[5/12/2003]One thing Vicksburg police officers who want raises must do under the department’s management team of 18 months is arrive at work on time.

Punctuality is one of 15 criteria on which officers are now evaluated quarterly under Chief Tommy Moffett and Deputy Chief Richard O’Bannon. One purpose of the evaluations is to determine how much, if any, officers will receive in raises on the state’s highest wage scale for police work.

“If officers come to work five minutes late once, that’s needs improvement,'” O’Bannon said. “Twice is unsatisfactory.'”

The merit-pay system, the department’s first in at least a quarter-century, began in 2002, the first calendar year the new team was in place. Previously, when raises were given, each officer received the same percentage, regardless of performance or rank in an “across-the-board” approach.

Mayor Laurence Leyens initiated the changes by recruiting Moffett after his retirement from the state’s second-largest department. Moffett was offered $80,000 $18,000 more than he was making as chief in Biloxi when brought to Vicksburg to reform a department bogged down in politics, inefficiency and lawsuits. Leyens said he wanted the state’s best-paid police, but with each check based on merit not merely rank and tenure.

Use of such merit-pay systems in police departments is “pretty common,” said John Morgan, an 18-year police chief of three different cities who is now with the University of Arkansas’ Criminal Justice Institute. “When properly managed, it’s a very good incentive to increase productiveness,” he said.

Under the new system, patrol officers employed at the beginning of 2002, for instance, were eligible to earn raises of up to 26.1 percent, from the old base recruit salary of $24,582 to the new target base pay of $31,000. Maximum annual raises under the plan for supervisory officers ranged from 19.4 percent for sergeants to 31.2 percent for captains.

“They could get an entire quarter (of the maximum raise) each quarter if they got a really good evaluation,” O’Bannon said. “If their evaluation was not quite so good, they would get percentages of that amount.”

When the plan took effect, the VPD employed nearly 100 officers. Two received maximum raises as quickly as possible, five received no raises and the rest fell in between, O’Bannon said.

“Some fell just short of getting the whole thing,” he added. “Several will get the remainder” following subsequent quarterly evaluations. During 2002, about $164,000 was paid out in “evaluations,” O’Bannon said, adding that “there’s about $180,000 still out there to be had.”

Despite the raises, the department’s personnel budget for the current fiscal year is, at $4,758,080, 15.7 percent lower than its level two years earlier, due mainly to a reduction of 27 officers in the department’s count.

The discretion the new management has over officers’ pay raises was necessary as an incentive due to the lack of opportunities for promotion by rank, Moffett said. Then, as now, about 45 percent of VPD officers are of supervisory rank.

Morgan said that, though such a high ratio of management to patrol officers is “almost unheard-of,” departments with disproportionate numbers of supervisory-ranked officers are “fairly common, especially in the South. For years, to give people promotions was a way of getting their salaries up.”

More than a quarter of the supervisory-ranked officers were promoted during the year and a half before Moffett took over, when the department’s chief was Mitchell Dent. Dent promoted 13 patrol officers to sergeants, and made seven other promotions within the supervisory ranks, including increasing the number of deputy chiefs from one to three.

Dent declined to be interviewed, citing as one reason his current capacity, as an interim appointee Warren County Justice Court judge. He was one of about five people who served as chief over the previous 10 years.

“We had people in place who weren’t able to do the job,” Moffett said of the situation when he took over. Now, the department has “lieutenants working for lieutenants and sergeants working for sergeants,” he added.

“It’s hard to go in and change the rank structure without stepping on some toes,” Morgan said of such a situation. “Most guys will do it through attrition.”

More-efficient use is also being made of officers’ work hours, Moffett said. For example, he has doubled the length of the department’s pay cycle, he said.

“We pay overtime, but we have a system where you have to come to work to get overtime,” Moffett said. “We’re getting more out of less people because people are coming to work. It’s simple management, nothing fancy.”

Tuesday: “On patrol” means “community policing,” chief says.