Remember the film “Cop Land,” in which Sylvester Stallone plays the sheriff of a New Jersey town populated by and run for the benefit of New York City police officers? Well, just a few miles up the Hudson River from that fictional movie town a New York suburb gives us an example of how this works in real life.
The place is called Clarkstown. There, the retired police chief of this bucolic Rockland County town, Peter Noonan, has just convinced the state Comptroller’s Office to bump up his already-hefty $190,000-plus annual pension to an astonishing $206,398 a year. That’s because the initial calculation of his average salary didn’t include the extra “chart days” — meaning he worked a five-day week instead of the patrol schedule of four days on, two days off.
The bottom line? The retired Noonan will now collect more than the salary paid to the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. Still it’s a comedown from his active-duty pay, when Noonan was taking in more than $332,000 a year. And Noonan wasn’t even the highest-paid: One captain earned $335,000 a year, even with a disability that required him to spend three days a week in physical therapy.
In this real life Cop Land, every one of the top 50 municipal wage-earners is on the police force. Police compensation accounts for a staggering 25 percent of the annual budget of this city of 84,000. As Cuomo has said, this pay is “out of line with economic reality.”
Police deserve good wages. But the communities deserve a pay scale that reminds all government workers they are the public’s servants, not its lords.