ALBANY COUNTY — As Albany County deputies and supervisors are negotiating their contract with the county, Sheriff Craig Apple is stumping for more money for them. He told The Enterprise that all of his stations are understaffed by people who do not have a lot of experience. This is “very concerning” to him, he says, stating that it is a matter of public safety.

The reason for his staffing problems, he says, is the much lower salary his office pays, compared to other local police departments. Because the sheriff’s office hires a great many more people each year than do local departments, would-be recruits view his office as a steppingstone to other jobs in law enforcement, he says.

“It doesn’t do anybody any good when you have that turnover rate,” Apple says.

The current county budget allots a total of $72 million for the sheriff’s office, Apple said, including “everything from pens to food for the jail to all of my employees.”

County Executive Daniel McCoy declined to comment on sheriff’s office salaries because of the ongoing negotiations.

The total staff in the sheriff’s office, Apple said, including correctional officers, paramedics, and civilians is about 650. Of those, he said, 120 are law-enforcement personnel.

Employees have good health insurance packages to which they contribute either 10 or 15 percent, he said; they also are part of the state pension plan. Deputies can retire after 20 years on the job, and corrections officers after 25.

Up for new contracts, Apple said, are just law enforcement staff, not paramedics and not civilian employees. He noted that the deputies and corrections officers’ bargaining unit is affiliated with Council 82 and that the supervisors’ unit is affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Law Enforcement.

“He’s up against it,” said Bethlehem Police Chief Lou Corsi of Apple. “Because he’ll bring 15 on, and put them through the academy, and five will leave.” Corsi is one of a number of local chiefs who often hires sheriff’s deputies.

The county currently pays first-year deputies $35,700 in base pay.

One of the highest starting base salaries for a rookie officer among local area departments is Colonie’s, at $54,914. One of the lowest is Gloversville, at $41,641.

Apple has a few officers who are nearing retirement, he says, but for the most part his staff is very young.

“I have none of the guys — and I use the word ‘guys’ generically — with the five, six, seven, eight, nine years,” he says. “You really need,” he says, “that well-rounded police department. You need young guys that you can nurture and grow, but you also need those guys who are already there.”

Before his deputies become seasoned officers, he says, they usually get hired away, sometimes immediately after his office sends them through the police academy, and sometimes after they’ve completed their in-service training or served a couple of years.

The Zone Five academy serves 10 counties: Greene, Albany, Rensselaer, Schenectady, Schoharie, Saratoga, Fulton, Montgomery, Warren, and Washington. The state set up a zoned training system in 1988; in 1995, Zone Five reorganized as a not-for-profit regional law-enforcement training center, run by a board of directors representing the agencies of the zone.

Apple listed Albany, Colonie, Guilderland, Bethlehem, Cohoes, Albany, Watervliet, Gloversville, and Troy as the departments most likely to hire sheriff’s deputies.

Apple doesn’t blame the other departments or the officers who leave. As far as he’s concerned, the solution is that he needs to be able to pay them comparable salaries.

All local law enforcement agencies have a stepped payscale, with increases each year. Apple noted, “You go to, say, Guilderland P.D., and you start much higher and go much higher than our top guy. So you tell that to a young guy who’s got college loans coming due or a young person who’s got a baby on the way, or a mortgage payment, and it’s a no-brainer.”

Members of local agencies, like most law-enforcement agencies nationally, work significant overtime hours, earning a great deal more over the course of a year than the amount of their base pay. But time-and-a-half calculated at a higher base rate naturally yields greater annual overtime pay.

“Our guys, they get their fair share of overtime,” Apple said. “We do all the court transportation, and a lot of town courts are at night. So a lot of our guys are getting overtime, and I’m sure some of those salaries eventually are catching the lower guys in the town PDs, but that’s after working a lot of overtime.”

A check of comparative salary tables shows that, at current rates, after he or she has been working for four years, a sheriff’s deputy’s pay will go up to $46,086. A Guilderland police officer’s will go up to $77,811 after the same amount of time.

Apple said that he can and does bill the various local departments for the training of each officer that they hire away, but that it’s “a drop in the bucket.” He noted that he can bill for more when the person is a fresh graduate than if they are an officer with experience on the job, which he said should be reversed.

The most he can bill, he said, is $17,500 for a person who graduated from the academy and quit his office that same day. This is calculated, he said, as exactly half of the $35,000 that was the starting salary for a deputy until it was raised in 2016 to $35,700; the academy lasts six months, so the initial reimbursement is for the full six months.

An officer’s worth continues to depreciate every day and month after he or she graduates, Apple said, adding, “The formula should really be reversed, because the more time you have on the job, the more valuable you are.”

He recently sent two bills, he said, one to the Bethlehem Police Department and one to Watervliet. He billed Bethlehem a little over $13,000 “for a deputy that left recently, who graduated the academy, I believe, in January,” he said.

That stands in stark contrast to the amount he recently billed Watervliet, for an officer who had been with the department for “just about three years.” The bill for the more experienced officer was “just under $3,000.”

Apple understands why a department would want to hire that officer.

“If I’m a town chief, and I get somebody with three or four years, and they have a good record, they haven’t been involved in anything, that guy’s a valuable guy,” he said.

“It makes sense: They hire a guy that’s got good training, a great track record, he’s not a time abuser, and they’re getting him for $2,700. Geez, that’s a steal!” he concluded.

How Guilderland hires

Guilderland currently has 35 officers on its force; 11 of them were formerly sheriff’s deputies, said Deputy Chief Curtis Cox. Eight came from various other departments, he said, including someone from Cobleskill and someone from Oneonta. Some officers have come from more than one other previous force, he said.

Hiring laterally “is not unusual for us,”  Cox said.

He said that he and Chief Carol Lawlor have both interviewed numerous candidates over the years and have heard a number of reasons for wishing to make a lateral transfer to Guilderland.

“We have heard payscale,” Cox said.

New graduates of the police academy sometimes ask Cox to keep them in mind later, when a position opens up at Guilderland, suggesting that, even before they land their first job, they are already thinking ahead about the possibility of a lateral transfer.

Some candidates hoping to make a lateral transfer want to return to their hometown, Cox said, while some want different duties or shifts.

“We also have hired new people and sent them through the academy,” he said, noting that both Chief Carol Lawlor and he were hired that way. Lawlor and Cox both worked as civilian dispatchers first and passed the Civil Service exam before being hired as officers, Lawlor in 1978 and Cox in 1984. Cox took over Lawlor’s job as dispatcher in 1978 when she left to become a police officer.

New policy in Cohoes

Altamont Police Chief Todd Pucci said that in Cohoes — where he holds a second full-time job, as captain in charge of patrol — new Mayor Shawn Morse, who started this January, has a policy of hiring locally, from among residents who take the test and are then sent to the police academy.

Cohoes is one of the departments cited by Apple as a frequent employer of sheriff’s deputies.

The last six officers hired, before Morse started, Pucci said, were lateral transfers from the sheriff’s office. In 2016, two officers have been hired, and both are residents of Cohoes, who were previously working in other fields in Cohoes. One is Pucci’s nephew, Kyle Pucci.

Morse said that these two officers were the first Cohoes residents hired for the police force in almost 15 years.

“When I think about policing, you’re there not just to arrest people, but to have the ability to deal with people. And you deal with people you know better than people you don’t,” said Morse of his reasoning.

His goal is always to hire locally, he said. The only case in which he would want to hire someone who was not a Cohoes resident is if a Cohoes native had been hired somewhere else and wanted to “come home, to be a police officer in the place where you were born and raised,” Morse said.

“We have this strong belief that the best policing is community policing, where the people have been born and raised and live in our city, and grew up in our city, and understand our city and hopefully went through our schools, and know the layout of the land and have relationships and a dedicated commitment to keeping our city moving forward with our goal of becoming an all-American city,” he said.

Altamont P.D. hires retired cops part-time

Pucci is the only officer in Altamont who works full-time. When he hires part-time officers, he said, he is not hiring people “away,” he says; he is giving them additional work.

He likes to hire retired officers, because they are trained, seasoned officers and “have seen everything,” but they already receive a pension, and so the village does not need to contribute into a pension fund for them.

He cited three officers who were retired before starting part-time at Altamont: Jill Kaufman, who was with the Secret Service and a major with the Department of Environmental Conservation’s police force; Tom Ross, who retired as detective commander of Cohoes Police and now acts as that force’s assistant chief; and Bob Bennett, who had many years with the Albany Police.

Altamont has not sent anyone to the police academy during his tenure, Pucci said.

“I try to get more experienced guys, at less cost,” Pucci said.

Pucci himself was sent through the academy by Altamont many years ago, back in 1997, he said. In the late nineties, Altamont made a habit of sending new hires to the academy and was viewed as a steppingstone to other agencies, much the way the sheriff’s office is now, he said. Pucci was hired full-time by another department afterward — Cohoes — but, in his case, he continued to work part-time at Altamont all along, and became chief in 2011.

“I never left Altamont,” he said.

Bethlehem chief came from the sheriff’s office

Bethlehem’s police chief, Lou Corsi, said he believed that the county legislature “should really look into what the sheriff’s needs are.” In order to retain good people, he said, “You have to pay them.”

Over the years there have been “quite a few” lateral transfers from the sheriff’s office to the Bethlehem Police Department, Corsi said, “myself included.” He worked for the Coeymans Police before transferring to the sheriff’s office.

In 1985, he made the move to Bethlehem, which was his hometown, and which offered better pay and benefits, he said.

Corsi said that in Bethlehem, if the department hired someone new, it would need to send the officer through the six-month academy program, then provide six months of additional training. With a lateral hire, all the department needs to do is provide two to three months of transitional training with Bethlehem.

“So you can see the time advantage on that, when an opportunity arises,” Corsi said.

Apple’s view on the exodus

Whenever someone leaves, Apple said, he does an exit interview. “And every single one of those exit interviews is, ‘You know, if I’d been making a little bit more, I would never have thought of it.’”

He says that he thinks, in terms of people’s reasons for making lateral transfers, that “Fiscal is number one, and then some guys want to be hometown cops.”

At one point, he wanted that himself, Apple said. “Then I got promoted to investigations, and I was like, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’”

Deputies’ jobs are interesting, Apple said. “We have a diverse department when it comes to policing. I’ve got snowmobile units, I’ve got marine patrol units, I’ve got search and rescue, I’ve got SWAT [Special Weapons and Tactics], I’ve got hazardous materials,” he said, listing some of the skills in which his officers can get extra training. “Nobody offers that,” he said.

The work of a deputy is not really more dangerous than that of a town police officer, Apple said, although deputies who patrol the Hilltowns alone can sometimes wait a significant amount of time for backup to arrive.. “I will say that the backup time is far disparate with many of our counterparts. You could be out there for a solid 12 or 15 minutes without backup.” In a town, he said, it’s unrealistic to think that it could ever take that long.

Apple noted that, in a worst-case scenario, an officer might need to drive from Albany to back up someone in Rensselaerville. Best case, he said, would be driving out from Clarksville.

One problem with having younger officers, Apple said, is that graduates leave the academy, “and they’re all hyped up — they want to get out there and write tickets and everything else.” Part of the on-the-job training is “rolling that back a little bit” and training them in community policing and in letting the public know that sheriff’s deputies “are not here just to arrest you; we’re here to work with you.”

The sheriff lacks, he said, the middle-area staff that have “real experience and community policing experience” and who will be able to step in and fill the void as his command-level staff starts to retire.

He just lost his undersheriff, William Cox, in July to retirement, Apple said.

Apple sees the appeal, for local departments, of hiring his deputies. It saves money and time for those departments, he said.

“If you’re the chief of Bethlehem,” he said, “and you want to hire a guy, it’s easier to pay Apple the $13,000 and get a trained cop you don’t have to put through the academy. Now you’ve spent $13,000 and you’ve just got to put him through your basic policy and procedures, your report writing, however your department functions, and get him out on the street.

“So,” he said of the length of time it takes a new hire to become a functioning officer, “you’re literally cutting the time by a third. At a minimum.”

Apple concluded, “Needless to say, we are wasting thousands and thousands of taxpayer dollars by hiring and having them leave for other agencies when trained.”

Apple says that he knows that pay raises to make salaries comparable might take time and years to achieve, but that he would like to see the process begin.

"These guys have got to get their salary up a little bit," he says, for his office to lower its turnover rate. “They deserve to be paid like the professionals they are,” he added.

Apple says that his officers should get a bump in pay right after finishing the academy, with their salary going up not necessarily as high as officers in town departments, “but somewhat comparable.”

Apple does not think, he said, “that we’re ever going to make the money that the town P.D.s do; that’s kind of unrealistic at this point.” He understands that change might not happen over the course of one contract negotiation. “It might take six, seven, eight years,” he said. “But there has to be some light at the end of the tunnel.”

Chairman of the legislature

“It’s been a problem for decades,” said Sean Ward, chairman of the Albany County Legislature “not just in Albany but in other municipalities as well. It’s difficult to compete with the suburban police departments.”

He said that the sheriff’s deputies’ pay is not a legislative matter but decided through collective bargaining, “and we have to respect that process.”

Ward said that, for years, Albany County residents have been fortunate to have “outstanding” deputies and command staff.