Merit based pay and law enforcement is a bad mix

March 3, 2011 - PRLog -- With the passage of Senate Bill 5 in the Ohio Senate, Ohio is now one step closer to ridding the public sector of collective bargaining. There are many stipulations in the bill that affect law enforcement but one in particular that will have a negative impact on the taxpayer is merit based pay. The bill calls to eliminate salary schedules and “step” increases allowing the employer to institute a merit-based pay system.

Police officers are like everyone else, they have bills to pay. If police agencies institute merit based pay programs for their officers, we will no doubt see the birth of Gestapo style policing take effect. Having a quota in law enforcement is unethical but that is exactly what merit based pay for law enforcement is. Performance based pay works well in many industries but that mixture in law enforcement is like oil and water. They don’t mix.

There are two theories when it comes to enforcing law, by the letter of the law or the spirit of the law. For the most part, officers have some discretion in the enforcement of laws as long as that discretion is equally applied non-discriminatorily to all people. What we will begin seeing with merit based pay is officers citing for violations that they traditionally overlooked or gave warnings for because their financial livelihood is now based on quotas. This will hold particularly true for enforcement of traffic laws.

Generally speaking, a patrol officer’s priority is to take calls for service from the citizens that they serve. A police officer can not directly affect whether or not your house gets broken into or your car gets stolen, in other words, they can not create crime to enforce. There is however a surplus of vehicular traffic on the roadways all hours of the day and night, thanks to the 24 hour society we live in, that officers can stop for infractions. What we will see is more and more people getting ticketed for minor misdemeanor equipment violations such as no license plate light, one headlight out, and speeding for a few mph over the limit, etc. I don’t believe this is the general publics’ main concern but you can bet that it will start to become the focus of officers as they are forced to "perform"

The pressure to perform will take officers attention off of important issues such as criminal patrol and refocus that attention onto traffic violations as those are easily attainable statistics that will justify the officer’s performance. Most people I know and speak with are much more concerned about the security and safety of themselves and their possessions than they are law enforcement running the roads and ticketing people for minor traffic violations. Merit based pay will affect the citizens in the end.

Jason Ratcliff can be contacted through his website at http://www.empowerdls.com/

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