NYPD Recruiting Woes Deepen

It was no great shock when the NYPD revealed last week that it is unlikely to appoint more than 800 qualified recruits - well short of the target of 1,500 or more - to the Police Academy in July.

The department was already running about 1,000 below its budgeted headcount because a starting salary that was drastically reduced under a June 2005 arbitration award for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association is inadequate in the eyes of many potential candidates. It doesn't matter that the $25,100 initial pay rate increases to $32,700 once rookies finish their Police Academy training.

What is particularly worrisome is that the low starting pay may not be remedied by the time another police class is ready to be appointed in January. The Bloomberg administration and the PBA are engaged in their own game of chicken, with neither side backing down as their contract dispute threatens to delay a wage increase for as much as a year. Since the last PBA contract actually expired in August 2004 (notwithstanding the fact that the award was issued 10 months later), this is not a good thing even for incumbent cops.

In that arbitration, city officials apparently believed that the pay scale could be sharply cut without a major impact on recruitment because the lower starting wage was still higher than what Nassau County was then paying rookie officers. There were two miscalculations in that assumption: Nassau paid senior cops a lot more than the NYPD did, prompting many cops on Long Island to take a short-term hit on starting pay because the long-run rewards were worth it, and there was enough concern about a future recruiting problem that in 2003 an arbitration panel had issued an award for the Nassau County Police Benevolent Association that included a big hike in starting pay - to $34,000 - by last year.

The Bloomberg administration is making another, slightly less-risky assumption in its recent bargaining offers to the PBA and its latest contract deal with the Uniformed Firefighters' Association. In both cases, it offered significant boosts in starting salary, but they aren't real increases in compensation.

The UFA pact, which was ratified earlier this month, raised minimum salary to $35,000, but the jump was offset by benefit reductions for new hires in areas like vacation days, night differential and annuity pay. UFA President Steve Cassidy acknowledged that the changes were "a wash," and one source said there might even be a slight loss for rookies under the shift to help pay for other gains made by veteran Firefighters.

Bloomberg officials made a similar offer to the PBA nearly a year ago, in that case raising starting pay to almost $38,000. Clearly, they believe packaging matters more than substance, and that potential candidates have focused much more on base pay than fringe benefits such as days off and annuity pay, both of which would have been reduced. They may be right: if the PBA had accepted that alternative package under the arbitration award, the cuts in benefits would not have excited newspaper headlines or prompted Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to pronounce it "a disgrace" that new officers were receiving fewer paid holidays and vacation days than incumbents, even though the savings to the city would have been the same.

The administration has tried to pressure PBA President Pat Lynch to return to bargaining rather than bide his time in arbitration, but to this point has failed to do so. The fact that Mr. Lynch's members just re-elected him without opposition means he is under no pressure to get a contract. Their patience to this point perhaps reflects a belief that the two contracts he previously won in arbitration were better than they actually are, or it could simply mean that their anger with the city is so high that they'd rather fight than settle.

Conversely, while the PBA's decision to allow the arbitration award to cut starting pay rather than benefits was based on the assumption that eventually the city would be desperate to rectify the problem, Mayor Bloomberg has shown no signs of caving. The NYPD is clearly scrambling to keep the crime rate down, but unless it suddenly skyrockets, there will be limited public pressure on Mr. Bloomberg to deal with the cause of the recruiting problem.

Mr. Kelly is hardly sanguine about that reality, nor should he be. He has done a remarkable job of reducing crime beyond the successes of the Giuliani years, even while managing a force that has dropped by about 5,000 cops over the course of his tenure. His job has been complicated by the increasing emphasis on anti-terrorism activities by the NYPD, which diverts personnel away from more-traditional anti-crime activities.

Clearly, the Police Commissioner would not want his legacy clouded by a sudden spike in crime because the department is shorthanded, or a corruption scandal that occurred because the need for warm bodies led personnel officials to hire questionable candidates.

For now, however, both sides have dug in and seem determined to play out their hands. The city is banking on a previous UFA settlement to limit any PBA contract award, and the union is hoping that an arbitration panel will be swayed by the shortage in the ranks to disregard more than a century of parity between Police Officers and Firefighters.

It's clearly not an ideal situation. The likelihood is, however, that barring a change of heart on either side, six months from now there will be new headlines about yet another police class for which there will be too few recruits.