Thursday, June 21, 2007

Cops probe man's charge recruit did nothing as he was beaten in Queens

"As drunken thugs beat Kelvin Garcia senseless outside a Queens house party last year, he thought he could count on help from an NYPD recruit he says was standing just a few feet away.

But Johanny Fabian didn't budge, he said.

"She was there, watching, with her cell phone in her hand. She didn't call anybody," said Garcia, 22, who suffered a fractured skull in the Lefrak City melee.

Fabian, 26, had an assault arrest of her own when she entered the Police Academy - and now her graduation is on hold while the investigators probe her role in the November 2006 attack on Garcia.

Yet the NYPD still might give her a gun and a badge to patrol the streets.

The Police Department has been struggling to find recruits willing to work for its paltry $25,100 starting salary - and critics fear Fabian's story is a cautionary tale about the quality of the rookies who are signing up.

"The department has never had a situation like this - where they are not being flooded with new recruits and where people are leaving before retirement," said NYPD historian Thomas Reppetto, co-author of "NYPD: A City and Its Police."

"If these trends continue, the NYPD will become an organization of temps - people waiting for a better job to come along. And that will mean they will hire a lot of people who aren't qualified and a decrease in service. Not tomorrow, but over time," Reppetto said.

Fabian was hired in July 2006, part of the second NYPD academy class with the low salary - even though she had a brush with the law.

Fabian was charged with assault after a fight in 1999 and later pleaded guilty to an undisclosed lesser charge that was dismissed after she stayed out of trouble..."

Even blind beggars working the street corners know there's been a precipitous decline in the quality of police officers, but it didn't begin with the lowering of Police Academy wages. City moonbats turned a blind eye to the problem when it was hinted that affirmative action was diluting the force but gleefully jumped upon the lowered pay scale once it became impossible to NOT mention how awful the cops had become. The city doesn't wish to spend big bucks on Academy recruits who take the training then move to Ct. or Jersey. Once out of the Academy the pay scale takes an enormous upswing so the powers that be thought they'd accomplished two things. Keeping the ones who were doing it for the idea of law enforcement as a profession, a vocation if you will, and ridding themselves of those in it simply for the diploma.

You CAN live in NYC on $25K. Certainly not in Manhattan. Not unless you've a roommate or two or live with relatives. But there remain bargain basement dwellings a subway ride from work, and think of it as struggling college students making do until they graduate and land that halfway decent first job.

A great many recruits flock for those always available hack jobs to make ends meet, because the average city cabbie makes $18 an hour. The better ones then put their apps in to Suffolk County where the run of the mill officer is paid $105,000 a year, or settle for Nassau's $85K. The worse ones stay. But in the long run can make as much if not more than any of their NY State brethren because overtime is easy money and there's always enough of it to go around.

It isn't as if the NYC bean counters are clueless. The real world difference between applicants looking to land a $35K starting job compared to the ones they're now getting for $25K is negligible.

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