Alaska Life Hack: Alaska State Troopers are hiring, and it comes with a $20,000 bonus

By
Suzanne Downing
-
12

Plenty of businesses are hurting for workers and the Alaska State Troopers are no different.

The Troopers are even offering a hiring bonus up to $20,000, and the base salary starts at $75,000 for a recruit who has a bachelor’s degree.

The bonus breaks down into two parts: A $10,000 bonus for completion of Troopers Academy, and another $10,000 bonus for completing the probationary period of a year. Applicants can be as young as 20, so long as they turn 21 before starting the academy.

Applicants with a current police certification and at least one year of experience may qualify for higher rates of pay for making the move to the Troopers:

1 year experience: $38.79/ hour ($80,683/year)
2 years experience: $40.24/hour ($83,699/year)
3 years experience: $41.75/hour ($86,840/year)
4 years experience: $43.32/hour ($90,105/year)
5 years experience: $44.94/hour ($93,475/year)
6+ years experience: $46.63/hour ($96,990/year)

Those with experience and a bachelor’s degree can add 3.75 percent to above salaries, and those assigned to remote locations can earn up to 60 percent more than the base pay.

More details are at this link.

12 COMMENTS

    • Primary way to make a great living is to be able and willing to do something that others are neither. Apparently you have neither the qualifications or the nerve to make a good wage.

      Go ahead, spend day in and day out making life or death decisions and not eff it up. Folks I know that actually know Troops also know they earn every penny.

      As for.”elites,” well, these guys are the closest Alaska has to that. No, college degree not requured, just skills and will.

      • Art, during the past couple of years, with BLM and cops going to jail for doing their job, most Trooper aspirants don’t think it is “worth it” to even apply.

        • So far – knock on wood – we haven’t reached that dystopian state here in Alaska, though there are places in rural Alaska that the AST isn’t exactly welcome. The big problem in my time in government, and I suspect it is even worse now is that it is damnably hard to find applicants who can pee in a bottle and pass a background check.

          Superficially, it would seem that the attrition from the big Blue cities would be a fertile recruitment ground, but the reality is that the place the AST always needs fresh recruits if for the remote assignments and city cops aren’t very useful in that duty.

          • Multiple problems with Lower 48 cops…you often hire someone else’s problem child, you find out that they don’t want to leave the road system (especially Palmer and Fairbanks), and they’ve been so closely managed over their previous LE career they don’t possess the vital Trooper trait of independent thought.

      • He’s worth a Tier 2 or Tier 3 retirement. Without that you’ll just keep throwing training and recruitment cash out the window. Cheaper by far to reward commitment with commitment. Otherwise, you just get into a bidding war with Depts. where the work is much, much easier.

        • Unless it has changed since I left, we had little attrition to other departments other than inside Alaska because Troopers wanted the more urban duty. During my whole tenure the one over-riding problem was being able to staff rural posts and while nobody would say it out loud the State’s response was to withdraw from rural posts. During Murkowski we had serious discussions about withdrawing from general law enforcement altogether and making AST into a super CIB. The boroughs and towns on the road system can patrol their own roads and if the “unorganized borough” wants law enforcement they can find a way to pay for it. I’ve been through “village councils” telling the State that it doesn’t have permission to send Troopers into their village, and if I were Governor or Commissioner of DPS, I’m damned if I would put up with that.

          My last couple of negotiations with PSEA in the early ’00s could be summarized as they threw down the MOA cop contract and said, “we want what they have” and we replied, “well, go to work for them.” In reality, we lost very few to MOA.

          As you hint at elsewhere, the State/DPS management is much less overtly political than MOA management, and that is true even in Democrat State administrations. Fundamentally, there are many more interests acting on a State administration than on an MOA administration and that tends to modulate behavior. While Walker pretended to be some sort of independent, the internal administration during his tenure was ruthlessly leftist and self-serving and that garnered quite a bit of enmity.

  3. Give them all a 50% raise for dealing with the crap they now have to put up with. God Bless the troopers.

  4. Twenty years ago there were often 200 qualified applicants for every AST opening. Now there aren’t 100 applicants for every class. Separations from DPS are close to twice the former rate.

    It’s not so much the BLM effect as the younger generation doesn’t want to live a life of devoted service and veteran Troopers have become disillusioned thanks to the court systems and the estrangement of the legislature.

    Expect a new mass exodus is there is another Gov. Walker. He paid off DPS handsomely and still couldn’t buy PSEA’s endorsement, working Troops hated him.

  5. Twenty years ago there were often 200 qualified applicants for every AST opening. Now there aren’t 100 applicants for every class. Separations from DPS are close to twice the former rate.

    It’s not so much the BLM effect as the younger generation doesn’t want to live a life of devoted service and veteran Troopers have become disillusioned thanks to the court systems and the estrangement of the legislature.

    Expect a new mass exodus if there is another Gov. Walker. He paid off DPS handsomely and still couldn’t buy PSEA’s endorsement, working Troops hated him.

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