Maria Smart is obviously a keen
observer of the local public safety scene as demonstrated in her
GNP letter criticizing the GNP
Opinion Piece that criticized the police union for not renegotiating
its raise. She is drawn in, like many,
to the emotionally charged issue of "laying their lives on the line".
She presented her emotional buildup
starting out with a Daily reminder that the cops face
danger; then to the Hourly: triage and trouble shoot;
followed by Minutes: No two alike; and ending with a Second:
could lose their lives.
She must have forgotten that
those are the same kind of emotionally charged phrases that firefighters
use to draw sympathy from the public and to justify their compensation level. But if she were able to set aside emotions and
check the occupational fatalities contained in the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, she would have discerned that both police
officers and firefighters are substantially below many occupations
commonly thought to be less risky. While
police remain a few percentage points above firefighters in annual deaths,
neither one is substantially above the average in occupations across the
country.
When she states that firefighters know
about as much about guns as cops know about fire hoses, she must not have read
the present union contract that obligates the city to pay firefighters assigned
to arson investigation monthly bonuses for scoring high marks on the shooting
range.
She is also a few million off on how much
overtime was distributed amongst the firefighters last year. While she cites $5 million, the real number is
between $7 & 8 million. It is very
hard to pin down because the city refuses to put the exact number in a form
that the public can understand. Each
firefighter last year, on average, made an extra $40,000 in overtime, while the
cops averaged about $8,000.
It was this $32,000 disparity in overtime
that caused the police union members to vote to reject opening the contract. They figure the extra 6% that will come to
them beginning July 1 and the 5% more on July 1 next year will help close the
gap.
The cops have been looking at the $100,000
club and they clearly see that firefighters are all making much more than
they are in total compensation. Why
would they waive a raise in an existing contract that would put them
further behind the firefighters? This is not rocket science; it is
predictable human nature 101.
Bruce Philpott