Salary data: Mid-Valley law enforcement among highest paid public employees

Law enforcement officers are often the highest-paid public employees in cities and counties throughout Oregon, with some earning more than paid elected officials and department heads when overtime payouts are included.

The Statesman Journal, using the state public records law, filed numerous requests to state and local government agencies for data detailing how much public employees are being paid. The results of those requests, with salary data for more than 76,000 government positions, can be found online at data.statesmanjournal.com/salary/.

In Salem, a police sergeant was the highest-paid employee in the city in fiscal 2022 at $232,296 when his $84,537 overtime payout was added to his $147,759 salary. In Keizer, a sergeant earned $156,720 when his $5,434 overtime pay was included, more than the city manager and all but two department heads.

It's unclear how much overtime Marion County Sheriff's Office employees were paid.

When the Statesman Journal requested overtime data, the county asked for an additional $287 beyond the $49 initially charged and paid for other salary data.

According to the provided salary data, 60 Sheriff's Office employees earned more than the county commissioners' $104,000 salary, and an undersheriff earned $164,572, more than the former sheriff.

See the database: Who makes what in Salem-area government agencies?

In Polk County, five people who worked as deputies or at the county jail earned more than Sheriff Mark Garton's salary of $112,476 in the 2022 fiscal year. That was a combination of salaries, incentives and overtime.

“Wasn’t supposed to, but yeah,” Polk County administrative officer Greg Hansen said.

State law says the sheriff of a county must be the highest-paid person in the department, according to Polk County.

The sheriff is an elected official. In Polk County, his pay is determined by the three non-elected members of the county’s compensation committee. They gave him a raise for the 2022-2023 fiscal year to get him back ahead of his employees.

Why does law enforcement make so much?

A combination of factors plays a role in why law enforcement employees often bring home more money than government employees in other departments.

They include union-negotiated contracts, shortages of officers creating competition between departments for officers, opportunities for overtime and merit-based pay increases.

“Without a doubt having a large number of vacancies increases your reliance on overtime to cover necessary duties," Salem Police chief Trevor Womack said. "We have vacancies at officer, sergeant, and lieutenant levels. Sergeants receive overtime for extra hours worked. Some employees desire overtime and volunteer for open and necessary overtime assignments, which include administrative duties and training, not just emergency call response.”

For example, Salem Police said, the top-earning sergeant is also a detective so the overtime included training and detective work as well as emergency response.

In the tight job market for officers, departments often vie for the same employees. Departments in small cities have a hard time retaining officers because they can't offer as much pay as one in a larger city, a county or the state police department.

In Stayton, the starting salary for an entry-level officer is $61,439, according to job listings. In Dallas, it is $66,623. In Salem, the starting hourly wage for an officer is advertised as $33.96, which equates to about $67,000 per year.

And small-town departments have limited budgets to increase pay to retain officers.

Aumsville city administrator Ron Harding said the budget to pay officers is limited, so officers frequently move up to bigger departments.

"It’s a struggle to keep people," Harding said.

According to a national survey conducted by Police Executive Research Forum, there were 40% more resignations by officers in 2021 than in 2020. About half were to take a position at another agency.

That leaves other departments playing catch up.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average police officer in the country earns $66,000.

In Oregon, the average officer earns $78,000. Though it is above the national average, it is below California’s $102,000 (the highest in the country) and Washington’s $92,000.

When it comes to police officers, parole and probation officers, and officers who work at the county jail, their pay is often determined through union-negotiated contracts. The officers in only a few smaller police departments are not represented by a union.

“They have a more powerful bargaining position vs. the general employees,” Hansen said. “That’s why you tend to see a discrepancy in cops’ salaries being higher than most others."

Marion County Commissioner Colm Willis said the high level of pay for officers carries with it a high level of responsibility.

“If we’re going to pay you $100,000 a year to be a police officer, then we expect you to be pretty darn near perfect,” he said. “It’s important that you have professionals, you have highly trained professionals, that you have people with big hearts that are compassionate, that have the soft skills, and that you pay them well."

Being a police officer is a dangerous and stressful job, Harding said. Paying officers is one way of keeping them happy and on the job.

"There’s not too many professions out there where you go and if you made an error in judgment or maybe you didn’t make an error in judgment, it’s just the circumstances of what happened doing your job, and now you’re facing criminal charges," Harding said.

See also: A comparison of Salem and Eugene city salaries

'Access to a lot more overtime'

Officers can increase their pay through education, certification, being bilingual, longevity and overtime. They also have access to more overtime opportunities than other government employees, Hansen said.

Hansen said if a police officer makes a routine traffic stop at the end of a shift, it can take two hours of overtime to fill out all the paperwork that goes along with that stop.

“And if there’s a wreck or an event, they may go five, six, seven, eight hours,” Hansen said.

“And then the other thing where they get a lot of overtime, and it’s not necessarily overtime, it’s additional time, when they have to come to grand jury and it’s their day off, or they have to come to court and it’s their day off.  So then they get X hours no matter what.”

Hansen said the state also supplies money to Polk County to cover overtime costs for deputies to patrol state-owned roads like Highway 22.

One Polk County Sheriff's Office patrol sergeant earned an extra $10,164 in overtime in fiscal 2022, according to the salary data.

Researcher: Risks start to increase after 12 hours straight

In addition to the added taxpayer cost of overtime payouts, there are also concerns about the mental and physical impacts of working many extra hours each day — particularly for a job that requires life-or-death decisions.

Lois James, a professor at Washington State University who researches the impacts of lack of sleep, said working too many hours presents health risks for officers and negatively impacts their performance and interactions with the public.

James, the principal investigator at Washington State University's Simulated Hazardous Operational Tasks Laboratory, works with departments to find that balance and consider the time of the shift, whether someone is a morning or night person and other factors when assigning overtime shifts.

The lab studies the impacts of fatigue on law enforcement performance, though she said their work is relevant to all first responders.

James said because of "huge staffing shortages," overtime is "sort of an unfortunate reality at the moment."

Departments should be tracking how many overtime hours employees are working, she said, especially when they're extending existing shifts.

"The science really, really shows that after 12 hours, the risks start to increase," she said.

A big risk that James has studied in the lab is falling asleep at the wheel, and the lab also has looked at impacts on public interaction.

Research didn't find any effect on basic marksmanship, she said, but fatigue did impact judgment and decision-making.

Fatigue reduces the threshold for the amount of evidence an officer might typically require to make a decision like whether to shoot someone, she said. That doesn't mean officers are making snap judgments, she said, but it does mean they don't weigh the evidence as much and are more influenced by implicit biases.

The same impacts apply to other uses of force and to more routine and mundane calls, she said.

Officers are less likely to de-escalate situations when they're tired or working an extended shift, James said.

It isn't just public safety at risk, James said: There also are huge health risks for officers.

Shift work contributes to law enforcement employees having a 10-year reduced lifespan, she said, and there are increased risks of mental illness, cancer, metabolic syndromes, anxiety, depression and more.

"It’s very well established that working too many hours … is not very good for you," James said.

Reporter Whitney Woodworth and former Eugene Register-Guard reporter Megan Banta contributed to this report. Bill Poehler covers Marion and Polk County for the Statesman Journal. Contact him at bpoehler@StatesmanJournal.com

This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Mid-Valley law enforcement among highest paid public employees