The Gwinnett County Police Department can empathize with those baseball teams forced to compete against deep-pocketed franchises like the Yankees and Dodgers.
Except that it’s not just the big-market departments that are outspending Gwinnett on new police hires. Johns Creek and Lilburn, for example, offer a starting salary roughly $5,000 higher. And Johns Creek will be giving its officers a raise in 2014.
Hence, it may not be surprising that so far in 2013, a staggering 48 officers have resigned from the Gwinnett department. In the previous three years combined, Gwinnett watched 78 officers leave for greener pastures.
“We’ve got to stop the bleeding,” said Gwinnett Police Chief Charlie Walters during hearings last week for the county’s 2014 budget, which will be presented Dec. 1. Gwinnett officers — who, depending on their experience, receive starting salaries from $35,023 to $37, 648 — haven’t received a raise since 2009.
Gwinnett Commission Chairwoman Charlotte Nash said she hopes to address employee pay in next year’s budget but adds it’s too early to commit to any raises.
“The biggest hurdle is the increased cost of employee health care,” Nash said in an email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Altogether, we expect that our health care costs will rise by over $5 million or more.”
If the county is unable to come up with the money, expect the defections, driven by a simple case of supply and demand, to continue.
“They don’t want to leave but they’re not being given much of a choice,” said former Gwinnett police officer Mike Puglise, who now practices law in Snellville. “These are qualified people that are leaving and it’s hard to replace that experience.”
Officers cited uncompetitive wages as their reason for leaving in nearly all of the exit interviews conducted by the department.
“The lack of annual salary or cost of living increases … placed me in a situation where I am having a very difficult time providing necessities, not comforts, for my wife and two young children,” wrote one officer.
But he had options.
Earlier this year five Gwinnett officers took jobs with Brookhaven’s nascent police department, where the pay scale ranges from $39,000 to $55,000. Brookhaven officials received more than 1,500 applications for 54 openings, the majority of which came from officers working at metro area agencies, said City Manager Marie L. Garrett.
Puglise said he remembered when Gwinnett was the department poaching officers from other departments.
“The city of Atlanta went through this same thing and Gwinnett took advantage,” he said.
The exodus of officers also has a financial impact, according to Walters.
At (last) week’s budget hearings, he said the minimum cost to replace each sworn officer lost through voluntary attrition is between $33,166 and $46,822.
Training those new officers is also costly.
“You don’t just transfer a patrol officer to a SWAT team,” Puglise said. “You have to learn these things. And when you’re losing experienced officers, you’re spending more on training.”
Highest average starting salaries for metro area police officers
Source: Source: Gwinnett Police Department
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