To All Delegates and Members

August 4, 2004

If anyone is unsure why the City refuses to pay us like professionals, you need only look to the public comments of our leadership at the NYPD. While paying lip service to the tremendous job we have done in a recent television interview and acknowledging the PBA’s position regarding our excellent performance in light of far fewer police officers, our Commissioner takes on the role of budget and labor advisor to the Mayor, concluding that essentially nothing can be done with our paltry salaries because of the City’s inability to pay and the City’s settlement with the civilian workers. With comments like these from the police leadership, our fight is made tougher. Even Commissioner Safir, a leader with no previous institutional ties to the NYPD, publicly stated that New York City Police Officers were “underpaid.”

Here is the position of the police leadership on our compensation, quoted verbatim from the transcript of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s interview on NY1:

Goldin (NY1): As you know, the Police Union has been complaining for months that they don’t have a contract, talks of perhaps a sick out, perhaps during the Republican Convention, do you know have any message to the cops who are on the street who are angry they don’t have more money?

Mr. Kelly: They’re doing a super job. Look at what they’ve done with less cops—several thousand fewer cops than we had four years ago. We all know they deserve a raise and they have said that, but it gets back to the ability to pay. I’ve been around a long time and it’s always been that way, and unfortunately, cops negotiate for like 150,000 city workers.

Everybody’s salary in some way, shape, or form seems to be tied to the police officers’ salary, so it holds them back. But I know that they’ll live up to their oath of office. I’ve been around a long time, I’ve seen these disputes that happen through the years, cops always do their jobs.

As is evidenced from these comments, our leadership has not attempted to feed a family on a police officer’s salary in some time and clearly has some other agenda other than the welfare of the NYPD and its personnel.

Most disturbing is the jaundiced and uninformed recollection of the history of labor relations. Does the Commissioner know the City has claimed an inability to pay us for the past 14 years? Additionally, after years of police officers consistently receiving raises in excess of civilian workers during the Koch administration, it was the Dinkins administration (during our leader’s first go round as Commissioner, not coincidentally) that the City imposed a lock step pattern between civilian workers and police officers. Even the Giuliani administration repudiated the concept of pattern bargaining between civilians and police officers in the last round, awarding police officers more than civilians.

The bottom line is when our agency head is siding with the Mayor’s number crunchers and labor advisors, the road to a fair contract is made tremendously more difficult. If this is our leadership’s opinion, when asked by reporters in the future to support their troops’ fight for fair pay, then they should simply stand mute. They would do less damage.

And we continue to produce record outputs for this leadership. The question is: Why?

Fraternally,

Patrick J. Lynch
President