The Chronicle‘s Matt Stiles stole a bit of City Controller Annise Parker’s thunder today, as his analysis of HPD overtime from payroll records was posted before the release of Parker’s report on the same subject. Here’s an excerpt from Stiles’ reporting:
The Chronicle examined 2006 payroll figures for all police employees using data obtained under the Texas Public Information Act.
The department paid $53 million in overtime last year, about 10 percent of its budget for all personnel costs in the current fiscal year. The average overtime total was about $10,000 per department employee, up from $6,000 in 2005.
Only 74 of the city’s roughly 21,000 employees made more than $50,000 in overtime last year. Three were from the fire department, and the rest work as police officers or sergeants.
Police commanders say the concentration of high overtime pay in a small group of rank-and-file officers reflects several factors.
The story goes into much more detail, and should be read in its entirety. HPD’s severe staffing shortage contributed significantly to the overtime expenditures, of course.
Controller Parker’s report is available here (pdf). In her press release, she criticized HPD for inadequate control and tracking of overtime hours:
A performance audit released today by Houston City Controller Annise Parker concludes the Houston Police Department lacks adequate controls to manage the amount of overtime and extra job hours worked by its classified officers. Auditors found no correlation between overtime worked for HPD and on the job injuries, accidents or disciplinary actions. However, they were unable to reach any conclusions regarding the impact of extra employment on job performance because the data was not available.
[snip]
HPD policy limits officers to no more than 16 hours on the job per 24-hour period and/or a total of 80 hours per workweek. According to the performance audit, the department lacks a process for identifying, tracking and reporting regular hours, overtime hours and extra job hours worked by officers. Officers are not routinely required to report hours worked on second jobs. As a result, there is no way to ensure compliance with the work hour limit. In fact, auditors noted that one officer included in the test group averaged pay for over 79 hours per week for the entire period covered by the audit without including extra employment, which he also worked.
The audit recommends HPD develop an internal program for scheduling and tracking overtime and extra employment hours worked by officers. “If anything, this is a matter of utilizing available computer technology to help HPD more effectively meet the very important demands of protecting Houstonians. HPD should know where every uniformed officer is working throughout the city. A manual system should be utilized until the new computer system kicks in. Other departments around the country are already doing this. ” Parker points out.
The audit was done at the request of Police Chief Harold Hurtt.
On the surface, it looks as if the city’s watchdog media and one official watchdog (the Controller’s office) have done some good work.
What do you think?
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