At least here in NYC, a large part of a NYPD officer's pension is calculated based on a 3-year look back from their retirement date, so there is a huge incentive to work as much overtime as possible in order to bump that number in your last few years of service. There are lots of stories of NYPD handing out easy overtime in massive numbers for each other, particularly when they are about to retire.

Teachers are the easy ones to point to, it is hard to be mad at an underpaid teacher who receives a reasonable pension for life. We certainly can be mad at NYPD scamming the system to get $100-200k/year for life.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-...

[2] https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/newly-retired-nypd...

At least in my union defined benefit pension it specifically excludes overtime since that obviously is ripe for abuse. It's just your basic calculation: average of your best 5 years of salary at 2% per year of service.

Is that not the case for police unions in the states?

All seem trivial compared to the money sucked up by billionaires, who seem to do little good for society. I'm not going to get angry at a police officer trying to maximize their retirement when we live in a society that celebrates people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.