Ideas Floated On How To Keep A Cop

Cut cop pensions and increase their salaries.

Add more disincentives to leave the department.

Shake down suburban departments when they do poach city officers.

Maybe lower the minimum age to become a police officer? Or maybe not.

Those are some of the latest suggestions to arise about how to tackle New Haven’s police staffing dilemma.

The ideas arose during a Finance Committee public hearing dedicated to staffing shortages in the New Haven Police Department.

Although much of the four-hour meeting earlier this week in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall was dedicated to persistent overages in police and fire overtime, the alders spent around an hour peppering Police Chief Anthony Campbell and Asst. Chiefs Otoniel Reyes and Luis Casanova with questions about how and why the department continues to lose officers en masse to retirement and to jobs in the suburbs.

The answers, said Campbell, are relatively simple.

• The department’s union contract expired two-and-a-half years ago, and is currently in arbitration.

• The bulk of the force hasn’t received raises since then.

• The department’s starting pay is roughly 15 percent less than that of its competitors.

• And stable health care and retirement packages at Yale and elsewhere are just too attractive to pass up on, especially when New Haven pay and benefits are so in doubt.

The department is currently down to 395 officers, 100 fewer than the 495 positions included in the budget. Campbell and Acting Chief Administrative Officer Sean Matteson said the department’s budgeted number of positions will drop from 495 to around 430 in the mayor’s next proposed budget.

Campbell himself recently announced that he will be leaving the department to work at the state’s attorney’s office, in large part because of concerns over health care coverage.

With those stressors in mind, the alders and the chiefs spent the rest of the public hearing brainstorming how to reverse these trends and keep officers in New Haven.

Raises & ​“Laterals”

Here are some highlights from the discussion:

• Come up with a policy for hiring ​“laterals,” or police officers trained and certified in other departments who would not have to be re-trained and re-certified in New Haven.

Campbell said he and Matteson are working on developing a policy that would allow the city’s department to hire laterals. ​“We’ve talked about this for at least four years,” Campbell said. ​“This is the first time I’m actually seeing movement among the administration.”

• Increase officers’ salaries, even if that means reducing some of their pension benefits. City officers currently start earning $44,400 per year, Campbell said, and then move up to $52,000 after three years. Yale and other suburban departments sometimes offer upwards of $68,000 to cops with similar levels of experience, he said. New Haven just can’t keep up with that at its current starting salary rates, which Matteson said are around 15 percent less than entry-level pay in Waterbury, Bridgeport, and Stamford.

New Haven still offers generous pensions, Campbell said, with officers who graduated from the academy before October entitled to full pensions after 20 years of service and newer officers entitled up to slightly reduced pensions after 25 years of service.

“Are the pension benefits and medical benefits in other towns relatively less than what we have?” East Rock Alder Anna Festa asked.

“Some of them are significantly less,” Campbell replied. ​“Some are a little less. Some are on par.”

• Increase the probationary period during which, if an officer resigns, he or she has to pay the city department a fine. Campbell said current policy requires officers to pay the department $4,000. The city can also recoup up to $12,000 for training costs from suburban departments that poach officers, he said.

Campbell said the alders and the city should consider increasing that probationary period from two years to four years. They should also look into how to recoup larger amounts of money from poaching departments.

“I think it’s worth looking into,” Board of Alders President and West River Alder Tyisha Walker-Myers said about increasing the length of the probationary period, ​“because we’re having a retention problem.”

• Hill Alder Dave Reyes asked the chiefs if they would recommend reducing the minimum age required to become a police officer from 21 to 18. ​“You can be 18 to serve your country, but 21 to be a police officer,” he said.

Otoniel Reyes, who will serve as interim chief when Campbell leaves next month, said that the Milwaukee Police Department has done a good job of recruiting young peopple into internships that prepare them to apply to become police officers when they turn 21. But, he warned, police officers deal with very serious issues, and 18-year-olds simply do not have the life experience necessary to handle most of what an officer has to deal with.

“I would recommend increasing it,” he said. ​“Not reducing it. If anything, people should be at least 25 in order to become an officer.” But if that were the case, he said with a laugh, then the department would have an even worse staffing crisis than it currently has.

• Finally, here’s a suggestion not mentioned at the hearing, courtesy of the Independent: Convince Yale to expand its homebuyer program (covering downpayments for purchases in the city) to include city cops and teachers.