Hartford’s top-paid employees are all members of the Police Department. Here’s why and a look at all city salaries.

The city of Hartford’s five highest-compensated municipal employees were all members of the police department, averaging $254,289 in combined base salary, overtime, special event and private duty payments from July 1, 2021 through June 16, 2022, according to data released by the city.

Police Capt. Jeffrey Rousseau — who earned $288,205, with a base salary of $141,852.28, private duty payments of $143,733.41 and $2,619 in special-event pay — was the highest-paid municipal employee out of 1,745 people who received at least one payment from the city of Hartford in 2021-22.

The next four highest-paid municipal employees were Sgt. Robert Hathaway ($257,703 total, $96,608 base salary, $160,516 in overtime and $577 in special event pay), Lt. Martin Cunningham ($247,424, $106,315 base pay, $27,244.88 in special event pay, $26,225.49 in private duty pay and $87,638.04 in overtime), Officer Quang Tran ($239,747.17, $78,599.87 in base pay, $87,511.38 in private duty pay, $70,953.09 in overtime and $2,682.83 in special event pay) and Capt. Gabriel Laureano ($238,367.95, $134,054.06 in base pay, $101,995.71 in private duty pay, $1,356.99 in overtime and $961.19 in special event pay).

By comparison, Hartford Police Chief Jason Thody, the top-ranked member of the Police Department, earned $153,699.05 and Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin earned $174,494.29.

A total of 37 municipal employees, all of whom were public safety employees, earned more than Bronin, the data shows, and 485 employees (about 27% of the city’s 2022 workforce, which includes, for the purposes of this article, per diem workers such as poll monitors who received small, one-time payments for their work) were paid more than $100,000.

The overwhelming majority of employees who were paid six figures worked for either the Police Department, which had a budget of $48.2 million in 2022, or the Fire Department.

But experts and city officials say the city is far from being an outlier when it comes to compensating its employees, particularly in the realm of public safety.

“It’s not just statewide, it’s nationwide,” Mike Lawlor, a former state official and an associate professor in the criminal justice department of the University of New Haven, said concerning the compensation earned by police officers.

“It’s happening everywhere. It’s not that their salary has changed, it’s all the overtime that they are working. The salary, the compensation, if anything, has gone down if you count benefits, especially retirement,” Lawlor said. “What used to be a straightforward defined benefit system is now in many towns it’s switching over to a defined contribution. …

“But on top of that many officers, especially those who want to do it, can work an almost unlimited amount of overtime,” he said. “That is what accounts for the huge compensation you see some officers get. It’s a national trend, it’s happening statewide, it’s happening in Hartford.”

Further, companies not only reimburse the city the money police personnel make from private duty assignments, but the city actually profits from such assignments, said Hartford city councilor James Sanchez, who is the chairman of the public safety committee.

“When it comes to special events, a lot of those are reimbursable, and that is a good thing,” Thody said during a recent city council quality of life and public safety meeting. Thody did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

As for the overtime, one of the major issues isn’t so much the amount of money police personnel are making, as it is how many hours it takes to accrue those payments, Lawlor said.

“It’s good some police are making a lot of money,” said Lawlor, also an attorney who also serves on the New Haven Board of Police Commissioners and was appointed by the governor to be a member of the Police Officer Standards and Training Council, “but it’s bad because a lot of these officers are going to be very tired and very stressed out.”

Eighteen Hartford municipal employees earned more in overtime and/or private duty payments than their salaries, the data show. Fourteen of those employees were police personnel, while three others were emergency dispatchers and one worked for the fire department.

Lawlor says it’s not an ideal situation, but it’s also one that is tough to avoid.

“On the one hand it’s a bad idea,” Lawlor said. “On the other hand, what’s the alternative? Because law enforcement like firefighters, like correction officers, like hospital workers, the staffing is set. You can’t not have that many people on duty at a particular time. So if you don’t have the bodies, you have to do the overtime. … You can make a lot of money if you work that much, but on the other hand, we’re relying on police officers to make split-second decisions, to be alert, like an airline pilot. They need to be alert all the time.”

Lawlor noted that even if the compensation may appear to be high, it’s more cost-effective for municipalities to pay the overtime than it is to hire additional staff.

“Ironically, it’s less expensive to pay a lot of overtime for a town or a city or a state than it would be to hire more people because you have all the benefits on top of it,” Lawlor said.

But what’s also driving overtime expenses, Lawlor said, is that virtually every law enforcement agency in the state is actively recruiting.

“It’s not like Hartford decided, ‘This is all the cops we need,'” Lawlor said. “They are constantly looking for police officers. The process of bringing them on board is very elaborate. … Every single police chief in the state is looking to bring people on board. I don’t think anyone has made a decision that it’s good to have all this overtime, even though it might actually be less expensive to do it in the short run. It’s just a question of how to get people on board.”

After a spate of officers leaving the department in recent years, retention has been less of an issue recently, Thody said during the committee meeting.

Additionally, Thody said that 12 officers are finishing field training in the next few weeks and another class will be starting in August.

“It looks like it’s going to be one of our largest classes that we’ve seen in the last four years,” he said. “Right now it looks like it’s a very diverse class, too. So if I can get more people and more diversity, then that’s a win. We have a full-time recruitment division and I give them a lot of credit. Our folks in backgrounds are pushing these folks through and trying to get them hired before some other department steals them.”

Competition in Connecticut over the recruitment and retention of police officers has been fierce.

Pointing to the shift in how officers’ pensions are calculated — overtime and private duty jobs used to be factored into the calculation of pensions until four or five years ago — Sanchez said, if anything, police officers in Hartford are now under-compensated, making the city somewhat less attractive to new hires and current members.

Sanchez noted that towns like Wethersfield have hired a number of officers from Hartford, including former Assistant Chief Rafael Medina III, who is now Wethersfield’s chief.

Pay and benefits are major factors why those officers leave for other towns, Sanchez said.

“Being the capital of the state, our officers should be compensated better than what they are receiving, and that negotiation is ongoing at this moment,” he said. “We’ve had an exodus of officers who have transitioned over to Wethersfield, Middletown, Cromwell, other suburban towns. One of the main reasons is because of better pay, in some cases better benefits.”

In the wake of the George Floyd murder, many smaller towns in Connecticut diversified their police departments by hiring officers away from cities such as Hartford, Sanchez said.

Some of the difficulties that Hartford and other municipalities have had in recruiting and retention also stem from how policing has changed, particularly in the last four or five years, Lawlor said.

Those changes include the prevalence of body and dash cameras, policy shifts such as the passage of the state’s police accountability law, as well as civilians having video cameras on their phones at the ready.

“There’s a lot of people in the ‘good old’ days,’ who wanted to be cops who don’t want to do it now because they aren’t prepared to meet the professional standards that are now enforced,” Lawlor said.

“Throw in body cameras and other kinds of transparency, and there are a lot of people who are scared off by that. On the other hand, the people who you’d want to be police officers are clearly coming into the force,” he said. “I think we’re in a bit of a transitional period now, where the people you want to become cops are becoming cops, and the ones you don’t want to become cops realize it’s probably a bad idea to do it now because you’re not going to get away with stuff that people got away with.”

Lawlor also acknowledges the inherent risk there is in being a police officer, including the increase in the number of guns in circulation, as well as the uptick in serious gun violence taking place nationwide.

But, he says, “[i]f you had to pick a place to be a police officer in terms of your own personal safety, Connecticut is the place,” he said, adding that the state has gone the second-longest period of time in the U.S. without having an officer shot and killed in the line of duty. (Vermont has gone the longest.)

But plenty of discussions still take place among Hartford officials concerning policing, though not necessarily directly related to compensation.

Hartford city councilor Josh Michtom of the Working Families Party has been a frequent critic of what he says is a police department that has too many officers and Hartford, as a municipality, invests too much in law enforcement in an effort to reduce crime.

Specifically, Michtom has noted numerous times that studies show that an increased number of police officers does not correlate to a reduction in crime.

Michtom has frequently advocated that a portion of the budget that is dedicated to the police department should be spent in other areas, such as increased maintenance of parks and other programs to improve public safety.

Sanchez, meanwhile, points to a study from 2015 that said a city of Hartford’s size in terms of square miles and population should have at least 400 to 475 active members of the police department.

The Hartford Police Department currently has about 380 members and is budgeted to have in the neighborhood of 400.

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