Meanwhile, during the mid-2000s, a state arbitrator forced the NYPD to slash starting yearly salaries for new officers to a preposterous $25,100. The reduced pay forced some 4,500 officers to quit in a period of a few years in the middle of the decade. The ones who stayed on the job had to really scramble to make a living wage. They did so by inventing an entirely new way of doing the job. It would be a revolution in what Levine calls “sub-misdemeanor policing.”
