Thomas Breen photo
Police Chief Campbell (right) testifies before the Finance Committee during a budget workshop on Thursday night.
Festa: “What happened?”
What started as a “mind-blowing” year in police overtime is ending up as somewhat less extreme, as the department has implemented new cost-saving protocols that should lower the bill for the coming fiscal year, the police chief told weary alders.
Police Chief Anthony Campbell shared that message with the alders on the Finance Committee during a four-hour workshop on the mayor’s proposed $547 million operating budget for the fiscal year starting July 1. The workshop took place this past Thursday night in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.
“What was really going to be a record, mind-blowing number year for overtime,” he said, “we’ve scaled it back quite a bit.”
East Rock Alder Anna Festa asked the chief why the recent spate of promotions has not reduced police overtime costs, which ran as high as $150,000 per week in January 2018.
“We were told last year at this meeting that the promotions were the cure for all the overtime,” Festa said. “And there’s still a deficit. What happened?”
Campbell said that the recent promotions of seven officers to lieutenant and assistant chief positions have indeed cut down on supervisory overtime.
But, he said, there are still two main drivers of larger-than-anticipated overtime numbers among rank and file officers: a steady decrease in the number of officers on the force, and the cost of training officers on how to use a suite of new equipment, from body cameras to crowd control gear, that have been introduced in the past nine months.
The week of Jan. 5, 2018, the police overtime exceeded $154,000. For the rest of January, that number ranged from $123,000 to $151,000.
The weekly overtime number dropped to the $80,000 to $90,000 range in March. The department still expects the overtime to be $2.5 million over budget by the end of the fiscal year in June, accordingly to a monthly financial report provided by Acting Budget Director Michael Gormany.
In regard to staffing concerns, Campbell said the force started January 2017 with 431 officers in the department. As of January 2018, that number dropped to 408.
He said that the department currently has 77 vacancies, and that that number could increase by as much as an additional 80 retirements by the end of the year.
He said that, at last week’s police commissioners meeting alone, he received five retirements and two resignations.
He said that the police contract does not require retirement-eligible officers to give any kind of advanced notice. He said that an officer could come in one day, announce that he or she is retiring, and be done by the afternoon.
Campbell said that he has a good enough relationship with the supervisors and rank and file officers on staff that people will usually give him some kind of heads up before retiring. But legally, he said, they do not have to provide any notice.
The aldermanic Finance Committee.
“My biggest concern with overtime is that we seat classes as soon as possible,” he said.
He said that he expects to seat a new class of 40 recruits by the end of April and another class of 40 by the end of the calendar year. But, he said, those new recruits are still not truly available to him for a good six to nine months, since six months are spent in the academy and another three are spent in field training.
Another driver of overtime increases in the past few months came from the introduction of and training around new equipment, like body cameras and crowd control gear, according to Campbell.
He said that he is glad that the department has implemented new technologies. He noted that a state grant helped outfit all 350 patrol officers with body cameras.
But new equipment requires training, and training requires time.
“The way our contract works,” he said, “when you are doing training for officers, officers get what’s called ‘TA time,’ or ‘Time Allowed.’”
He said that each officer who conducts training or who receives training on his or her day off earns 1.5 hours of TA instead of getting paid in overtime.
Officers can put TA hours towards taking time off without having to burn any vacation time or personal days.
However, once an officer reaches a cap of 480 hours in accumulated TA, the police contract requires that the department pay the officer overtime instead of letting him or her accumulate more TA.
As much as maxed out TAs contribute to overtime problems, he said, the real problem comes when 35 officers are pulled all at once from their regular beats for two to five days of training. Then the department has to scramble to find other officers to backfill the patrol beats left empty by training officers, and that replacement staff earns a lot of overtime.
“When you take basically an entire department and over a three month period you take days to get them trained in new body cameras, new cellphone distribution, you generate quite a bit of overtime,” he told the alders.
“Whenever you’re trying to build your department and implement new technology,” he continued, “this is something that you run into.”
Campbell said that his department has brought the overtime fees down from around $160,000 per week in January to as low as $80,000 per week in March by pulling two or three officers off a shift at a time for training, instead of trying to train (and backfill) dozens of officers at once. He said that he has also assigned specific officers in each district to crime suppression beats like motor vehicle stops, so that the other officers are available to respond to Priority 1 and Priority 2 calls.
The Board of Alders must approve a final version of the budget by the first week of June.
The next budget workshop, during which the Finance Committee will interview more department heads about their respective allocations in the mayor’s proposed budget, is on Tuesday, March 27, at 6 p.m. in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.