by Phil Campbell
The five officers and five lieutenants listed and pictured in
The Memphis Flyer this week, who drew tens of thousands of dollars
in overtime in 1997, are arguably the hardest-working patrol officers,
detectives, and supervising lieutenants in the city. While other
officers may have chosen to make extra money as part-time security
officers, these 10 officers averaged between 60 hours and 67 hours
per week for the Memphis Police Department, cruising the streets
or carrying out a wide range of other departmental duties. Though
their identities have not been revealed until now, these are the
same officers who have been at the center of the recent overtime
controversy.
In the larger scheme of things, these officers are part of the reason the department overshot its overtime budget by more than $6 million.
Early last year, Mayor Willie Herenton ordered the department to restructure and lower crime, holding Director Walter Winfrey and members of his command staff accountable. Police administrators, in turn, made precinct commanders accountable. They meant it, too; in the past year, department administrators have twice shuffled inspectors around, into and out of precincts.
But precinct commanders and administrators alike know they’re seriously understaffed. The department can’t seem to hire and train enough recruits in time to keep up with the veterans who are constantly retiring from the department. The need for supervisory lieutenants is especially great.
So everyone gets the opportunity to make more money in overtime, and plenty of officers naturally take advantage of it. Arrests go up, crime numbers begin a downward trend (except rape and arson), and by late January 1998, Herenton is once again publicly praising his director.
Then March rolls around, and the department realizes that, while it was making sure enough officers were on the streets, no one was really paying attention to the growing budget problem. A stink is raised in the city council, but no one can blame the police. They are, after all, just doing their jobs, and no politician in Memphis would deny the police extra money if they seem to be getting results. Emergency funds are approved, but department officials decide to curtail overtime – temporarily, anyway.
That’s the bigger story. This is the smaller story. While Winfrey was taking heat for exceeding overtime costs, he mentioned that some officers were making more than $90,000 in overtime.
In actuality, there were six such officers – one patrol officer and five lieutenants – who raked in more money than their bosses last year. Five officers and five lieutenants put in an average of 20 to 27 hours in overtime a week.
Winfrey was making $85,000 a third of the way through 1997, then received a raise to $92,400 a year, according to city personnel records. His gross salary for that year was about $90,000. Winfrey and the officers in his command staff do not earn overtime pay, no matter how many hours they work.
Last year’s highest-paid police officer was Lt. Steven R. Cole, who made $99,301.13. Until the summer of 1997, Cole was working in the South Precinct. Then he was transferred to downtown headquarters to work as a detective for the Felony Response unit, where he works the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift. Cole was able to make extra money during this time as a CDO, or command duty officer, who is responsible for filing paperwork for officers who come downtown after they make arrests.
According to numbers supplied in The Commercial Appeal, the use of overtime was fairly well distributed throughout the department’s six precincts and detective bureaus. Similarly, these officers and lieutenants are scattered throughout the department. Lt. A.Z. Woods works in Public Housing, Sgt. Lonnie Thweatt works in Special Traffic Investigations. The Central, South, and East precincts are represented in this list, but the North, West and Downtown precincts are not. The highest-paid patrol officer, Robert M. Willie, earned a total of $91,268.18 last year, presumably by working extra hours at the Central Precinct, where he regularly works the day shift.
The numbers do clarify one point. The officers who made the most
in overtime were making almost twice their base pay, but they
were not working twice as many hours. Officers making overtime
make 150 percent (time-and-a-half) of their base pay.
Though it was difficult to find substantive research on the topic, common sense raises this question: Are officers working marathon hours as big a threat to public safety as an officer shortage? “If a person’s working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, that tears the body apart,” Deputy Chief David Dugger notes. “As soon as work ends, it begins again. A person needs some time away from the job.”
Even without the accountability plan, overtime is an easy thing for a police officer to pick up. If your shift ends at 10 p.m., but you get a dispatch call for a rape in progress at 9:55 p.m., you obviously can’t just turn around and head back to the precinct on time, hoping someone else will handle it. Occasionally, a call for service can turn into a several-hour ordeal.
Then there’s court time and bureaucratic details, the petty kinds of things that can consume so many hours. Court time was a major factor last year for overtime expenses, according to Dugger. And, with the department dramatically improving its arrest rate from 1996 to 1997, it’s fairly inevitable that officers would be spending more time testifying, filling out tedious forms, and driving suspects downtown for booking (as much as a 30-minute trek for officers covering outlying areas of the city).
These five officers and five lieutenants are a special bunch, though. They didn’t just fall into collecting overtime. They sought it out. When someone was sick, they were the first to volunteer. After a while, the precinct’s supervising officer knew how willing they would be.
Take Officer J.B. Bell Jr., who, in 1997, averaged about 64 hours a week patrolling the streets of the East Precinct. He made $42,583 in base pay last year, and collected $36,246 in overtime. Bell says he never worked any “special events,” those extra, boring crowd-control duties such as patrolling the Cooper-Young Festival or University of Memphis basketball and football games. He was in a squad car on the streets of Memphis, more than happy to make extra money by filling in for officers who were sick or on vacation. He would often work a double, two shifts back-to-back. His supervisors, apparently, were happy to let him work.
Bell says he could, if he were allowed to, work as many as five double shifts in a row, an 80-hour work week. “The only way you can get tired is if you work your off-days,” he says. “There’s nothing to working a double. But if you work your off-days, that’s when you get tired. You never get an arrest.” Bell said he once tried to work those days, too, but soon realized his limitations.
Bell says his supervisors, aware of how overworked officers were getting tired, would use two officers in a car when the officers were working too much overtime. It’s safer to have a partner in the car with you than in a separate squad car. That way, both are assured to be together when they approach an uncertain, potentially dangerous situation.
Officer J.B. Raines logged the highest number of extra hours, an average of 26.44 hours a week last year. Raines worked in the Central Precinct, covering East Memphis during the evening and late shift. “We were extremely short-handed on the midnight shift in the Central Precinct,” he says. Raines has since been transferred to Crime Analysis. He wouldn’t give any further statements, but he did acknowledge that he’s resigning from the department in two weeks. The police department had increasingly used him over the years for computer analysis, and Raines is leaving to work for a company that holds consulting contracts with the MPD.
According to personnel records, none of these officers have fewer than 10 years’ experience. They average $44,000 a year in base pay. None of the lieutenants has fewer than 19 years’ experience, averaging $53,000 a year in base pay.
Attempts were made to reach all of these officers, though only a few responded by the time this story went to print. Their reactions to questions were mixed, from suspicious to neutral to eager. A few declined to comment until they had the approval of a supervisor. Lt. A.Z. Woods, who is assigned to patrol the city’s public-housing projects, was angry. “Did you look through my files?” he asked accusingly. When asked how he used his overtime, he responded, “I worked for the Memphis Police Department. I worked for the Memphis Police Department.” Then he slammed the phone down.
Lt. Woods was No. 4 among overtime-collecting lieutenants, making
$38,287.58 in overtime. 