‘Major hiring spree’ needed to staff police force, DeKalb CEO says

Her plan includes increasing the annual base salary for a police recruit from $57,200 to $61,000. Officers with a college degree would receive about $64,000. Salaries for sergeants, lieutenants, captains and majors would increase by 7.1%.

Senior police officers and master police officers would make a minimum salary of $70,000 and $75,000, respectively. Officers also could receive a monthly housing allowance of up to $500, among other proposed benefits.

Cochran-Johnson introduced the plan to the Board of Commissioners this week, and it’s covered through her proposed 2025 operating budget. Commissioners are scheduled to vote on the countywide spending plan on Feb. 28. If the budget is approved, the police salary and benefit enhancements would go into effect in March.

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Cochran-Johnson said the $10.4 million that would go toward her police recruitment plan otherwise would be spent on triple overtime.

In the 2024 fiscal year, the police department’s budget for salaries and overtime was $7.8 million, but more than $19 million was spent because of the steep overtime costs to operate a department with a severe staffing shortage, Cochran-Johnson said.

“Money that wasn’t spent in salaries was spent on triple overtime,” she said. “Triple overtime — I had never heard of such a thing. But when you reach a certain point of deprivation, you do what you must because public safety is not negotiable.”

According to Cochran-Johnson’s presentation to county commissioners, the plan would make DeKalb competitive with top-paying departments in metro Atlanta.

The new salary for DeKalb police recruits of $61,000 would be roughly what the city of Atlanta pays recruits and higher than the base recruit salary in Brookhaven, Gwinnett County and Cobb County, but lower than in Sandy Springs, according to Cochran-Johnson’s presentation.

DeKalb Commissioner Mereda Davis Johnson, who sits on the county’s Employee Relations and Public Safety Committee and used to chair it, said Wednesday she is excited about Cochran-Johnson’s proposal.

“DeKalb has been a training ground for officers to come in and move on to better benefits and better pay, and it’s very competitive locally and regionally and nationally,” said Davis Johnson, whose District 5 includes southeast DeKalb.

Referring to the need to fill gaps by paying triple overtime, Davis Johnson said: “We did what we had to do. Now we’re at a different point in the road where we can give incentives to attract and retain our officers. So I think it’s a win-win situation, and I think that the citizens will be supportive of it as well.”

Violent crime and property crime in DeKalb County both were down 13% last year compared to 2023, according to crime statistics provided by Cochran-Johnson.

“But the problem I deal with in DeKalb is we have high-crime zones,” she said. “We have certain areas where the crime is absolutely horrible.”

She added that because DeKalb’s officers are spread so thin, “there’s no opportunity, in my opinion, for true community policing.”

Butch Ayers, executive director of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police, said in a recent interview that police departments across metro Atlanta are competing in a “salary war” to hire from a diminished talent pool. “Each agency is trying to one-up somebody else so they can attract more officers,” Ayers said.

Despite challenges in policing and the relative shortage of job candidates, Ayers said he has been seeing an uptick in interest among Georgians in careers in law enforcement after a drop in 2020, when a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd. Ayers attributes this, in part, to better training of officers, better policies within departments and the fact that “you haven’t seen the widespread national protests as you did in the wake of George Floyd.”

“I think the pendulum is turning — going back toward more people being interested in a law-enforcement career,“ Ayers said. “But it’s not like it was.”