Jefferson City police union: Competitive salaries needed for officer retention

Jefferson City Police Department patrol vehicle
Jefferson City Police Department patrol vehicle

The Fraternal Order of Police on Thursday presented the Jefferson City Public Safety Committee with data they have compiled over several years in support of increasing salaries for the city's police officers.

FOP President Jeremy Bowman outlined the goals of the FOP: to have competitive wages among their peers; resolve compression issues relating to salary; have progressive pay and reward longevity within the department; and solidify recruitment and retention.

Bowman compared the salary issues to a broken window on a home. The broken window causes more problems when weather and other debris come inside.

"I'm standing here in front of you today to tell you there is a broken window in the Police Department, and it's salaries," Bowman said. "If we do not fix it, things will deteriorate."

Salaries of Jefferson City employees, including the police and fire departments, fall into a ranked pay scale. All JCPD employees fall in grades 14 and above. Within each pay grade, there is a salary minimum and maximum employees can receive, with the possibility of earning a certain percentage over the salary minimum.

For example, in pay grade 28, the salary minimum is $115,909. If an employee makes 25 percent more than the minimum, they would make $144,866. The highest percentage before the next pay grade is 50 percent.

Consistently, police officers make less than other city employees within their pay grade, even though they often have more years of experience in comparison.

"If you look at their years in service and their percent above their minimum pay, surely you can see the disparity there - higher years of service, lower percent above minimum among other city employees," Bowman said.

On average, a one-year police officer makes just 1 percent above their minimum salary. At two years, the average is 1.25 percent over the minimum.

JCPD officers with close to a decade of experience make just a few percentage points higher than the minimum pay.

Also within JCPD, some higher-ranking officers like captains are making less than lieutenants, who can then make less than their subordinates, and so on.

This creates no incentive to promote, Bowman said.

Two retirement eligible officers - one a lieutenant and one a sergeant - with more than 20 years in their careers are not even halfway up their respective pay scales.

"What this data shows us - we have zero ability to reach top scale," Bowman said. "Can't do it. It's impossible. And we're not competitive with other city employees in matching salary range."

When compared to the city employees in wage levels 14 and above from other city departments, the Police Department has the lowest average salary percentage above minimum.

The city's finance, information technologies and human resources employees making a level 14 salary or above are paid, on average, almost twice as much over their minimum pay as police officers do and have about half the years of experience.

Police officer salaries also don't continue rising. While they go up some percentages based on years of experience, at certain levels, the percentages they make above their minimum salary actually decrease in comparison to previous years. Bowman called this "compression."

"You can be here 20 years, and you're still dealing with compression," he said.

All of these factors contribute to difficulty with officer recruitment and retention, Bowman said.

He added, of their 90-officer department, they expect to lose about four officers a year for various reasons. In 2019, they lost 10 officers - nine of whom were squad officers, meaning they are the ones out patrolling the streets.

"They're the nuts and bolts of what makes the entire Police Department work. They are they ones that have the first contact with the community. They're the ones you see drive up and down your road."

Of those 10, six of the officers had been with the department for five to seven years. Bowman said when those officers leave, the relationships they have built leave, too.

"In your five to seven years of experience, you've gained enough ground to build serious relationships within the community, especially with minorities," hr said. "At that five- to seven-year mark, you're really dug into the community. You're deep rooted into the neighborhood, but relationships are lost when that officer leaves."

This can have a negative effect on the department's ability to do its job if the community doesn't feel they have a relationship with their officers, Bowman said.

This is reflected in crime statistics from 2019 compared with 2018. While crimes reported dropped 2 percent in 2019, total crimes rose 13 percent.

"You don't have to be a math whiz to know something here doesn't make sense," Bowman said. "Crimes reported is down because people aren't telling us. Why? Because we just lost a 20 percent turnover of our nuts and bolts of people that were rooted into our community. Not as much gets reported."

As of January 2020, the Police Department had 32 squad officers, and 18 of them had been with the department five years or less.

Bowman said they can't retain officers because of the pay scale, and the city is investing financially into officers through training and not keeping them.

"They're looking into the future. They want to see what's next, and it's not pretty," he said. "We're not retaining. What we're doing is we're training these officers, and we provide very good training. We train these officers to become a qualified candidate for an agency that pays more. We are a stop. We're a temporary stop."

The FOP compared JCPD to communities across the state using data from 2018.

Jefferson City officers consistently make the lowest or second-lowest wages of cities with comparable data in the areas of starting pay for officers, population, amount of officers, violent crimes, total crimes, officers per thousand residents, crimes per capita and crimes per officer.

Bowman said JCPD is most likely to recruit from the Mid-Missouri area. Within a 75-mile radius, Jefferson City most closely matches Columbia in terms of sales tax, median household income and crimes per capita.

"We need to be competitive with Columbia; that's our match," he said.

When comparing officers from the Columbia Police Department and JCPD, officers in Jefferson City made less than Columbia officers at the same ranking and experience.

"Our captains are below their lieutenants. We even had a captain in their sergeants," Bowman said. "Our lieutenants are below their sergeants."

An average eight-year officer in Jefferson City makes $46,406 per year, which is less than starting pay in Columbia.

"Think of that investment for the city - to train eight years of experience, and they make less than somebody who fills out an application and gets hired on in Columbia," he said.

Bowman ended his presentation to the committee by asking city officials to focus on increasing police salaries and recognize the need for competitive wages.

"There's a lot of important things, I understand," Bowman said. "I don't downplay any one of them. But this is a vital one."