here’s an old French saying that, roughly translated, goes like this: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

That’s certainly true as far as New York City police officers’ salary issues are concerned, as a reading of some very old documents demonstrates.

One of those documents, an 1846 committee report to the State Assembly (at right), argues that the city’s patrol officers are seriously underpaid. The other, a yellowed newspaper clipping published a little more than 73 years later (at left), quotes police union and civil service officials making much the same case in a budget request to the police commissioner.

Now, 87 years after that, we are still citing many of the same problems of morale, recruitment, retention and common-sense fairness that they did then in the perennial crusade by police advocates to correct some age-old inequities.

The April 1, 1846, State Assembly report was prepared for a select committee considering amendments to a law passed two years earlier “for the establishment and regulation” of the city’s police department, which before that had been only “a nominal police system.” The report introduces the argument for higher pay by going into another issue prominent today — what it calls “the paucity of men” and is now known as reduced manpower, or what the city describes as “doing more with less.”

“The men are obliged to be on duty night and day,” the report points out, “are up at all hours and out in all weathers. This, of course, proves destructive to their health, and is an evil which calls particularly for redress...The public then, too, are also injured by the fewness of the police. Notwithstanding the most unwearied exertions by chiefs, captains and men, there are some parts of the city which, for many hours, are of necessity left insufficiently guarded.”

Sound familiar?

The report makes another point that could be made with equal validity today: “The present police force is active and energetic, and can perform all that the same body of men anywhere could do; but they cannot work out impossibilities.”

The legislative document then turns to “another source of complaint... the amount of compensation” — $500 a year at a time when officers had to pay for their uniforms and other equipment and were not paid when they were out sick. “Having families to support, children to educate, and, by reason of their very position, many unusual calls upon their pockets, to anyone conversant with the expenses of city life, the sum allowed these men appears very small,” said the report.

Like today, the New York City police officers of yore couldn’t afford to live in the city they patrolled.

The all-too familiar objection to police compensation also reared its unattractive head — budget constraints: “It is not objected that the services of these worthy and efficient men are not well worth all that is asked, but the opposition simply rests on the ground of an already large taxation for other purposes,” the report notes.

How many times have we heard, in more recent contract negotiations, that the city believes its officers should be paid much more but it simply can’t afford it?

In response to excuses like that, the report argues what we would today: “There are, too, it is believed, not a few offices which are largely expensive to the city, and which are not at all of that importance to the citizens, which this (police) system acknowledgedly is. If, then, the argument urged is to be of any effect, it would appear better to reduce or abolish what is at best not absolutely necessary, than do injustice to those to whom the dearest interests of the city are entrusted.”

In other words, if you’re going to skimp somewhere, cops’ salaries and public safety are not the places to do it.

The Aug. 17, 1919, clipping from the New York Times, headlined “Patrolmen Here Ask Rise in Pay,” tells of a PBA request to the police commissioner to include in the 1920 budget a raise for the city’s 9,500 officers from $1,650 to $1,800 a year — a more than 9% increase. If the commissioner was not going to approve the raise, according to the article, the Civil Service Forum intended to take the request to the Board of Estimate (where the mayor, comptroller, City Council president and borough presidents all had votes) along with “data to show that this city is near the bottom of the scale in payment of its police and that each year sees a lower grade or recruits attracted to the service.”

Like Yogi said, déjà vu all over again.

The article also cites an expensive housing market and other cost-of-living increases as justification for the raise: “Although the pay of the policemen has been increased from $1,400 to $1,650 in the last four years, the officials of the forum point out that the pay has not kept pace with the cost of living and with the increasing rents. It is the belief of some of these officials that even $1,800 a year is too low and that the pay of the first-grade patrolman should be about $2,000.”

The manpower shortage also remained a problem: “Another reason urged by the Civil Service Forum is that the Police Department is now short about 500 patrolmen and has virtually no list of recruits to build up the force so that the work of protecting this city may be carried on at highest efficiency.”

“The police force of this city always has been known as the ‘Finest,’” the article continues, quoting forum official Joseph J. O’Reilley. “Its organization has been copied by virtually every first-class city in the country, and we want to continue that high reputation by attracting to the service the highest class of men, and by keeping the highest class of men after we get them. If we don’t do that we will have an inefficient force, crime will increase and it will take a long time to get back to the old standard.”

Wise words, in 1846, 1919 and today.