Crime doesn’t pay in West New York, but being a police officer sure does.
The working-class north Hudson town of roughly 52,000 spends nearly 20% of his annual budget, or $19.6 million, on its police department, and it doesn’t even have a police chief, according to the latest payroll records.
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“Public safety employees are generally the highest compensated primarily because they have collective bargaining rights and binding arbitration,” said Marc Pfeiffer, assistant director of Rutgers University’s Bloustein Local, the local government research unit at the Center for Urban Policy Research.
And some get more than others.