / 3%
2015: 0.12% / 3%
2016: 1.26% / 3%
2017: 2.14% / 3.65 %
2018: 2.44% / 3.85%
2019: 2.24 / 3.3%

(5/17)

Starting in 2019, SPD got an annual raise equal to cost of living plus 1%

Cost of living is calculated by the Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma Consumer Price Index (min. 1.5% / max 4%)

Ex. If CPI = 0.5%, SPD gets a raise of 2.5%

In 2019, the raise was 3.3%.

(6/17)

On paper, a 3.3% raise doesn’t sound like much, but it's applied to an already large pay scale then multiplied by a number of "premiums":

Officers: $82k-$109k over 54 mos. (4.5 yrs)
Sergeants: $113k-$127k over 18 mos. (2.3 yrs)
(7/17)

After five years, when officers hit the top of the pay scale. They start getting regularly scheduled “longevity” bumps, which are higher for patrol.

(8/17)

There are premiums for different jobs too:

Patrol 1.5%
All detectives 4% + Detectives in some units get extra on top of that:
•Bomb squad 9%
•Homicide, CSI, FIT 6%

Hazard pay = 5%

Others:

Cops get a 2% bonus just for wearing a body camera.

If cops don’t normally have to wear one but they get detailed to a unit (crowd control duty) then they get 2% for every hr on that duty.

(10/17)

668 Patrol * $103,500 avg salary = $69.1 million

2% of $69.1 million = $1.4 million

So the city is paying cops $1.4 million to do something that they're legally required to do as part of their jobs.

(11/17)

So lets talk overtime.

Last yr a patrolman named Ron Willis made $414,000 in total compensation. His base pay is $59/hr ($118k/yr). Subtract benefit costs (~$45k), then that means Officer Ron made somewhere in the ballpark of $250k in overtime + retroactive compensation (12/17)

Overtime in SPOG contract is standard (time + ½) but it’s extraordinarily generous in terms of allotting overtime for extra police duties outside normal shift hours.

(13/17)

Officers on days off (furlough) get overtime for court appearances.

There’s a 3-hr minimum and it’s applied for each court appearance.

So a cop who gets called to court twice in one day for 1 hr each can get 6 hrs overtime pay

(14/17)

And if an officer takes a call on his off day that’s longer than 8 min, they get compensated for an hour at time+½ . So a cop making $60/hr gets paid $90 for a 10-min call.

(15/17)

Overtime allotment for 2020 was about 29.3 million (7% of the total budget).

SPD burned through one-fifth of that ($6.3 million) during 10 days of protests at Cal Anderson and elsewhere

(16/17)

The SPD contract expires at the end of December this year—after the 2021 city budget is finalized.

(17/17)

One more thing I forgot:

The city pays 95% of officers' health insurance premium. Formerly it paid 80%. That's a huge material benefit equal to thousands of dollars in extra compensation annually.

Avg total compensation per patrol officer = $150,000. 31% is benefits.

Just returning to the 2018 status quo of 80% contribution would save millions of dollars.