NBC News Highlights Low Pay Offered by Some St. Louis-Area Police Departments

NBC News
has a story on its website based on pay data collected from 24
police departments in the St. Louis Area, arguing that the gap from
department to department means “Many of America’s Finest Struggle
on Poverty Wages,” as the headline notes.

The story itself doesn’t include too much substance; the average
pay for the 24 departments is listed but mostly NBC News talks to
an officer paid $10.50 an hour in Hillsdale. Unsurprisingly,
because the piece is trying to find sympathy for cops, the officer
chosen to feature the gap through is African-American.

Here’s a quote that comes close to a substantive point for the
piece:

“In areas without a tax base to speak of, where residents live
in poverty already, communities are saddled with a police force
that is underpaid and under resourced in other ways,” says David
Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies
policing. “It’s another form of a penalty for being poor.”

Unmentioned is Radley Balko’s
recent expose for The Washington Post, which found
municipalities across the St. Louis-area using the poor, and
policing them with fines and penalties, as a significant source of
revenue. All the “resources” that come from the transfer of
military surplus from the federal government to local police
agencies was also unmentioned.

Neither was there any attempt to correlate high pay with decent
service. Do cities with better paid cops have better behaved cops?
I don’t know of any evidence that points to that, and the NBC piece
didn’t try to tackle the question at all. Instead, it played to
emotion. NBC News’ cable affiliate has spent the last several
months taking a critical, if racialized, look at policing in the
United States. In that context, this piece wasn’t surprising. It
didn’t have the kind of information that would be useful, like
what’s listed above, nor did it address how police brutality and

union rules that protect bad cops contribute to police
departments not having the resources to, uh, properly serve poor
people.

But what is listed is how much Darren Wilson, the Ferguson cop
who shot and killed Michael Brown, is getting paid, along with the
observation that it’s more than the cop NBC News featured in its
story.

It’s not a story interested in structural police reforms, the
kind that would lead to better cops and even better pay, insomuch
as eliciting an emotional reaction, grafting the issue of income
inequality onto the issue of police conduct, and maybe playing the
race card.