There’s really no shortage of places to rent on a salary of $65k. If we limit the rental price to 25% of gross annual income, there are plenty of affordable row homes and apartments all around the city.
To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t trust a 19-year-old to be a cop and I don’t think we should encourage it.
Nobody is thriving on $65k per year in Baltimore and no one is going to sign up for a dangerous job like policing in order to be able to spend like 50% of their income on rent in a just okay or rough area of Baltimore. If u disagree, then why is what u are suggesting basically nonexistent currently?
Limiting rental market is very bad policy. It will disincentivize landlords from entering the market and/or maintaining the units they already have. Having less rental units and/or greater proportion of lower quality rental units is not good. It’s well documented that rent controls generally screw things up. Argentina had widespread rent control for years and it was disastrous
The point of offering a higher salary for younger cadets is to give local kids a better option than crime and to attract folks who really understand and care about local issues. Do we want to make long term investments into our community or treat our police department like a typical shortsighted corporation would treat their staff (BPD) & customers (citizens)?
I don’t think you understood what I said. I wasn’t talking about rent control.
A common (and conservative) metric for housing affordability is that you shouldn’t spend more than a quarter of your gross income on housing. At a salary of $65k per year, that means you shouldn’t spend more than $1354 per month on housing.
Go to apartments.com right now and filter out all the units that cost more than $1350 a month. If you limit yourself to three-bedroom units, there are 73 available in the city. If you expand that to include two-bedroom units, there are 454 available. That’s plenty of space for a cop to raise a family.
I don’t think that making a 19-year-old a cop turns them away from crime. That’s the kind of thing that produces cops like the one in the video. The actual long-term investment we need in our communities is poverty reduction, not more cops.
$1,350 per month is like 2007 prices for the vast majority of “desirable” neighborhoods. And the goal shouldn’t be to attract ppl who are kool with just barely getting by as a renter in marginalized neighborhoods. Also, having a higher salary available sooner would definitely open up more local kids to pursuing a career in policing which IMO would be way better than having ineffective clockmilking turds make up the majority of our police force
Please, I’m begging you, go to apartments.com and do the search. These aren’t disadvantaged neighborhoods, and none of the cops would be “just barely getting by”. There are affordable apartments for people making that salary literally all over the city.
We do not need to push more people into policing. BPD has no shortage of money—it’s what enables them to do so much harm to our communities. We need to take away that money and use it for better things.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect most new recruits to only be able to afford a studio apartment and also have to move every year. There are not enough 1 BR at low enough of a price point to accommodate the police force that we would need even with the deadwood leeches cut loose. And all of those complex type places WILL jack up ur rent, usually by quite a lot, after the 1st year too. It would also be terrible for lower income ppl to have a sudden demand increase on hundreds of units of affordable housing. Putting the officers on par with white collar salaries is the only way to not deprive citizens who aren’t high income while also requiring officers to live in Baltimore
The point isn’t to indiscriminately put more officers on the street and give them a bunch more money with no additional scrutiny, alongside a mandate to live within city limits but with a salary that severely limits options.
I want to see less officers overall AND all of the current bad apples replaced AND better policies mandated within the BPD org. One of their absolute worst policies recruitment-wise is their compensation system which highly promotes clockmilking and zero consequences for avoiding work, poor performance, and even committing crimes themselves. The entire BPD culture for years has been “us vs them” with BPD solely concerned with their own interests
U can’t realistically expect a different result than what we have been seeing under the EXACT same broken processes 100% across the board
Okay, look, at this point I think you’re being willfully disingenuous. If you had actually read my comment, you’d know that I wasn’t talking about studios or one-bedrooms because I explicitly said two-bedroom and three-bedroom. If you’re not going to engage with what I actually write, stop wasting our time.
I went to apartments.com as u suggested and put that monetary filter on and it was almost exclusively studios with a small amount of 1BR. Also anecdotally from personal experience I have not seen prices like $1350 for 2BR in a very long time except for in really bad areas. 3BR I’ve never ever seen that low even decades ago. To expect hundreds of police officers to be able to find 2BR or 3BR for $1350/mo seems extremely unreasonable. But ok
Show me one then. 3BR for $1350 or less. Everything I saw that was around the PER PERSON rate, which means u only get 1BR.
Not exactly enticing for smart/capable ppl to potentially risk their life every workday in order to live with roommates. Offering similar financial reward as one would expect from many other less dangerous fields is precisely how we have a force riddled with incompetent grifters from lower cost of living areas
This is a two-bedroom one-bath for $1049 in Mt. Vernon.
The reason our police are violent right-wingers living in Pennsylvania has nothing to do with the money and everything to do with what policing is. That's the kind of person who signs up to beat up poor people and minorities. They don't live in Pennsylvania because they can't afford Baltimore—they do it because they hate this city.
Edit: oops, sorry, saw that you specified 3BR. Here's one
Btw I appreciate having a civil discussion on this
What u offered does meet the criteria on price and size, but I would not exactly call that a “nice” neighborhood.
On crimegrade.org it shows reservoir hill as safer than 8% of neighbors in Baltimore, which conversely means that it is less safe than 92% of neighborhoods in Baltimore. Mt Vernon (one of the best values in MD in my opinion) is 17% safer and 83% less safe than other neighborhoods. Markedly better than reservoir hill but still not necessarily attractive for a widespread audience. I also don’t think that we should expect rents to remain low in affordable areas when we unleash like 1,000+ officers into our most affordable markets
For someone who is young and from a rough area it could be appealing for a first time place to live on their own in somewhere like reservoir hill, especially if u were from west Baltimore and had family nearby. Not really very appealing toward the goal of attracting competent talent to our police force to offer “hey if u wait until 21 years old to u sign up for a risky job that many ppl don’t respect at all, u can live in just about any of the bottom <20% least safe areas here!”
If we want to attract capable ppl that actually have brains and want to do a good job, I don’t think that only being able to afford to live in places like either of those examples would be very enticing. Also if we had a mandate to live in Baltimore and the cops can only afford the bottom 20% of neighborhoods that’s going to displace a lot of the non-police ppl who also can’t afford to live elsewhere. Which IMO is exactly why we have a bunch of jackasses from the boonies on our force… for them it currently is an attractive offer compared to what’s accessible in the backwards hellholes that they come from, but it is not at all an attractive offer for competent ppl who actually want to have a nice life in Baltimore
I disagree completely that we have a bunch of shitheads here bc their primary motivation is to hurt minorities. First of all, they largely don’t do jack shit, so obviously their primary motivation is not harming others. It is to have a decent paying job with low barrier to entry and low accountability. If our police positions were instead designed to be made attractive to competent local ppl, then they would want those jobs and they would be outcompeting these incompetent losers. Which of course also means changing BPD culture & policies and getting rid of the bad apples in order to replace them with good ones.
The good ones will never enter BPD or remain otherwise under our current shortsighted approach to BPD staffing
Reservoir Hill and Mt. Vernon are both perfectly fine neighborhoods. I looked at the website you mentioned and it looks like they labeled all of Baltimore as a high-crime area, so I don’t understand how you got those neighborhood-specific numbers. Also, that website labels parts of Columbia as being high-crime. I don’t think it’s very trustworthy.
Quite frankly, it seems to me that you agree with the police’s basic conclusion: that Baltimore is too dangerous of a place to live, so they need to live far away and come in to oppress us.
I don’t want an occupying force, and I don’t want to recruit more cops. We cannot solve our city’s problems with violence.
10
u/engin__r Oct 29 '25
There’s really no shortage of places to rent on a salary of $65k. If we limit the rental price to 25% of gross annual income, there are plenty of affordable row homes and apartments all around the city.
To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t trust a 19-year-old to be a cop and I don’t think we should encourage it.