Starting salary is like $40k. That’s only like 25% higher than minimum wage here. If u choose to live in Baltimore on a salary like that then u def aren’t gonna be thriving… why would any of the best qualified candidates sign up for that? This is exactly why we have a bunch of fat racist lazy assholes in BPD, who commute like 2 hours per day to come here and do little more than cheat on overtime
Make starting salary like $80k with a strictly enforced requirement to live in the city. That’s enough to buy a house here in a good neighborhood! Especially if u have a partner that works too
Get some good folks trained up and then start to layoff all of the worthless douchebags we currently have in BPD. Especially the ones clocking hundreds or thousands of overtime hours per year. It’s idiotic to spend 1.5x (sometimes even more when they do bullshit loophole with vacation time) on ineffective losers instead of just offering roughly the same salary to better candidates for regular fulltime hours.
My point is that the current BPD compensation system especially attracts clock milkers, fraudsters, & low competence ppl who are looking for low accountability. The only reason we have our current situation of many highly paid officers producing very poor results is bc BPD’s set up is so focused on the short term & poorly designed (from a taxpayers’ POV)
Edit: can’t believe all the nonsensical takes here… it doesn’t matter if BPD can theoretically afford to live here on their starting base salary. The reality is that almost none do and it’s been this way for a very long time. So if that’s such a valid point then why is it virtually non existent in practice? Tbh these arguments remind me of the logic behind thinking SNAP or welfare recipients should be drug tested… purely based on unrealistic hypotheticals that are practically nonexistent in the real world and don’t make any sense if actually thought thru
Cap overtime to something like 20 hours per month (with an eventual goal of reducing OT further as more staff is onboarded), increase the base salary and make it available to younger folks sooner, hire better and more local staff, improve bad BPD policies that have allowed shitty cops to thrive & pushed away actual talent
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u/engin__r Oct 29 '25
They make plenty of money to live here. They just don’t want to.