According to a new survey from The City’s Department of Human Resources, San Francisco cops and firefighters have one of the highest base salaries in the state.
The minimum pay for a San Francisco police officer is $6,884 a month or $82,608 a year. For a firefighter, it’s $6,110 a month or $73,320 a year. Analysis shows that a San Francisco police and firefighter’s base pay is respectively 26 and 30 percent higher than the average of the state’s largest cities.
Trailing closely behind is San Jose, the next highest-paid city. Police there get the base pay of $6,720 a month. On the other end of the spectrum, the lowest paid city of the eight major cities surveyed in California is Sacramento, where officers receive $4,648 a month.
However, wages and benefits seem to be a trade off said Steven Ponder, classification and compensation manager for San Francisco. Other cities such as Santa Clara, San Jose, Berkeley and Sunnyvale all provide higher compensation packages that include better medical insurance and pension contributions than San Francisco.
San Francisco Police Officers Association President Gary Delagnes said that the high pay rates for officers are justified, especially since San Francisco is an expensive city and being a police is a tough job.
“We have the highest cost of living in the U.S., with the exception of, perhaps, New York City,” Delagnes said. “We have one of the hardest cities, without dispute, to be a police officer in the country. We are the highest paid and we feel as though we deserve it.”
