t the October delegates’ meeting, we distributed over 10,000 striking color posters emblazoned with the message, “We believe that NYC police officers should be paid a fair salary. We support NYC police.” Designing these posters and getting them to the delegates was the easy part. Now you have to make them pay off for us by getting them displayed in public places.

What Pat Lynch is asking all of us to do is to visit local stores, restaurants, office buildings and businesses anywhere that attract large numbers of New Yorkers and ask them to feature the poster prominently. Ideally, it should be hung in a front window, on a front door or other places where lots of people will see it. The very attractive poster was intentionally designed to touch the sense of patriotism that has developed in New Yorkers since the attack on the World Trade Center so there would be two strong reasons for people to display it: patriotism and support for our cause.

Remember, these posters aren’t going to help us win a fair contract hanging over the bar in your finished basement. You’ve got to get them out and up if they’re going to have any impact.

The first phase of the PBA’s public relations campaign for a fair contract began with publicly scheduled informational picketing at Madison Square Garden before the Republican National Convention, followed by a series of “pop-up picketing” at public events attended by Mayor Bloomberg. The strategy informed the public — loudly and clearly — that we’ve been without a contract for over two years and through no one’s fault but the mayor’s.

The second — what Pat Lynch calls the “educational” — phase of the campaign immediately followed the RNC. The PBA has begun running a series of graphic and provocative full-page newspaper ads that seek to educate the public about why our pay is out of sync with the job we do and the risks we take. The ads focus on comparability and the city’s ability to pay — the primary criteria PERB considers in its binding arbitration — to keep those issues in the public consciousness during the PERB hearings.

A series of radio commercials in support of the print ads are being developed to keep our message out front, particularly during the PERB hearings. And the PBA has also partnered with private concerns in producing, at no expense to us, radio and television ads that question the use of hundreds of millions of tax dollars for a football stadium while its police go without fair salary.

In the end, it’s all about keeping the mayor, the public and the PERB panel thinking about the injustice of low pay for New York’s Finest.