No salary for any industry is based off what an average citizen makes anywhere.
Uhmmmm, this is emphatically untrue. Have you ever wondered why software engineers in India make less than those in America?
So why should a police officers salary be based off of what an average citizen makes? Salaries are based off cost of living and what the employment market for that industry will bare. Not what the average citizen makes. What you are doing is trying to tie a police officer's salary to an arbitrary metric.
How is tying the salary of public servants to the salary of those paying that public servant arbitrary? It is the opposite, and the cost of living in an area and what people make in it are closely tied together.
$90k is not rich. What you are arguing is that people of New York City are really pretty poor, and you think police should be poor along with them. For gods sake, the average cost of a Studio apartment in New York City is $2500 a month.. that is $30k a year.. which is about 60% of the take home income of these median households, when it's suggested that housing should be no more than 30%. That is more telling that the police salary which is not the problem it seems. The low income of the citizens is the problem. but again, that is just an arbitrary metric.
I didn’t say $90k was rich, but by any reasonable standard one person earning ~150% of the median household income (which is often two earners) for a region is paid quite well.
Also, as someone who has lived in a studio apartment in NYC your idea of what a studio in NYC costs is ludicrous. Perhaps that’s the average cost, but it’s being pulled way up by crazy high rents in Manhattan. You can find studios for almost half that price. (I just looked!)
Why is it a wrong way to do things? Specially since being a police officer is a high stress job, regardless if it is dangerous or not. There are many government jobs that you can take your full pension after 20 years. Military is a great example. I have already told you that the police are not the only ones who have such pension programs. Sorry that you don't have such offerings.. maybe you should change that? I don't know where you are getting "if they could retire at 40, there pensions would be reduced so low as to be effectively nothing". This is false.
Maybe giving everyone a pension after 20 years would be right, but it’s not remotely close to what we as a country do. It’s basically police and firefighters. Your example of the military tells me you don’t actually know how this works, because the military pension is shit after 20 years. (It’s based on base pay, which can be as little as half your take home salary)
As far as what a pension would be at 40, most non-police pension systems are similar to social security in that they have an age then consider ‘full retirement age’ and payments decrease each year prior to that. See here:
Most members will receive a service retirement benefit upon completion of their public service career. See if you meet the NYSTRS eligibility requirements.
www.nystrs.org
Most would not even let you retire at 40 but even if you could by this formula your payments would be near zero.
So in the end yes, for a job that only requires an associates degree police are paid very well, and their pension benefits are ludicrously generous. It’s a sweet job!