Fire fighters make 200k, police can make 400k a year.
The one that is getting a relatively bad deal is the foreign population, that has higher tax rates, lower benefits, no political power and comprise 25% of Cali pop.
Whenever public sector salaries are discussed in the news, the outliers are highlighted, never the median or the mean, giving readers a warped sense of what cops and firefighters make. Sure, some workers put in a lot of overtime hours and make gobs of money, but the typical salaries are not enough to live comfortably in the cities that they serve. For example, Glassdoor says the mean LAPD cop makes $76k --https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/LAPD-Police-Officer-Salarie... and the mean SFPD cop makes about $100k -- https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-police-offi...
I believe NYPD cops make similar amounts, but that's without overtime. They often get x 1.5 for OT and they can easiyl double their annual salary to $150k - $189k after 4-5 years in service.
$400k sounds a bit high, though it's not unheard of.
In NYC, there are thousands of public employees at MTA and NYPD collecting over $150K annually just a few years in service and I'm not talking managerial or chief positions. Some corrupt safety inspectors were reportedly collecting over $400K at the Long Island Railway years back and the governor promised to fix that (didn't), but those are still outliers.
The one that is getting a relatively bad deal is the foreign population, that has higher tax rates, lower benefits, no political power and comprise 25% of Cali pop.