Police overtime costs climbing again
Police overtime expected to hit the highest total since 2006
Above: A police car stops at the Edmondson Village Shopping Center last November.
Despite years of controversy, criticism and hand-wringing, overtime costs at the Baltimore Police Department are back on the rise.
The Department of Finance disclosed yesterday that overtime spending for uniformed police officers is expected to increase to $27.2 million in the current fiscal year ending June 30, the highest sum since Martin O’Malley left as Baltimore’s mayor in 2006.
Spending on overtime is 16% above last year’s total – and fully 63% higher than the recent low water mark of $16.7 million under Mayor Sheila Dixon in 2010.
Andrew W. Kleine, the budget director, told the City Council’s Budget and Appropriations Committee that there are 254 vacancies among sworn officers, which accounts for the reliance on overtime to maintain police coverage of the city.
Above Budget in Legal Fees and Judgments
Savings from vacancies is being more than offset by the combination of “overages in overtime, severance, legal fees and judgments and suits” against the department, Kleine said in his presentation yesterday.
Overtime has been a persistent source of criticism of the police department, which in turn says that vacancies, caused in part from comparatively low officer salaries, hurts its crime-fighting efforts.
Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts has pledged to reduce overtime, but has been plagued by a rising homicide rate, which spilled over to a record number of homicides so far this year (there have been 36 homicides in 2014, compared to 29 in the same period last year).
But crime-fighting does not account for all of the city’s spending.
A $285,000 strategic report – requested by Batts and made public last November – identified police security for Orioles and Ravens games and other special events as a key factor in the overtime problem, saying the city lost about $3 million from such events.
City Pays for Stadium Overtime
The Orioles and Ravens do not reimburse the police department for the full cost of overtime under their contracts with the Maryland Stadium Authority, the report said.
In addition to charging the full-cost rate for stadium events, the report recommends charging the full rate for traffic control for stadium special events, increasing the police-services fee for all special events and creating a discounted rate for non-profit and charitable special events.
Such measures could add $2 million a year to the department’s coffers and help reduce its “overtime overage.”
Another problem is officer deployment.
The department insists on fully staffing all nine districts across all shifts, which frequently means that officers from the previous shift are recruited to work the next one, making for 16-hour days.
STAFFING MISALIGNMENTS: Chart of patrol staffing imbalance between the early morning hours (surplus of officers) and the high-crime hours of 4 p.m. to midnight (shortage of officers). Courtesy of Peter Bellmio
Peter Bellmio, a consultant hired by Commissioner Batts, has questioned this practice. He has compiled statistics showing that service calls reach a low (20 or fewer an hour citywide) between 3 and 6 in the morning, especially on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
But calls spike to more than 120 an hour during the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, especially on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
As a result, police pay overtime for unneeded officers in the early morning hours, but have a shortage of officers (both on overtime and not) when crime and violence peak in the late afternoon and evening hours.