Temitope Oriola: Is Edmonton's police chief worth $340K? It's complicated

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The debate over police funding in Edmonton gained new traction courtesy of the Edmonton Police Commission’s disclosure of the compensation package of Dale McFee, the Edmonton Police Service chief. We learned that McFee makes $340,000 per year. The commission was smart to provide comparator salaries: chiefs of police in Vancouver ($378,368), Ottawa ($359,133) and Toronto ($356,600) make more. The Edmonton Journal reports that McFee’s pay is higher than salaries of chiefs of police in Calgary ($244,677 to $299,250) and Winnipeg ($291,834).

A journalist reached out for my perspective on the “high salary … why this may be, if it’s an appropriate use of resources, if the work EPS has done gives reason to how high their chief is paid.” I was unable to grant the interview mainly because I had promised to cook egusi soup, a traditional Nigerian dish, for Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, Nigeria’s former minister of education, and her spouse, Pastor Chinedu Ezekwesili. Pastor Ezekwesili’s cooking skills were well-known. I had to do more than OK. Besides, I was concerned about context (or lack therefore) vis-à-vis what would have been a complicated response. I am always wary that public communication is often the enemy of nuance. There is only so much a TV journalist can put into a two-minute report.

Is McFee’s $340,000 per year on the high side? Oh, yes. However, objectivity calls for looking at McFee’s salary in context. It also means neither unfairly singling him out nor offering justification. There are three main considerations.

First, McFee’s pay has to be examined in the context of overall climate of executive compensation. A January 2022 article in the HR Reporter by Sarah Dobson is instructive: CEOs make “191 times more than the average worker wage in Canada.” Dobson quotes David McDonald, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in her report: “At this rate, it will take the average worker the entire year to accrue what Canada’s highest-paid CEOs will rack up just before lunch on Jan. 4 — the first official working day of the year.”

I grew up in Nigeria; I know the consequences of a poorly paid police service. Therefore, I support excellent pay for law enforcement, particularly the rank and file. Police officers in Canada are generally well-paid. The EPS salary schedule indicates that a first-year constable makes $71,195 per year. That is slightly higher than the $70,000 annual salary provided by the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships, the most prestigious of its kind in Canada, awarded to 70 persons from the over 7,000 PhDs minted every year. Some postdoctoral fellows (with hard-earned PhDs) working on life-saving biomedical research make in the region of $50,000 per year.

Second, the dynamics of an institutional field also matter. Policing is a unique field with little to no structural equivalents in most jurisdictions. Therefore, there is competition over the best candidates. What one police commission offers to a new chief affects what others may reasonably put on the table. Those variables favour the top candidates.

The third consideration is value for money. How does a jurisdiction measure the performance of a police chief? This matter ties closely with the second point. Whether the crime rate is low or high, society is wired to turn to police. The public assumes low crime means they are doing their job. We often assume high crime rate or disorder simply requires police intervention, hence we offer more to prospective chiefs we consider the best candidates. As has become obvious in Edmonton in the last few weeks, it is hard to win an argument against police. They carry significant political power and rarely hesitate to use it.

Nonetheless, the buck stops with the chief’s employer. The employer needs to set the parameters for reasonable executive compensation and performance measurement. Measuring performance necessitates both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. The former concerns crime rates, arrest statistics, et cetera, produced by police services. However, in-house statistics must be cross-analyzed with the employer’s independent assessment, for example, through interviews and/or opinion surveys of citizens (those in contact with law enforcement and the general public), regarding mode of operation, impact and results. My pot of egusi soup saved me from the challenge of explaining all the above within a few seconds.

Temitope Oriola is professor of criminology at the University of Alberta and president-elect of the Canadian Sociological Association. Email: oriola@ualberta.ca Twitter: @topeoriola