The current starting salary for a Minneapolis Police Officer is $35,386/year ($17.01/hr). There is also a uniform allowance of about $800, but that does not come close to covering the cost of all of the uniforms and equipment. Mpls. officers are required to purchase their own firearm, which takes care of most of the uniform allowance the first year. The ERU officers buy additional equipment and uniforms, with no additional uniform allowance.
This starting salary now is comparable to what Saint Paul was paying 10 years ago. (10 years ago, the Mpls starting salary was about $27-28,000 - sorry, I don't keep my tax records back that far.) Most suburban departments pay at least slightly better, some much better. Curently, Stillwater is offering $35,885 to start, Eagan is offering $36,982 - 51,000 DOQ. Brooklyn Park is offering $18.18/hr, Columbia Heights - $33,780-51,972 to start, DOQ. A sergeant in Mpls makes about the same as a patrol officer with 3 years experience in Lakeville. Roseville offers $16.37 hour to start - this is the only city that I could find salary info on that was lower than Mpls for all applicants. When my husband was hired by Mpls. 11 years ago, he was paid $1000 per month for the first 6 months (training), with no health insurance. Our kids were on medical assistance. We lived with my father-in-law because we couldn't afford housing at all. Then he went to the $27K-something per year. We looked for houses in Minneapolis, but couldn't afford the homes that we felt would meet our needs. We ended up building a 1170 sq. ft. home in an outer-ring suburb, with enough room that we could expand the home later. For the first 5 or so years of his employment with the city of Mpls, we qualified for the low/mod-income subsidized townhomes offered by our county HRA. The legislature passed a law specifically to allow Minneapolis to have a residency requirement, eventually rescinding it after lobbying by the Federation. My husband was exempted from the rule as an existing employee. During the time that the residency requirement was in effect, applications dropped off significantly. By having a residency requirement, you are restricting your recruiting to: 1. people who live in the city (who probably would have been part of your applicant pool anyway) 2. young people fresh out of college who do not own a home or have family ties elsewhere. (who probably would have been part of your applicant pool anyway) 3. people who could not get hired anywhere else. (who probably would have been in your applicant pool anyway) What you lose: older applicants who have some perspective and life experience under their belts, and a stable home life somewhere other than within the city limits. After all, who is going to sell their home and uproot their children for under $36,000 per year, if they could get a job in St. Paul or the suburbs, make more money, have less stress, and not have to move? There is one officer who recently retired from the department who first worked as a stock broker, retired from that, and then came to work for Minneapolis. He owns a very nice home in the suburbs. At the time of his hire, his kids were in high school. Isn't he making sacrifice enough by giving up the big money to work as a cop? Why would you expect him to take his kids away from their friends and the school system that they have been in all of their lives, and sell his home? How would having an unhappy family make him a better cop? Why would having his wife have a longer commute than he does make him a better cop? Police work is a stressful job. People need to be able to get away from the job to relax. If you are a Mpls cop, and you are within the city limits, you are never truly off-duty - you must be armed at all times, because you are obligated by law to act in an official capacity any time you see any crime being committed. Who wants to take their kid to the park while wearing a gun? You also never know when you might run into someone who holds a grudge against you because you put them or a family member in jail. It is one thing for the officer to accept this risk - it is an entirely different thing to require the officer's entire family to accept this risk. There is certainly nothing wrong with an officer CHOOSING to live in the city, or incentives, such as the "cop on every block" program which provided $50,000 to clear a lot for officers to build a home, as long as they agreed to build a certain size house (3BR+ I think?) and live there for a minimum number of years. Police officers who live in the city have been targeted - someone started a 4th precinct cop's truck on fire, for one - but it doesn't make the news. The last thing most cops want to do when they have been victimized is call up the newsies and draw more attention to their home. My family has volunteered in Minneapolis for years, although we don't live there. Former Chief John Laux presented a citizen's award to my father-in-law for his volunteer work in Minneapolis, and Sharon Sayles-Belton declared the day of his funeral "Robert Wulff Day" in Minneapolis. The work that he did was because of my husband's work with the Police Department. I volunteer as well, but in a less visible capacity. How many of those on this list who are endorsing a residency requirement have had their families do volunteer work for their employers? Or is it just a "do as I say, not as I do" thing? As for requiring that applicants grew up in an urban environment - my husband grew up in Thailand, Laos, and in outstate Minnesota. He looked into working in law enforcement in the community where he graduated from high school, but they weren't interested, possibly because he is a "person of color". That same community has a number of immigrants from Vietnam, Mexico, and elsewhere - if they applied to Minneapolis, would you discriminate against them because they weren't urban enough, or would the urban requirement only apply to white males? Discrimination is discrimination, however you package it. Wendy Wulff Formerly of Longfellow and Powderhorn, now in the suburbs. I wasn't affected by the residency requirement the last time, so most likely would not be affected by a new one. _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
