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Comment by haroldp | Hacker News Reader

What is the point of this if it omits the step where you can choose not to use someone's services if you don't like their rating?

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”Warning: The officer approaching you has a RateOurCops rating of 1.6. Do not make any sudden movements. Use old english language and manners. Attempt to turn caucasian. Good luck.”

Good advice for any law enforcement encounter.

> Use old english language

Hwæt, weardmann! Hwæt is sēo ġedrēfednes?

It sets up the launch of the companion site where you buy improved service.

My city has a monopoly contract with one provider. I don't get to choose.

Oh, no, not like that. It helps you understand when you might need to let a $100 fall out of your wallet when you're pulled over.

What's $100 to a dude making over $100 per hour?

Assuming a 40hr/wk schedule, the average salary for police officers in the usa ($70k) works out to about $33/hr with about half making less (likely more depending on the skew in the distribution). There are job postings for usa police listing ~30k yearly salary, which comes to about $15/hr. Probably some new recruits end up in the typical situation of salaried workers and work significnatly more than 40 hours. I bet $100 could seem pretty nice.

> Assuming a 40hr/wk schedule…

A lot of police officers work a lot of overtime hours, for example in Oakland one officer averaged a half a million dollars per year. (1)

I’m not sure exactly what his hourly wage worked out to, but I’ll agree with the overall sentiment that somebody making that much money would not likely be swayed by $100.

1 https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-police-average-30-million-...

I'd be wary of extrapolating from one exceptional person in the bay area to the entire country... Probably most cops aren't the single highest paid person in their municipality.

Here are more articles and studies on this topic. I didn’t extrapolate from one example, I just used one in my post (this is why I used the phrase “for example”)

https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-police-officers-overwo...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2020/04/23/polic...

https://www.courant.com/breaking-news/hc-lender-police-pay-2...

https://www.marketplace.org/2020/07/03/police-departments-ha...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/15-portland-police-officers-see-l...

I’d personally be wary of extrapolating “this webpage says that some police officers that make less money than others” to “$100 is a significant amount of money for an average cop.”

For your example you picked the highest paid officer in one of the richest areas in the state where police officers make the most money. It does seem that police in California make a ton of money, but it's really not representative of the entire country. Take a look at that Forbes link you posted.

Despite reading your articles, I still don't think $100/hr is a reasonable approximation of an average cop's hourly rate, and thats before getting into the fact that the guy making half a million for watching Warriors games is probably not the guy pulling you over.

> Despite reading your articles, I still don't think $100/hr is a reasonable approximation of an average cop's hourly rate

I’ve personally never said that police make more than $100 per hour, in fact I specifically said that despite not knowing what the hourly wage works out to, I don’t think that $100 would be a significant amount of money to most cops.

If your premise is “you can bribe anyone as long as the dollar amount is higher than the wages from one hour of work,” then I suppose it’s impossible to discuss in good faith.

My premise is “$100 isn’t usually enough to bribe people that make high five figures or more.” I’m not entirely sure why hourly wage is supposed to fit in here.

> I’m not entirely sure why hourly wage is supposed to fit in here.

Please read the original post I responded to. It explicitly mentions hourly wage which is the only reason I mentioned it at all. I thought their estimate seemed a little high.

Thank you for stating your premise, I didn't find it clear in your earlier posts. I don't have strong opinions about how much is enough to bribe someone who makes X as I am not aware of any good sources of data that deal with this question. Maybe a table of attempted bribes with metadata. I'll run some experiments and get back to you.

I’d suggest a wonderful book called The End of Policing by Alex Vitale. I’ve read it cover to cover many times and it may include some insight that you’d enjoy.

I appreciate the suggestion :) I will add it to my list.

Based on a quick glance at some synopses, it seems the author accurate identifies the role of police in society but perhaps doesn't adequately account for how society would change if the police were removed but the driving force for their existence remained in place.

I would suggest drawing your own conclusions from the book. It’s exhaustively researched and thoroughly cited, but it’s a topic that gets people worked up so I’m sure that interpretations abound.

I’m kind of curious as to what you mean by this: > it seems the author accurate identifies the role of police in society but perhaps doesn't adequately account for how society would change if the police were removed but the driving force for their existence remained in place.

You believe that the author has a factual understanding of the current state of police, and at the same time is factually wrong about a hypothetical scenario that has never occurred in American history?

(As an aside, I’m not sure what the synopses have led you to believe Vitale is directly advocating for. It’s a very complex book with a lot of nuance. If one’s interpretation is “this is the same exact thing as a ‘defund the police’ or ‘black lives matter’ or ‘coexist’ bumper sticker” then there isn’t really much that can be done to change that opinion.)

What authors do you think are correct about a hypothetical future in which something completely unprecedented happens to American society?

If the only possible opinions to have about hypothetical events are 'factually correct' and 'factually incorrect,' I don't think you will find many good opinions.

I haven't the book and it will take me several months to get to it, so I'd appreciate if you didn't pull random concrete ideas out of my intentionally vague and non-committal statement. Why is it that the people quickest to accuse others of bad faith are the ones that do this?

My bad. I took “accurate” to mean “correct from my perspective” and “inadequate” to mean “incorrect from my perspective.”

Clearly you meant something else, I apologize.

Here's a search for the pay for every "sergeant" in my state. Not brand new cops, but not lieutenants, captains of chiefs either:

https://transparentnevada.com/salaries/search/?q=sergeant

Cops make a lot more than most people realize.

$100/hr works out to about $200k/yr, maybe a little more or less depending on how much vacation you get and assuming no overtime (for convenience despite the sibling comment). Based on your data, the represents about the top percentile of police sergeant pay (not including benefits). Actually in the most recent available year only 1 out of 250 passes this threshold, with the median at around ~$85k. Unless this website is just a tool for police to hide how much they earn too?

It's a good amount of money for a blue collar job, but I think you're overselling it, especially for HN.

Why wouldn't you include benefits? Do you consider benefits when accepting a job? Would cops accept only base pay as compensation? I am paying for these benefits, and they are not, like $50/mo into your 401k benefits. They are golden-parachute, retire young, benefits. They are part of total compensation, and it would be dishonest to talk about cop pay without including them. Almost every police sergeant makes over $100k in total compensation. At least 10% make more than $200k.

Because I'm not convinced of the reliability of benfit-to-dollar conversions, especially given their history as a way to distract from falling real wages. I personally value real salary much higher than benefit equivalent. Maybe the police department is overpaying for dental insurance from an agency run by the chief's cousin's wife.

You raise a valid point but it makes the analysis more complicated. Even given the way you run the numbers, however, I think you are still overestimating the hourly rate for the average cop. If you judge the wealth of the world by the top 10%, poverty has been eliminated.

That is a valid point but let me highlight three counter arguments: First, a large fraction of those benefits come from "overtime pay" or "other pay", and are dispersed as cash. Second, benefits typically come out of pay before taxes, so even if they aren't necessarily the best value, they are a better value than you could buy yourself. Third, most public employees in my state, as with many others, who's retirement benefits are paid into the PERS retirement system, are exempt from paying Social Security taxes.

If I were to talk to a fulltime hourly worker, I feel like they wouldn't include benefits when they tell me their hourly rate (I didn't when I was one). You make a good argument; perhaps they should. Even if the conversions are somewhat sketchy, I think this would actually be quite illuminating, especially when considering things like minimum wages. A discussion for another day.

In my first full-time job at a call center I was given a packet that described total compensation including 401k contributions, insurance etc.

There was a bigger number that included all the benefits and perks, and a smaller number that represented actual weekly take-home pay. I was able to divide the bigger number by 40 just as easily as I was able to divide the smaller number by 40.

I guess I’m the only one to do that? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I believe the person you’re responding to is only interested in take-home pay divided by hours worked and whether or not that number >=$100. I am not sure whether or not the requisite $100/hr number to become immune to bribery is pre- or post-tax.

The premise seems to be that if the police made $99/hr, you could easily get better services out of them by handing them a $100 bill, because then they’d make an extra dollar. However if they are making $100/hr, they’d become morally unassailable at that price point.

It’s a somewhat odd argument because instead of responding to a somewhat flippant comment about what it would take to have better interactions with law enforcement, we’re now arguing about hourly wages. It’s a pretty neat way to avoid addressing the actual issue at hand.

There are a lot of places in the US where the chief of police is the highest paid employee on a municipality's payroll.

Base salary is a fraction of what cops earn. Indeed, it is a way to hide what they actually earn. Check this out:

Deputy Jason Wood is the sort of shitty cop that I would like to avoid based on his poor ratings from interactions with my community. He can be heard in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc4iEjycDCw repeatedly urging his dog to attack a suspect who was on his knees with his hands in the air. He subsequently got a DUI https://mynews4.com/news/local/washoe-county-deputy-charged-.... Deputy Jason Wood is still a Washoe County Sheriff's deputy today, and indeed has been promoted since those incidents. We paid him $242,000 https://transparentnevada.com/salaries/2020/washoe/jason-d-w... in total compensation last year - plus we paid the guy in that video $17,500 for the mauling and beating.

He also shot a guy to death in 2014, but there was no video of that and police investigated themselves and determined that there was no wrongdoing.

If you want to do some naive math, $242k divided by 40hr/week divided by 52 weeks/year is $116/hr in total compensation.

Oh he got a second DUI this year too.

I lived in a state where the median salary for cops was over $108k before overtime, benefits and bonuses. Many cops made over $250k+ a year with overtime. Some of them retire after 20 years with $250k a year pensions that municipalities are liable for.

Based on a sibling comment's data, the only state that comes close to that level is California. I think this is reflective more of the messed up economics of the state than anything else. If this guess is incorrect please let me know which state so I can update my model.

There's no denying being a senior cop is a good gig, but probably the gig of an average cop is a little more mundane. In many municipalities the highest paid public sector employee is a cop, but only a very small number of cops reach this status.

Here's one state with median cop salaries being ~$105k[1] a year.

[1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s...

Thanks.

Forbes-via-BLS reports $89k average for the same time period, but it seems they are not including overtime. A ~20% increase in median pay from overtime is pretty substantial. It'd be interesting to see nominal and actual compared by state.

an hour of work

There was a cop in one state who was caught taking $20 and $50 bribes from people. He was making over $200k a year.

It's not about money, it's about power.

This doesn’t really work in the US (thankfully). You gotta go far, far bigger and it not be a traffic ticket for that to work. Think cartel.

It's a political tool to highlight abusive behavior, and thus exert pressure for police reform. However if that is too abstract for you, an individual's legal team could use this tool determine if an arresting officer has a history of abuse and police perjury.

I imagine the impetus for this comes from the widespread accounts of cops that have long histories of abusive behavior and evidence tampering being tolerated and indeed covered up by the police. In fact in many states, disciplinary records are secret, and indeed there are moves in several states to make independently documenting abusive police encounters a criminal offense.

> an individual's legal team could use this tool determine if an arresting officer has a history of abuse and police perjury.

No self-respecting attorney would ever trust a third-party site with zero verification. You would literally get more accurate information from Twitter or Facebook.

> I imagine the impetus for this comes from the widespread accounts of cops that have long histories of abusive behavior and evidence tampering being tolerated and indeed covered up by the police.

All of these issues are only going to be correctly handled by legitimate authorities anyways, this site doesn't actually solve anything. Anything posted here can be safely ignored. If anything, this site's layout should just be translated to an official city's website for handling complaints, so that they can spend the money to use it and make it effective.

> No self-respecting attorney would ever trust a third-party site with zero verification. You would literally get more accurate information from Twitter or Facebook.

Of course they wouldn't, but now they have leads they can reach out to and verify. And if they want to give testimony, and the court will hear them, then they can do so under the threat of perjury.

> All of these issues are only going to be correctly handled by legitimate authorities anyways, this site doesn't actually solve anything

Except this hasn't been the case. There are plenty of examples of abuse of power by law enforcement being brushed under the rug by authorities until the public or their team of lawyers pressured them into doing something about it.

> All of these issues are only going to be correctly handled by legitimate authorities anyways,

I don't know why you believe this, because there's mountains of evidence contradicting this very thought. A simple google search for "poilce misconduct" will give page after page of both studies and individual cases where officers were known be abusive or committing perjury or mishandling evidence and yet this this information remained secret, and the officer remained employed for decades.

For instance David Cimperman had a long history of comitting felonies, perjury, and evidence tampering, and yet he became the Chief of Police for Amsterdam, OH. In what world is this considered "correctly handled"?

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/0...

The stated goal on the website is good: better accountability.

But I’m afraid the proposed solution may lead to doxxing and threatening of police officers and their family members, ie 2021 style mob rule.

The correct solution would be more legislation requiring police to disclose whatever it should disclose. The law should define the level of police transparency, not anonymous justice warriors.

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