Following City Council action on Tuesday, April 6, the starting salaries for police officers will be raised in September when a new class enters the Greensboro Police Academy.
The raise was proposed by Greensboro City Manager David Parrish and was praised by most members of the City Council. The motion by City Councilmember Justin Outling to approve the raise and additional raises so new recruits don’t end up making more than officers already on the force passed by a unanimous vote.
The raise is from $38,987 to $40,212, or a raise of $1,225 a year. The stated purpose of the raise is to help Greensboro recruit a sufficient number of officers, not simply to keep up with attrition but to fill the open positions. Police Chief Brian James told the City Council that the number of authorized police officers is 683 and that he currently had 611 fully trained sworn officers on the force.
The Police Department normally graduates two Police Academy classes a year and the normal attrition rate for officers is about 60 per year. So to stay even each class needs to have 30 officers graduate and then complete field training. James said they needed classes with 40 people for the next couple of years to get back to full strength. Recent classes have graduated less than 20.
This raise is supposed to make it possible to more than double the size of the Police Academy classes. James said that the biggest obstacle to recruiting new officers was the pay, and when you look at what other police departments in the state are paying, it doesn’t appear a $1,225 raise is going to be enough.
The starting salary in High Point will still be higher, at $40,357, plus High Point offers a 5 percent salary increase for an associates degree and a 10 percent increase for a bachelor’s degree.
So someone with a bachelor’s degree would start in Greensboro at $40,212 and in High Point at $44,392.
In Raleigh, someone with a bachelor’s degree starts at $43,620.
In Charlotte, the starting salary with or without a college degree is $45,757.
In Cary, the starting salary for a police officer is $48,800 and can go as high as $59,716 for those with experience, education and training.
In Huntersville, for someone with a bachelor’s degree the starting salary is $46,168 plus a 2.5 percent increase for living in town and 5 percent increase for being bilingual.
A raise from $38,987 to $40,212 won’t even make Greensboro police recruits the highest paid in Guilford County, much less the state.
NOTHING is going to help until we get RID of ALL present City Council members. They have damaged the moral and confidence of ALL the police personnel and ALL the citizens of Greensboro. They think that “THEY” can “Cure the violence” by themselves without the police department and they are keeping secrets from the citizens of OUR City which is NOT legal. Everyone is accountable for OUR actions and WE ALL have the right to know how OUR tax money is being used. NO ONE is above the law. WE citizens have the RIGHT TO KNOW the truth.
Shameful! Do you have any idea the out of pocket AND the cost of their insurance alone puts them in a poverty level with their lives always on the line.
Right! The City Council knows all this. “Defund the Police” is in full effect here, in a faux-stealth mode.
Consider the reputation of this City, the salary should approach $50,000 to have any real effect. I wouldn’t put up with all this c^*p from the City, and put my life on line for $3-4m gross dollars a month.
Talk about an understatement. Even if GPD paid $100k a year right now, who would want to be a cop? With the Chauvin trial well under way, charges for the Daunte Wright shooting just filed, the trial for Rayshard Brooks about to get started, and the general anti-police bias which is becoming ever more prevalent, who would want the job? Policing is always a tough career choice, but throw in massive negative press and overwhelming lack of public support, and you get very few people willing to risk their lives and careers on a job where one bad choice in a potentially life or death situation will lead to your downfall.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Chauvin failed to provide assistance to Floyd, and Daunte Wright did not deserve to be shot. However, we cannot blame all police for a few bad eggs and we cannot condemn all policing for the bad decisions of a few. You have the cancel culture to thank for that. Unfortunately, we will see something like that in Greensboro pretty soon because the quality of our officers will continue to decline as GPD falls further an further behind other nearby agencies. “You get what you pay for” was not a phrase created out of nowhere, but I digress.
Needless to say, the candidate pool is looking pretty small. And here come Greensboro’s city council to save the day. How do you fix a dying agency? By throwing a few dollars at it and calling it done without looking at how your decision will affect anything. What a joke. The only candidates GPD is getting, or will get in the foreseeable future, are the ones that cannot get hired elsewhere. Why else would they come here, when literally almost every other agency has better pay and benefits?
The GPD recruiters are probably working on a script right now… “Come to GPD, where the pay is almost Greensboro government’s minimum wage, and you get to park your personal car at work all week if you can find a parking space so you can borrow a work car for a few days before you return it. It’s where city council values you at $19 an hour unless you do anything even mildly upsetting to anyone who has the council in their pocket and then they will call for your public shaming and termination just like they did with those officers a few years ago in the DeJuan Yourse case, or with those officers who briefly stopped a young man on the Greenway last year because he may have been armed but turned out not to be. Yes, come one, come all. It’s not just a lousy job, it’s a civil liability adventure!”
To call city council a bunch of buffoons would insult buffoons. Good luck GPD, and good luck Greensboro, which unfortunately just added two more murders to the tally by the way.
…and one more dead yesterday. I believe that is 15 homicides already and it is not even summer. How many will it take, City Council? How many will it take to get you to do something meaningful? Gunshot detectors would not have stopped this, Cure Violence certainly didn’t, nor is inclusion training exactly going to cut it.
The only way to impact violent crime is with a highly motivated, highly trained, and well staffed police force that is hitting the streets every day. Stop being cheapskates and hire some more police.
Welcome to Clown Town, formerly known as Greensboro, soon to be known as the murder capital of NC.
How insuulting…
Thanks for the remarks.You are all the mark in pointing out the control of the city council.Even if I was graduating from the academy ,I still would not hire on with Greensboro. When will the people in Greensboro learn that all the council and the mayor needs to be voted out.I would never agree to be a police person in Greensboro.If the chief could possibly come off as a non profit,the city council would give them more money than they could use.There is a faction of of city that loves the ever loving tax increases that is coming when A Democratic person is voted in .If you would look at the county commissioners to see that the Democrats have taken over this board.GUESS what !!!! The first thing they did was give the ball team in High Point a bailout .They have promised the schools that they should get a much bigger handout after the county voted a bond in for the schools .Wake up citizens!!!!
I’ve been in G’boro for 6 months, and if you think you have CRIME here, take a trip a few hundred miles northeast. There is no neighborhood in the Triad area I wouldn’t go, any time of the day or night, because it’s just not that crowded, crime infested or dangerous. Maybe compared to MAYBERRY RFD it may be a little rougher but you’ve got NOTHING to be afraid of or ashamed about. No matter how much you pay cops, they NEVER prevent crime. They merely apprehend suspects AFTER the crimes are committed. Preventing crime requires a COMMUNITY effort, which includes a robust, diverse economy, affordable housing, places for kids to go after school and ease of citizens to get child and health care. People become criminals due to mental illness, poverty and lack of opportunity to survive doing anything else. Getting businesses back to normal, vaccinating and achieving herd immunity will do more for this community’s safety record than any number of cops you can hire.
Well, “NEVER”, in all caps no less, seems a bit untrue.
Example 1: If I wanted to rob someone and I’m trolling the area, but see it is rife with cops, I will most likely choose not too offend that night, at least in that location.
Example 2: I’m about to commit that robbery and get pulled over. Cops see my gun or find a way to search my var and get my gun. I go to jail, and a robbery is prevented.
Example 3: Cops patrolling see that I left my car door open in the driveway. They get out and talk to me about securing my valuables amd locking my doors. I become more self aware and follow their advice, and a crime is prevented.
Example 4: Cops come to my comminity meeting or to my job and give a safety talk, similar to the individual example above. Now a group of us become more self aware and less likely to be victimized.
What else you got there Steve? You did hint at a truth though. Crime exists in a community because the community tolerates it. There are no hordes of cops rolling through Irving Park, yet there is very little crime there. Why? Because the second something out of place happens, the community calls the cops. Sadly, lower socio-economic areas are less likely to activate the police and are more likely to tolerate street level, open air crime. That is I ly one reason why crime happens, but it is a big one.