[waterlesscloud]

It also includes being a first responder to accidents. And watching over the cleanup of said accidents. People burned alive in cars. Children strewn across highways.

And knowing every violation stop is a potential end to your life. Who knows who that driver is and what they're going to do?

Do I want the job? No thanks. They're more than welcome to those salaries for what they deal with.

[jerf]

Pay is not determined by the difficulty or unpleasantness of the job, or at least, not directly. It is determined by the balance of supply and demand. How many people are ready and willing to be police officers at some level of pay, and how many police officers are needed?

Policing isn't trivial, but you know what? Neither are most other jobs. There are many, many people with the capability of being police officers; supply is high. Demand is not actually all that high compared to supply. There's even more supply than may initially meet the eye because many people not physically strong enough to be police officers right this instant could bring themselves up to spec if needed. The difficulty or unpleasantness of the job factors into the supply but I think you'd find a lot of people who would take that job; it's hard, but there's a lot of hard jobs about that people do for much less than that amount of money. (After all, first responding is hard from one point of view, but it is uniquely rewarding too; how many lives have you saved in the course of your work? It's not all good but it's not all bad either.)

You argue that they are valuable, and this is true, but the value of an employee is not what determines their pay... it is what caps it; long term, anyhow. You can't be paid more than what you are worth, you can't even be paid exactly what you are worth, you in fact inevitably must be paid less than what you are "worth" for the whole arrangement to work. Governments aren't immune to this. They must run at a net profit or they'll bring their society down. Measurement of profit is somewhat different than a private company, but profit they must; they must be extracting more value from their employees than they are paying their employees or the society is running the government at a net loss, which can only be tolerated to a finite degree as determined by what other surpluses the society is running elsewhere. What governments can do that private industry can't is put off the pain until much later before the fact they are paying people more than the value they are actually bringing bites them.

Later's pretty much here, by the way.

[CWuestefeld]

Pay is not determined by the difficulty or unpleasantness of the job, or at least, not directly. It is determined by the balance of supply and demand.

That's true, but the market is ridiculously deformed on both sides of that equation. On the supply side, there are many who would like to be cops but the requirements bar them entry (most often for legitimate reasons, but I suspect not always). On the demand side, America's constant quest for new crimes to be defined and new police powers creates an artificial demand. I mean, most people I know don't see a demand for policing those smoking marijuana, but legislation forces it.

You can't be paid more than what you are worth

That depends on the definition of "worth". If you determine it rigorously as an economist would -- how much less money would the organization make without this employee -- then you're right. But if you define it in terms of the employee's productive contribution, it's a different story. Again, regulations cause some of that different (the need to have a figurehead owner who is a state resident, in some jurisdictions, is just deadweight but a requirement for doing business); in other cases it's contractual obligations (i.e., to be certified to sell some Cisco product you must have on staff one Cisco-certified engineer, even though you're not using his services as such).

[jerf]

I think you misunderstood when I said you can't be paid more than you are worth; I don't mean that you can't overpay someone, ever, I'm saying that nobody, government or otherwise, can persistently over the long haul pay its employees more than they are worth. I'd say any definition of "value" or "worth" that does permit that is so broken as to be useless. It's simply impossible; a system simply can not have more value flowing out of it than the sum total of the value it generates, the value it takes in, and the value it has on hand, and imbalances in income vs. outflow tend to be able to rapidly deplete the stored value.

That the market is "ridiculously deformed" here is sort of my point, along with the fact that such deformations can not be sustained.

[krschultz]

I don't think this pay is rooted in the laws of economics. The number of people applying for police officer jobs is huge - but that doesn't mean the pay gets lowered for anyone. The contracts are negotiated by the veterans in the force, and the people with criminal justice degrees waiting in the wings who would gladly take less money are not stake holders in contract negotiations.

[jerf]

Absolutely, that's my point. Just because they are valuable doesn't mean they should actually get paid according to their "value".

[Retric]

Nothing stops people from being paid more than they are worth. Doctors in the US are a classic example of an industry that captures regulations which enables them to artificially limit supply and over charge for their services.

[gaius]

It is determined by the balance of supply and demand

That's not actually true - here in the UK they are turning away applicants for the Met, even cancelling start dates. The supply of police officers far outstrips the demand. The same is true of the fire brigade.

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2010/06/10/55913/met-...

[bhickey]

    And knowing every violation stop is a potential end to your life. Who knows who that driver is and what they're going to do?

According to Wolfram Alpha, 633,000 people are employed as police officers. From the Office Down Memorial Page, I found that 127 officers died in the line of duty in the United States in 2009. This gives us a death rate of 20 per 100,000. Of those 127 deaths, 60 were classified as the result of gunfire, during pursuit, or as the result of an assault. If we're generous and treat all of these incidents as homicides, we get a homicide rate of 9.5 per 100,000.

The 2008 murder rate in Detroit was 40.6 per 100,000. East St. Louis, 101.9 per 100,000! The murder rate across the entire United States at the same time was 5.4 per 100,000. The death rate of fishermen is 112 per 100,000.

We could dig into the numbers more and look at where these officers were killed and get an adjusted risk of homicide for police. Anyway, here's my point: The actual threat posed to police is small compared to the public perception of a threat.

[patrickgzill]

True, however EMTs get paid less and see similar things, as do volunteer firemen earning $0 in my part of Pennsylvania.

FWIW in most areas police are statistically less likely to die a violent death than the populace at large.

[poet]

To be fair, police have to deal with a wider range of psychological issues than jobs in rescue. Not only are police exposed to most things that rescue jobs are exposed to, they also have to deal with domestic violence, hostage situations, exploitation of minors and other disadvantaged groups, threats from organized crime, and sometimes actually pulling the trigger themselves. Hell, just the fact that police officers have to enforce laws they might not personally agree with is a pretty big emotional strain. My naive intuition is that rescue jobs are far less in a grey area emotionally.

I'm not saying this to quibble about whose job is more important or serious. It's just that I would volunteer as a firefighter or an EMT in a second, but I would have to think very carefully about how working in law enforcement would affect me.

[metamemetics]

>police have to deal with a wider range of psychological issues

Not nearly as much as those serving in the military whose salary is vastly less (closer to the population median income).

[stevenbedrick]

True, but is that a problem with police salaries, or with military ones? I have a number of acquaintances in the military, many of whom have served multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a taxpayer and (putative) beneficiary of their service, I'm personally embarrassed by how little they get paid.

[metamemetics]

They get the population median income. Without having to have acquired any skills before joining, all training and living costs are paid for after enlistement. Base pay is still far higher than minimum wage work. I'd say the problem in this specific context is undeniably CHP salaries being artificially super inflated above the national median income in a market inefficient manner that does not reflect supply of people capable of performing the work.

[joeyo]

  > FWIW in most areas police are statistically less
  > likely to die a violent death than the populace at large.

[Citation Needed]

[patrickgzill]

Here is one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_officer#Occupational_haz...

quote: "Despite perceived dangers, policing has never been listed among the top ten most dangerous jobs in America. In terms of deaths per capita, driver-sales work such as pizza delivery is a more dangerous profession than being a police officer." (see reference in footnote)

Edit: I did say "less than the populace at large" ; will try to find a specific link to back this up, not just one that shows being a police officer is not as dangerous as other jobs.

[pfedor]

I think the difference is that, unlike EMTs and firemen, police officers need to be difficult to corrupt.

[tdfx]

If NJ is any indication, higher salaries do nothing to prevent police corruption.

[jamesaguilar]

> Who knows who that driver is and what they're going to do?

They're in much greater danger of being killed in an ordinary car accident than by a driver with murderous intent.

[jonhendry]

Standing on the side of the road next to a pulled-over car is a known way to get yourself hit by another car.

[tibbon]

By that concept, army infantry should be some of the highest paid people out there. A rather dangerous job in many of the places we deploy. Yet, their pay is nowhere near this level.