Wait, think about what you're complaining about—do you want your police to be low paid so they are more susceptible to bribes and corruption? Like they are in many other countries? And California is on the border with Mexico where massively funded global drug cartels operate.
If the average cop salary is set at some X amount higher than non-cops, then they are Y percent less likely to be on the take. If our police are a lot less corrupt, then overall, society pays more, but in theory receives an equal yet intangible benefit from better law enforcement in general.
I doubt anyone will argue that officers aren't owed a reasonably large salary in exchange for their training, the risks they take and their accumulated experience.
However, it is unreasonable to be giving near 100% raises over 2 year periods like we see in this data. In these cases, they are obviously gaming the system to increase their pension payouts. This is an unintended consequence of basing pension payouts on the salary of a person's last year of employment.
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, it's very difficult to become a highway patrol officer. Just getting into the academy is hard to do. But apparently once you're in, you're set for life with a decent salary and these last-year-pay-raise games to make sure you have an unreasonably large pension as well. Artificially limiting the supply of officers in this way allows them to spread their budget over fewer people at the expensive of a smaller force.
In this system, Californians lose out not only on tax dollars that go to artificially inflated pensions, but with a smaller number of on-duty officers as well. If anything, this sounds like corruption to me.
When supply and demand don't dictate price, you have to wonder what does. There isn't a shortage of trigger happy kids wanting a job, the military recruits just fine. We overpay because it's taxed revenue so things like customer satisfaction really don't matter. They even call themselves 'public servants'..
If the average cop salary is set at some X amount higher than non-cops, then they are Y percent less likely to be on the take. If our police are a lot less corrupt, then overall, society pays more, but in theory receives an equal yet intangible benefit from better law enforcement in general.