Similar roles to police and trends in salary

Major takeaways:

Salary Data

• Security guards and general maangers are the most common jobs for police to transition to

• Wages in almost all of these similar jobs have risen a great deal more than the overall median wage from 1999 to 2019

  • The Census of Government estimates put the increase in police compensation higher than that of the BLS. This is largely because, we believe, the BLS data includes only wages, whereas the Census data is overall payroll and so includes things like overtime pay and pension contributions. This seems to be supported by some articles I’ve seen on the topic about police’s use of overtime pay.

  • After private detectives, police officers in big cities (list 1) have seen the biggest increase in pay, followed by police administrators in mixed/largely small cities (list 2).

  • Even when comparing apples to apples (i.e. BLS estimates of median wage), police officers saw an increase in wages ~5x as great as the overall median wage across all occupations (not just similar occupations)

• Similar to the trend between list 1 and list 2 cities, when looking within the Census data, police admin in counties have seen the biggest increase, followed by police officers in cities.

Risk to Police

• There are a lot of reasons why police salaries may have gone up so much. One we explored was increased risk to police officers, including perceived risk

• The number of guns owned continues to steadily increase, and suicides with guns have increased. But on a per capita basis, firearm homicides have declined.

• Adjusting for the increased number of police, police deaths have actually gone down over the past few decades, particularly the number of police killed with a firearm.

• Police are also less likely to be assaulted than they used to

• However, Pew data from 2016 shows that the public perceives the job of police has gotten riskier

Why might salaries be going up? Risk and perceived risk to police