By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT


After years of struggling to lure top-quality recruits, the New York Police Department has found that the prolonged recession - coupled with a significant increase in first-year salaries - has generated new interest in police careers.

Applications to the Police Academy rose 54 percent in 2008 from 2007, when there were 17,212 applicants. The wider pool of candidates has enabled the department to become more diverse by the year; the percentage of black, Hispanic and Asian officers has steadily risen since 2000, as has the percentage of female officers.

The department is also better educated than in the past: in 1999, 17 percent of the force had four-year college degrees; this year, the figure rose to 24 percent.

However, the department has been unable to take advantage of the surplus of talented applicants because of hiring restrictions tied to the city’s budget crisis. Over the next year, the department will continue to shrink through attrition to 34,304 members, about 6,000 fewer than in 2001.

“When we had the money, we didn’t have the people,” the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said. “Now we have the people and we don’t have the money. We have people knocking on our door and we can’t do anything.”

In interviews, rookie officers said that two economic factors - the poor job market and a competitive police salary - played a large role in their decision to join the force. The base salary for first-year officers, which fell to $25,100 from nearly $40,000 in 2005, has risen to $41,975; after five and a half years, the total compensation - including holiday pay, uniform allowance and night differential and longevity pay - rises to $90,829. After 20 years, officers may retire with a pension equal to half their salary.

Officer Ricardo Montilla, who had been a financial adviser for a bank in Brooklyn, said he had hit a wall in his civilian pay, and joined the force in December.

“I was making a lot of money, and then not making money,” he said. “As the economy got worse, the investments dried up and I needed more stability. The police offer a pension that’s unheard of.”

In the current first-year class of rookies, Officer Montilla, 31, is one of several refugees from the financial industry, an uncommon breeding ground for police officers. He and two academy classmates who had also worked in finance said they had been willing to give up larger salaries partly because they were afraid they would not be able to support their families if the economy continued to slow.

A year and a half ago, Henry Chung was an assistant vice president at Merrill Lynch, monitoring billions of dollars the firm traded on a daily basis.

Recently, he found himself, in his capacity as a patrol officer in the Queens section of New York, chasing a man who had slashed another man’s neck with a razor blade. He grabbed the man from behind, pushed him up against a wall and handcuffed him.

“It’s a little different than looking at a computer monitor trying to figure out why there’s a million bucks missing in the firm’s accounts,” Officer Chung, 34, said.

Two former Police Academy officials said that they could not recall anyone during their tenure who had worked on Wall Street and become a police officer. “There were teachers, security guards, painters, military, almost everything, even sales, but I don’t remember anyone from Wall Street,” said John Cerar, who spent 15 of his 26 years on the force working at the Police Academy as a supervisor, officer and administrator and retired in 1999.


ÁNGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES / Henry Chung worked at Merrill Lynch before joining the police.