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Posted by: policelaborlaw.com

Police Dept. to scrutinize productivity

Overtime, paid details draw special attention

By Suzanne Smalley, Globe Staff | April 13, 2006

Boston police officials have launched an extensive new monitoring program to track officers' productivity with measures including arrests made, interrogations conducted, tickets written, and time spent on leave.

Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole and her command staff are paying particular attention to officers who work significant amounts of overtime and paid details to make sure that their performance during regular shifts is up to par.

Officials say that the scrutiny, when reinforcements to the patrol force are failing to keep up with rising gun violence, is paying off.

Since mid-January, they say, the number of officers on injury leave has decreased from 130 to 95. Last month, eight officers who had been earning full pay while on disability, in one case for as long as a decade, were forced to retire. And the number of citations issued has increased, though officials did not have specific numbers yesterday.

''We're facing tough fiscal challenges. . . . We need to get as much productivity as we can," O'Toole said in an interview yesterday.

She said the department is using computer technology that can collect and analyze what individual officers do on the job, such as the number of arrests and citations, plus provide a breakdown of their pay.

Using that system, officials are also keeping track of how much paid leave officers are getting for injury, illness, or exemplary work, and officials are enforcing a rule limiting how many overtime shifts and paid details officers can work. Officers are not allowed to work more than 96 hours in a week.

Top police officials have asked district captains and other commanders to scrutinize the productivity of officers with heavy overtime and paid detail work, in part to make sure officers are not dangerously fatigued during regular duty or jeopardizing their health.

At weekly meetings with Superintendent Robert Dunford, district captains and other supervisors are told to document officers' productivity and to put pressure on high-earning officers who are not being productive enough.

''If you're a high earner, your numbers should be up there: your arrests, your field interrogations, your moving citations," said one high-ranking police official, who has attended some of the meetings and who requested anonymity because it is against department rules to speak with the news media without permission. ''He threw it out there [that] if these guys are making money, they better be working."

O'Toole said the department has traditionally had a culture in which a relatively small number of top performers have done the bulk of the work.

''Now," she said, ''for the first time in the department's history we have the information to closely monitor what people are doing, and if we have people who are poor performers, it gives their supervisors the information they need to hold them accountable and to coach them or discipline them."

Officials would not detail the minimum productivity standards officers are expected to meet.

Christopher Fox, head of the department's Bureau of Administration and Technology, said the effort is meant to maximize performance and accountability.

''If somebody is making a lot of money or using a lot of overtime, what is the public getting in return, in terms of arrests or warrants issued?" Fox asked.

The scrutiny comes as Mayor Thomas M. Menino faces pressure from residents and city councilors to combat the surge in violence by beefing up the patrol force. Fatal and nonfatal shootings have increased to 99 through April 6 this year, from 57 at the same point last year. There are 1,356 patrol officers, down from 1,466 in 2000.

Menino's budget proposal, submitted yesterday to the City Council, includes money for two new classes of recruits -- 58 getting ready to graduate and another 70 who have recently begun training -- as well as a controversial plan to fold Municipal Police officers into the Boston Police Department.

Fox said he will continue to look for savings. For instance, he said, the department has slashed nonmandatory overtime, much of it resulting from captains giving officers paid days off as a reward for good work. Now, captains must turn in a written form explaining their reasons for awarding the time off.

Last year, the department reduced the amount of discretionary overtime by about a third, to 1,999 days from 3,197 days in 2004.

O'Toole said she hopes that a new system for tracking overtime spending will bring further reductions. She said she wants supervisors to be alerted when an unusual amount of money is being spent or work is missed.

O'Toole said she has also focused recently on reducing the amount of time officers spend in court, a cost that she said accounts for 25 percent of the overtime budget. The commissioner said she is working with court officials on a better system for alerting officers to changes in court schedules. O'Toole said she has spoken to the district attorney about being more selective when summoning officers to testify. Officers are paid for four hours, even if they are in court for as little as 30 minutes.

Posted by: Wolfman

"Quotas".

Posted by: SOT

Yes! I am sooooo gad that police departments are now looking at efficiency v. public safety!
When they have enough police to fill every shift and every detail without overtime..then they should worry about efficiency.

Posted by: LA Copper

It looks like our Bratton has had a little chat with your O'Toole.

This kind of thing has been going on in my department since before I got on the job back in 1988, and before Chief Bratton came on board. We call it "recap." We are held accountable on: citations, felony arrests, misdemeanor arrests, radio calls and observation activities. At the end of each month, a supervisor meets with officers in his squad and goes over their recap.

Each officer that works patrol is compared to other officers in productivity. Everyone works, some more than others of course, but everyone works.

We don't call it quotas, it's just doing your job and earning your salary. Also, it would seem that efficiency would equal public safety.

Posted by: SOT

Efficiency absolutely does not equal public safety....

It's more efficient to have one officer per car...but is that in the best interest of public safety when it comes to hihg crime areas? The reason some are doing overtime is because there are not enough cops on the job to cover the work. It may be more cost effective to pay overtime for four hours here and there then to add another position, but is that in the interest of public safety?
People tink ...ohhh this guy got paid time and a half...but when they consider the total cost of an officer on the street, they forget, training, equipment, medical insurance, and all the things that go with having a new hire....which is more efficient? Havin a cop that's already on the job work more...or having more cops to cover the needed details?

Posted by: LA Copper

It would seem this would depend on how the efficiency thing is used. One thing we don't have out here that you do back there is details. We don't have to worry about having to fill them. The closest we have to details is pre-scheduled overtime shifts where the officer (who is on a day off) goes out and does some type of crime suppression.

I agree about not having enough cops to go around to cover the work. That seems to be a nationwide problem. For example, in the division where I work, we are have approximately 425,000 people. On my watch, we sometimes only have 12 officers because of one reason or another. But because of this, we have to be as efficient as possible to use those 12 officers to keep things in check. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

By the way, the one officer per car thing in a "high crime" area could be construed as a public safety factor. The theory being that the more black and whites the bad guys see, the less likely they are to commit a crime. BUT, one officer per car in a "high crime" area is most definitely NOT an officer safety thing! There, I would agree with you on.

Posted by: lofu

Now the press is praising numbers based policing? Wasn't it less than a week ago that the other Boston paper did an "expose" decrying the aggresive traffic enforcement of the troopers on the pike?

Posted by: LA Copper

Quote:

Originally Posted by lofu

Now the press is praising numbers based policing? Wasn't it less than a week ago that the other Boston paper did an "expose" decrying the aggresive traffic enforcement of the troopers on the pike?

Good point. Guess they can't make up their minds. Let's face it, the media is never happy when it comes to the police. Come to think of it, neither is the vocal minority of the public.

Posted by: pablo

what a load of crap. This job is not that hard,anwswer your calls. stop a few cars and make an arrest when neccesssary. THe more arrests a Dept makes, the more money it costs them in overtime,court, housing prisoners etc.They tried this at my dept a while back and within two months they told us to scale back on the aggressive ebforcement- they could not afford it any more because of all the court time and Ot shifts to baby sit prisoners.

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