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The good folks at DCist have done a deep dive on police overtime police at the Washington, DC police department.

When a police officer bills 2,735 overtime hours, a total of 4935 hours in a year, the equivalent of 13½ hour days every day of the year, something in profoundly wrong.

In fact, either the officer is engaging in overtime fraud, or they are wielding a gun while impaired from exhaustion.

If a trucker put in those hours, he would have his commercial license pulled.

To state the obvious, one of the problems with policing in the United States is that cops are sleep deprived to the point of psychosis:

For D.C. Metropolitan Police Department sergeant Tony Giles, working overtime is a full-time job of its own.

In the budget year ending September 30, 2022, Giles billed the city for 2,735 extra work hours, which — on top of a regular 40-hour workweek — is equivalent to working a 13-hour day, every single day, for all 365 days of the year.

This harrowing workload was so lucrative that Giles out-earned the highest paid officials in city government in fiscal year 2022. His total compensation was greater than the publicly reported salaries of every other city employee, including the police chief and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Giles, whose base salary was $114,000 that year, ultimately took home $361,000 in total pay.

The 33-year MPD veteran has doubled his base salary every year since at least 2014 — the earliest year with publicly available data on the D.C. Council’s website. And this year, he surpassed his 2022 total; as of the end of July, with a month-and-a-half remaining in the 2023 budget year, he’d already earned $249,577 in overtime and other bonus pay.

While Giles was the department’s highest earner, he was far from the only officer in the District significantly padding his wallet by banking overtime hours. He was one of 41 MPD employees who earned more than $100,000 in overtime and other extra pay in fiscal year 2022, according to data obtained and analyzed by DCist/WAMU and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Through the end of this July, 44 MPD employees had already earned at least that much in extra pay in the most recent budget year.

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Spreadsheets detailing MPD overtime hours for each of the past five fiscal years, obtained via public records request, show that officers routinely record 14- to 18-hour work days, in some cases breaking MPD policies on overwork. Department rules prohibit officers from working more than 18 hours during a 24 hour period or more than 98-hours over the course of a week unless they receive a special waiver.

“You don't want to be dealing with a cop on hour 15. I can promise you that,” says Chris Magnus, D.C.’s Deputy Auditor for Public Safety and a former police chief in multiple cities. “For anybody, 16 hours [or more] is craziness.”

………

But many also agreed that such overwork is not safe for officers themselves or for the public.

“When you start working officers too much, it affects their judgment, affects their situational awareness,” said Steve O’Dell, a decorated former MPD lieutenant who retired in 2003. O’Dell said officers who work excessive overtime tend to become either “overreactive”: quick to interpret a situation as a threat — or “underreactive”: less likely to respond quickly to potential threats. “Traffic accidents go up, injuries go up, and citizens’ complaints go up because you've got an officer who's fatigued, worked too much and he may not respond correctly under a stressful situation.”

………

Officers blocking off streets for the presidential motorcade often have to report early for their posts, which allows them to rest — or, in some cases, catch some shut eye. Several former officers described high earners in SOD sneaking naps on the job, especially in their cars, though Lewbel says the department does not tolerate sleeping on the job. 

Sleeping on the job is overtime fraud.

Hell, this is all overtime fraud.  

Unfortunately, in the police department, the inmates run the overtime asylum and making it worse, this overtime boosts their retirement benefits too.

Police officers are routinely defrauding their departments and their taxpayers.