ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - St. Louis Metropolitan Police officers and sergeants are getting a raise.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, their union and the city announced Tuesday they have all agreed to a raise for officers and sergeants.
The raise is seven percent, bringing starting wages up from a little over $53,000 to nearly $57,000.
"With this new pay raise in place, we will continue to work to recruit and retain officers to the force," said St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones. "The best thing we can do to help our officers is give them more colleagues, and that – in addition to showing our appreciation – is what we hope to accomplish with this raise for our officers."
To make this raise possible, the city will reduce their budgeted staff from 1244 to 1100.
"With this seven percent raise, everyone, including the police officer's association agreed to reduce the number of commissioned personnel," said St. Louis Police Chief Robert Tracy during a press conference.
Tracy says the departments current workforce is 857 commissioned officers with an additional 39 in the academy.
Chief Tracy adds they are seeing fewer people leave for reasons other than retirement.
"We're losing to natural attrition right now," said Chief Tracy. "People get their 20 years, then go out. We're losing officers to other jurisdictions."
"Now I'm seeing officers leave for other professions or leaving this profession all together. So those days have slowed down."
Chief Tracy says they would like to work with the Police Foundation on another recruiting blitz to promote the new raises but also says they can do this internally.
"Lot of things we can do on our website and get the message out," said Chief Tracy. "Continue to communicate, we got a new communications public affairs director."
"We trying to do all those things to get these things out to make sure we can communicate."
Union President Joe Steiger called this a step in the right direction he says more work needs to be done to close the gap between the city's police and neighboring counties.
Chief Tracy adds the raises still need to be approved by Civil Service Commission, Board of Alderman and Board of Estimate and Apportionment for approval.
The collective bargaining agreement is up for renegotiation and they hope to negotiate future raises with the city.