As the newest class of police officers celebrated graduation from the Police Academy yesterday, the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, spoke about recruitment challenges the New York Police Department will face starting next year. The comments came after sizable pay cuts were set for new police recruits.

“I think it presents a major recruiting challenge to the department,” the commissioner said at the Brooklyn College swearing-in ceremony. “No question about that.”

Mayor Bloomberg made a similar remark yesterday. “It doesn’t make it easier to recruit,” the mayor told reporters.

Beginning next January, the starting annual salary for police officers in training will be reduced to $25,100 a year, for the first six months. After graduation, the salary of the newly minted officers will rise by $7,600 a year.

The class that entered the academy Monday was guaranteed a starting salary of $40,658, according to the congratulatory letter one rookie received this month. The new police officer, who asked that her name be withheld, had thought she was going to earn the lesser salary but was prepared to take the job anyway. To make ends meet, the rookie said she considered moving her son to a public school and eliminating her cable-television service.

“I was really going to have to tighten my belt,” the 34-year-old recruit said.

The state’s Public Employment Relations Board, in binding arbitration invoked after the Bloomberg administration and the police union reached an impasse in collective bargaining, called for the salary cuts in the police contract covering 2002 to 2004. At the same time, the board also retroactively increased the base annual salary of full-fledged police officers by 10.25% over two years.

“While this 10.25% award over two years significantly exceeds the existing pattern of 0%, 3%, and 1% and is a step in the right direction,” the president of the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, said in a news release, “it does not go far enough.”

Mr. Lynch also said, “This reduction in starting salary for future hires is not in the long-term interest of the city.”

New hires’ base annual salary of $25,100 rises to $32,700 after they finish the 6-month academy, under the arbitrators’ ruling, and then increases in increments of between $2,000 and $5,000 until it tops out at $59,588 for officers at the end of 5 and a half years of employment. Some veteran police officers doubted whether they would have become cops if their starting pay has been only $25,100.

Police Officer Lupe Saracino said she would “probably not.” She gave up a better-paying job to become a police officer in 1994 at a base pay in the high 20s, she said.

“I even thought at that time that the salary was low,” she said.

Of the new rate for officers in training, she said: “I definitely think it’s going to affect the candidates they’re going to get.”

Police Officer Christine Calderon, a PBA delegate in the 24th Precinct, said sentiment toward the pay cuts has been mixed.

“When I came on, starting pay was $24,900 and that was over 12 years ago,” she said. “No one’s going to come on this job. They’re going to have to resort to – I don’t know – Riker’s Island to recruit.”

Others agreed the new salary could affect recruitment.

“It will make a difficult job more difficult,” a professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, William Eimicke, said. If the reductions were made permanent, they could result in a decline in the number and quality of police officers, Mr. Eimicke, a former state and city official, said.

Salary, however, is only one factor when it comes to selecting a career in civil service. Most candidates, the professor said, are also strongly motivated by the prospect of entering public service and of having good benefits and job security.