The Tucson City Council has informally signed off on a plan to help keep more police officers patrolling the streets by cutting back on the number of new recruits hired next fiscal year.
Specifically, the council has reduced the projected number of police officers it plans to hire in fiscal year 2019 from 120 to 110. The city will turn the roughly $650,000 set aside for training those 10 officers into raises for experienced officers.
In all, the city has set aside a total of $3.26 million for retaining police officers in an effort to stem a troubling trend of experienced officers leaving the force over pay.
Last week, Police Chief Chris Magnus told the council that some experienced officers could see as much as a 15 percent raise next fiscal year. Under the plan, most officers that have worked for the city for at least two years would see some form of a pay raise.
An Arizona Daily Star analysis of officer salaries in 2017 found the average base salary for Tucson Police Department officers was $50,060.
Magnus said had the city not suspended annual pay increases roughly a decade ago — referred to as “steps” — many officers would be making a lot more than a 15 percent increase.
“They would have gotten a much higher increase if they had gotten all the steps,” he said.
Magnus said the latest proposal addresses what he sees an ongoing crisis — the high number of high-performing, experienced officers leaving for better jobs elsewhere, something the department calls “dysfunctional turnover.”
He has said these unexpected departures have been increasing in the department for the last two years. In fiscal years 2016 and 2017 there were 28 of these departures, according to a police memo.
Replacing an experienced police officer is expensive — the city spends about $100,000 to train a recruit in a process that takes about a year.
Magnus said the city already cemented plans to hire 100 officers next year to offset natural attrition, primarily due to retirement.
Plans were in place to hire an additional 20 officers in the next fiscal cycle, part of a strategy to increase the size of the department.
The city missed its goal of hiring 20 additional officers this fiscal year due to higher-than-anticipated numbers of officers leaving for better-paying jobs.
Magnus doesn’t want the public to read too much into the desire to hire 10 fewer officers next year.
“It is not just 10 — it is 10 more than 100 were are already hiring,” Magnus said. “What this allows us to do is have a little more money to help those officers who’ve fallen particularly far behind (in pay) and are most likely to leave the department.”
Mayor Jonathan Rothschild told Magnus the strategy will be tested in the coming year, and that he is hopeful the results show more officers staying. Councilman Paul Cunningham said the new plan is a compromise between competing proposals from the city manager, the police chief and the police union.
Magnus called the new proposal a “win” for the officers, even though he had proposed a strategy that would have given 7.5 percent to most officers. The new strategy is more targeted to experienced officers.
Sgt. Jason Winsky, with the Tucson Police Officers’ Association, said the union supports the latest proposal and that trying to hire 120 officers in a fiscal year would be difficult.
And it wasn’t a practical goal, given the number of officers who leave the department every month. “You are pouring water in the top of the bucket when there is a hole in the bottom of the bucket,” Winsky said.
He estimated about 400 officers would get a sizable pay raise next fiscal year. The city has roughly 800 police officers.
