To All Delegates and Members

May 2, 2001

Today we unveiled a 680-square-foot billboard towering over Duffy Square in the heart of the tourist-filled Times Square area that dramatizes how miserably paid New York City police officers are. Under the headline, “No wonder NYC can’t hire cops…,” the billboard shows six stacks of U.S. currency representing the compensation paid to police officers in Nassau, the Port Authority, Newark, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Of course, the smallest pile of dough by far is over New York.

My press conference introducing the billboard commenced just minutes after a Duffy Square rededication ceremony which featured a speech and news conference by Mayor Giuliani, who had to deliver his remarks with the 34-foot high and 20-foot-wide PBA billboard looming over his right shoulder. It had gone up just a short time before his arrival.

The PBA press conference was covered by most of the newspapers, radio and TV stations in town and we got to hammer home our message that the city’s police recruitment and retention crisis won’t be solved until New York City cops are rewarded with a decent, liveable wage increase for their fine work in keeping places like Times Square safe.

The billboard will be up, on the west side of the street between 46^th and 47^th Sts. at Broadway and Seventh Avenues for at least the entire month of May. The same message will appear on bus shelters at strategic locations around Manhattan and Brooklyn beginning in about a week and lasting a month after that.

Click here to see the billboard.