PAY COPS FOR EDUCATION

Pay Cops for Education

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is blasting the reduced starting salary for Police Officers, while the head of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association insists that it's maximum salary that is too low to attract and keep good candidates.

Obscured in that debate - in which both men make valid points - is that neither the union nor the city has done anything for more than a decade to rectify a matter about which there should be no controversy: cops have never been compensated for the raised education standard that became a requirement for new officers in 1995.

We don't believe the differential to which officers who have the required 60 college credits are entitled should be carved out of the overall collective-bargaining pot. Rather, it should be a matter for separate negotiations, similar to what transpired when the city and the Uniformed Firefighters' Association agreed to have Firefighters paid a special differential for handling emergency medical calls.

The fact that the FDNY differential compensates employees for taking on additional duties does not make it a separate case from this one. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani's rationale for the college requirement - which he later waived for one of his Police Commissioners - was that police work had become too complex to get top-grade candidates if you only required a high school education, as had long been the case. In essence, police candidates were being asked to take on more work before they were even hired.

Typically, employers pay more if a job requires a higher level of education, but for more than a decade it hasn't worked that way in the NYPD. From the union's standpoint, the issue was set in a political minefield: pre-1995 hires who never got the college credits would be unhappy if less-senior officers were getting more money than them. And so the PBA has never pushed the issue hard, whether in contract arbitrations or outside the normal bargaining realm.

It's true that other agencies have raised education standards as well, and without compensating the employees for meeting them. The Correction Department, for example, now requires that applicants for Correction Officer positions have 39 college credits. But Police Officers have a right to feel aggrieved on that score as well: why should compensation for both positions be the same when they need more than a semester's worth of additional college credits?

It's high time this issue was addressed.