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[–] 28 points 8 months ago (20 children)

They said high paying career

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  • [–] 33 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    For the amount of education needed or risk of the job, I doubt there's another more profitable career out there.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    It is much safer than it is percieved

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    It's a six-figure salary in my part of Texas.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Yeah, it starts at almost $80k for first year here with a senior officer that hasn't made Sergeant getting up to $140k. A captain makes between ~$150k and just under $210k.

    As a cadet it's $50k. Which will never make you rich but if you're stuck in a minimum wage position or as a gig driver that can be attractive, especially knowing you'll soon bump over $25k.

    That's not counting incentives for higher education, having places like communities and shopping centers hire you to patrol off hours, more than 50 days of time off (PTO, personal days, "physical agility days" that can be traded in for $1000 a pop, and holidays, plus compensatory time at 1.5 hours), paid parental leave, retirement, halfway decent insurance, tuition assistance, continued training leave, student loan forgiveness, free public transportation......They have the benefits most of us should be getting.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    They have the benefits most of us should be getting.

    We all should have those benefits but that would require us to give a fuck about labor. In my opinion, cops get those benefits for two reasons.

    One: they protect the capital investments of the borgeousie so they're a privileged class to keep them happy.

    Two: police have unions that actually fight for them.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    You don't know about the police unions hijacking town budgets? They regularly make high five figures with options for unlimited overtime. They also get to decide what counts as work and when it starts so they frequently cheat the system and steal your money to easily double their normal salary.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    The amount of overtime police here in Massachusetts get is ridiculous. The police union here is so powerful that we don’t have regular flag people at construction/work sites. It’s always paid police details. It’s not uncommon for some cops to pull in decent 6 figure salaries with all the overtime they pull in.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (1 child)

    Oh man...you come on Lemmy dissing cops but also dissing a strong union that's bringing fair pay and good benefits to its members. I feel so conflicted right now.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Listen, I'm a fucking syndicalist, but there's a reason we don't think cops should have strong unions. A strong union at a business making too high demands just tanks the business, especially if it's union owned. Because of this union owned businesses tend to prioritize stability over benefits and discourage taking too much for not enough benefit to the whole.

    Police are an arm of the municipality. When their union is strong enough to demand whatever it wants the city has to find the money from somewhere else, often through rent seeking applications of civil offenses and misdemeanors. You wind up in a situation where laws are enforced based on how profitable or easy they are to enforce to the cops. What does that look like? Decades of unexamined rape kits sitting in a back room, a 50% murder solve rate, and nobody bothering to investigate your home invasion if you don't have a surveillance camera, but traffic and parking tickets galore with lots and lots of whatever the cops want. But the library is broke and there's no money for infrastructure.

    And that's before we get into the fact that this is the people who use violence on behalf of the state. Police and prison guard unions both are incentivised to fight for less restrictions on use of violence by the state. Less consequences for police misconduct or unjustified killing, longer prison sentences, less enforcement those pesky rights that get in their way.

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