General Assembly OK’s state police raises, bonuses
Active-duty state police will get $3,500 bonuses and 2.5 percent annual salary increases under a four-year contract approved Wednesday by the General Assembly. The House began debate shortly after 1 p.m. and 90 minutes later, the legislation was approved 142-1, with Rep. Gale Mastrofrancesco, R-Wolcott, the lone dissenter.
The Senate began discussing the contract around the time of the House vote and an hour later, the resolution passed in a 35-1 vote, with
Sen. Rob Sampson, RWolcott, opposed.
First-year State troopers will get a two-stage $17,000 increase over the $50,000 entry pay, to more than $67,000 by 2025. Department employees with the longest service will also get 2 percent lump payments, and all agency employees will get a new $500-a-year stipend for health club, yoga and gym memberships in the attempt to attract and retain new troopers to the 870 members of the union.
“It’s important,” said Speaker of the House Matt Ritter, D-Hartford. “We need more numbers. We need to recruit better and hopefully this will help.”
State Rep. Mike D’Agostino, D-Hamden, cochairman of the General Law Committee, who introduced the bill in the House, noted that in recent years 400 State troopers have left the agency, some going to suburban departments that pay substantially more. “It’s far below the 1,000 we need just to cut overtime,” he said, stressing that the main competition for the State Police personnel are towns and cities.
Rep. Tammy Nuccio, RTolland, a top Republican on the General Law Committee, noted that the contract includes provisions to give troopers an easier path to higher pay grades.
D’Agostino said that the contract includes a controversial section to protect some personal privacy of troopers, such as health issues, but allow other records to become public information, including complaints on actions in the field.
The contract was unanimously approved in the budget-writing Appropriations Committee last week, although some conservative Republicans attempted to bring the controversial police transparency and accountability legislation of 2020 into the panel’s debate, but were discouraged by committee co-chairwoman Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, who led the Senate debate Wednesday afternoon.
Several House and Senate members on Wednesday raised the issues again.
“The department should determine what they need in terms of troopers and we should be working toward funding that number,” House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Haven, told reporters Wednesday morning. He stressed that some suburban police departments seem to be more-attractive to law enforcement personnel who might want to work in quieter communities, as opposed to busy big-city departments. “Being a State Police officer has very different responsibilities than being a police officer, say, in Avon,” Rojas
The contract was unanimously approved in the budget-writing Appropriations Committee last week, although some conservative Republicans attempted to bring the controversial police transparency and accountability legislation of 2020 into the panel’s debate.
said.
GOP lawmakers on Wednesday announced several proposals that would amend the accountability law, which itself was in response to the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police.
Nuccio raised the issue while stressing that the cost of the raises and new benefits, about $68 million, might be high. She said that nationally, police are being discouraged, even in Connecticut, where the troopers are some of the highest training, but short staffing is raising overtime and compromising public safety. “They don’t have the time to respond to traffic enforcement,” she said. “They’re out there handling the crime. They can’t handle traffic enforcement.”
A major criticism of the accountability law was a section on so-called qualified immunity, in which on paper, rogue police officers could become liable in civil court if convicted of the abuse of suspects.
“I’d like to see consent searches being allowed again,” said Rep. Tom O’Dea, R-New Canaan. “We need to encourage active policing, putting qualified immunity back before trial so that our police officers can act reasonably under the circumstances. I’m pleading with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, begging some, they say, let’s go more for our State Police, our municipal police.”
Ritter noted that no such suits have yet emerged. “If that is a concern, that has not come to the forefront through litigation,” said Ritter, a lawyer. “There was a concern of windfall lawsuits and that just hasn’t happened. The standard is still pretty strict and pretty rigorous. When you have an example like you saw with George Floyd that would be a pretty rare, extreme but necessary example where you would get of qualified immunity. It’s criminal.”
Republicans have introduced legislation to overturn another key section of the bill that ended the habit of police asking stopped motorists to examine the contents of their vehicles under a socalled consent-search law that is now prohibited in the accountability legislation as well as the legalized cannabis bill of last year.
Earlier this week, Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said that he opposes the proposed change and the bill is unlikely to reach the committee floor for a vote. Democrats have a 24-12 majority in the Senate and a 95-53 edge in the House, pending three special elections.
“The General Assembly has a lot of work to do to earn the confidence of our law enforcement community in the wake of the antagonistic ‘police accountability’ bill,” said House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, RNorth Branford, in a statement Wednesday morning. “And it’s my hope that our colleagues across the aisle will finally take serious the challenges their legislation poses not just to recruitment and morale, but also to the ability of officers to keep our communities safe.”
The GOP proposals include the creation of a special funding account to benefit the families of officers killed in action.