No wonder the academics want to ‘defund the police’
In San Francisco, the median police officer earns $301,000 a year in compensation, and the top-earning cop took home $872,000, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. In Los Angeles, 23 police employees earned more than $400,000 in 2025. Some were deputy chiefs but others were sergeants or ordinary officers who worked a lot of overtime, data from the city controller’s office indicates.
In Newton, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, 12 of the 13 highest paid city employees in 2025 were police officers, with eight of them earning more than $300,000 a year, MassLive reported. In Boston, governed by progressive Democrat Mayor Michelle Wu, 33 police officers earned more than $400,000 in 2025, the Boston Herald reported.
Some of the police officers are earning more than college professors. Harvard is hiring government professors with doctoral degrees, offering pay of between $100,000 and $145,000, or in a salary range of $170,000 – $430,000 for a tenured, top-tier, senior scholar.
Bureau of Labor Statistics national data for May 2025 put annual mean wages for Police and Sheriff’s Patrol Officers at $79,200, lower than the $103,470 mean wage for postsecondary teachers. The American Association of University Professors, an anti-Israel advocacy group, says that at doctorate-granting institutions, the average full-time faculty salary in 2025-2026 was $131,678.
That police and professors are approaching rough pay parity could potentially help to explain some of the support on college campuses for the movement to “defund the police.” A September 23, 2023 Harvard Kennedy School discussion titled “Abolition of Policing” focused on “ways to reduce the size, scope, and power of the police.”
“Where one out of every 1,000 Black men can expect to lose their lives at the hands of the police, where a sixth leading cause of death among young Black men is police homicide, defunding the things that don’t work, funding the things that do work, with a sense of urgency, a timetable, metrics, goals, objectives, is the moral response, the public policy response to this crisis in American history,” said a 2020 Harvard Kennedy School video featuring professor Cornell Brooks.
“The radical idea to defund, dismantle, and reimagine what public safety means deserves our full attention and support,” one Harvard professor, Mary Bassett, said. “We should defund police departments and reinvest that funding to improve communities of color.”
A 2026 Gallup survey found overall public trust levels in police and higher education roughly on par, with the police trusted slightly more. There were stark partisan differences, though, with Republicans highly confident in the police but not in higher education. Democrats reported that they trusted higher education more than they trusted the police.
The partisan differences may have prevented police pay from becoming a political hot button. There’s been some criticism—the Herald article quoted the executive director of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, Paul Diego Craney, saying, “Taxpayers in Boston should be outraged”—but for the most part, right-leaning politicians and interest groups like police and figure they should be well compensated for working nights and holidays and putting their lives on the line to protect people from dangerous criminals and disorder. Democrats, meanwhile, are closely tied to public-employee unions, who fund and back Democratic campaigns; they want to aim their class warfare at billionaires, not at police officers earning $300,000 or $400,000 a year in places where housing is expensive. Put it all together, and there’s not much constraint on police pay other than the willingness of city residents to pay the taxes needed to make payroll.
As for professorial pay, the public story has been more a tale of poverty—the embittered adjunct living out of his car while teaching courses at four different colleges—than wealth. The federal Department of Education requires reporting of salary data even for private institutions and says, “In fall 2024, the adjusted 9-month average salary of full-time instructional staff was $100,224. This is based on 3,868 institutions.” Maybe some of the professors should quit and become police officers. Not only might they in some cases win increased pay, they also might gain some increased appreciation of the difficulty of police work, and of its value in maintaining order.
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