Quinn for long haul
It’s not entirely clear what makes the contract agreement between the city of Boston and the largest police union “historic,” as both parties proclaim, other than the fact that it didn’t take years to resolve and end up before an arbitrator. A rather low bar to clear.
That the deal is done is a good thing, of course, and 2 percent annual raises are certainly within reason. But there’s always more to the story, which brings us to the burden that will now fall on the city to fully fund benefits of the Quinn Bill.
Quinn provides salary incentives to cops who seek higher education, with pay bumps between 10 percent and 25 percent. The program has come a long way from its early days, when officers could essentially mail away for a degree from one of several notorious diploma mills, but in our view it’s still an ineffective way of achieving the goal of an educated workforce.
The cost of the local-option program used to be split between the state and cities and towns that adopted its provisions. But in 2010 the state withdrew most of its funding, and communities were left to come up with their own solutions. Some opted out of the incentives altogether.
Boston police unions sued to require the city to fund 100 percent of the incentives, but the state’s highest court ruled in 2012 that cities and towns aren’t automatically obligated to go beyond their 50 percent share. A 2013 arbitration award for the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association required the city to fund the Quinn Bill at 75 percent. The new contract goes even farther in that direction, voluntarily increasing the city’s obligation to 100 percent within four years.
It’s not a huge surprise, given that the union representing Hub detectives scored more Quinn Bill funding through arbitration in 2015. But if a community believes its police force should be college-educated it ought to make it a requirement of the job (and increase salaries accordingly). The Quinn Bill is an inefficient and unnecessarily complicated way to pad officers’ paychecks.