Force Is With Us!

The search for a location for a new police training facility has been debated for several decades. Many possible locations have been reviewed and rejected over the years. Queens held its collective breath!
Now it is official, the police force will be with us in Queens - in College Point to be exact. The $1 billion plus project is a tremendous boon to the borough and the area.
In announcing plans for the 30-acre campus, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly pointed out that the hi-tech academy will have 250 classrooms, firing ranges, indoor and outdoor tracks, and a simulated subway station within a tactical training village.
The current academy on East 20th Street in Manhattan, the weapons training currently done at a firing range in The Bronx and emergency-vehicle training conducted at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn will all be consolidated on the site which is currently a NYPD tow pound in Queens.
Rookie cops, while in training, will no longer have to endure inadequate toilet facilities, jogging along the FDR Drive or split day and night sessions.
They will however, still have to endure disgracefully low pay and lots of out-of-pocket uniform expenses. We need to pay our rookie police officers in training a living wage; $25,100 a year is not enough!
Cops maximum base pay tops out at just $59,588 after seven years on the job.
This figure is hardly comparable to the top pay police at the Port Authority and Nassau County receive.
Now to make things worse, The Daily News reported recently that cops promoted to the rank of sergeant earn less than $2,000 more than their top pay - a mere $61,093. Sergeants are the first line of supervisors who oversee police officers, account for their whereabouts and actions and ensure that procedures are followed correctly.
Out of the 20,867 officers eligible to take the February 3 sergeant’s exam, only 3,856 took the test with only 255 passing. The NYPD’s leadership crisis continues up the chain of command as only half of the eligible sergeants took the lieutenant’s exam and only 35 percent of eligible lieutenants took the captain’s exam.
If top-flight personnel cannot afford to be promoted, who is going to run the Police Department? - A topical question posed by John Driscoll, president of the Captain’s Endowment Association.
This brain drain is directly related to glaringly inadequate compensation resulting in large numbers of trained officers leaving the NYPD for better paying positions.
We must find more money for our Finest.