Categories of Police Overtime

The SFPD tracks General Fund non-holiday overtime use by unit and by the type of overtime. Specifically, there are five types of General Fund non-holiday overtime:

• Extended Work Week (EWW) or Special Event Overtime reflects overtime paid to officers who work beyond their scheduled shifts, or work on their scheduled days off to provide special event coverage. Special events include public activities such as parades, fairs, demonstrations or emergencies which require police officer presence for crowd or traffic control, or other law enforcement duties.

• Investigative Overtime isincurred primarily by inspectors in the Investigators Bureau who work beyond their scheduled hours in order to complete investigative duties, such as interviewing witnesses or making arrests.

• Court Overtime is paid to sworn employees who are subpoenaed to appear in court during off-duty hours.

• Miscellaneous Overtime consists of civilian overtime and sworn overtime used for training, attending meetings or carrying out other functions during off-duty hours.

• Arrest Overtime is typically paid to district station police officers who are sometimes required to stay beyond their scheduled shifts to complete arrests or to file arrest and/or incident reports.

Another type of General Fund overtime is holiday overtime, which is paid to sworn personnel who are scheduled to work on legal holidays. Holiday overtime is also earned at one and one-half times the straight-time rate, and may be compensated as either overtime pay or compensatory time-off.

A breakdown of General Fund non-holiday overtime hours and expenditures by category for the Police Department in FY 1995-96 is shown in Table 3.2 below.

Table 3.2
General Fund Non-Holiday Overtime Hours and Expenditures by
Category of Overtime
San Francisco Police Department FY1995-96

There is also one category of non-General Fund overtime, which is called Special Law Enforcement Services (SLES) overtime. The cost for SLES overtime is reimbursed to the City by persons or agencies who hire off-duty officers to police special events. SLES overtime expenditures are not part of the SFPD budget. Because SLES overtime is reimbursed, it is tracked separately and is distinct from EWW or special event overtime, which are paid by the General Fund.

Third parties pay one and one-half times the straight-time rate for each hour worked plus 22.6 percent for administrative overhead. Payments are deposited into the SLES fund, with the exception of the 22.6 percent for administrative overhead, which is to be deposited into the General Fund. SLES overtime is discussed in further detail in Section 4.2 of this report.

In addition to overtime compensation, the Department pays for two types of standby duty. (1) The first is court standby, which is paid when a police officer is required to testify at a trial. The officer calls a message tape during specified hours on the evening or weekend prior to the scheduled date of the trial to determine whether he or she will be needed in court the following weekday. If the officer is off-duty during those hours, he or she earns two hours of overtime even if not needed in court. (2) The second type of standby pay is received for investigative on-call duty. The Homicide Detail, Sex Crimes Detail, Juvenile Detail, Photo Lab, Bomb Squad and Crime Scene Investigations each maintain two officers on-call 24 hours per day. The Department compensates an officer who is on-call with two hours of standby pay regardless of whether he or she is called out for duty. If called, he or she is paid the two hours for being on-call, plus the time spent investigating the case. Both court standby and investigative standby are paid at the overtime rate, although they are actually forms of premium pay.

Overtime Policies and Procedures

Sworn personnel are exempt from Administrative Code Section 18.13, which limits permissible overtime hours for City employees to 16 percent of the number of hours the employee is regularly scheduled to work. Rules regarding overtime and compensatory time off for police officers are in Section 11.01 of the San Francisco Police Department"s (SFPD) General Order Manual.

Prior authorization for overtime is required in the Investigations Bureau. Each inspector, prior to working overtime, provides an estimate of the approximate number of overtime hours that will be needed to the lieutenant in charge of his or her detail. Following the use of overtime, the inspector must then complete an overtime card and explain, if necessary, why the amount of overtime incurred exceeds the amount for which he or she received prior authorization.

In Field Operations, prior authorization for overtime is not explicitly required. However, an officer is required to obtain prior approval from his or her sergeant before making an arrest. Thus, if an officer needs to stay on-duty beyond his or her normal watch in order to complete an arrest, investigation and/or incident report, any use of overtime is implicitly authorized once the sergeant approves the arrest. Overtime is also assigned by commanding officers in order to provide additional police coverage for special events and emergencies or, in some circumstances, to substitute for officers absent due to sick leave, vacation, disability leave or other factors.

Requests for compensation for extra duty must be submitted to the police officer"s commanding officer without delay upon completion of the overtime worked or as soon as possible thereafter. The request is signed by the commanding officer and is used by each unit"s clerk to fill out the biweekly watch report, which shows the number of overtime hours worked and the officer"s preference regarding form of compensation. The watch report, along with the overtime cards, are sent to payroll. The payroll office then computes overtime payments based solely on the watch reports. Additionally, attendance data and overtime use by police officer are recorded on separate documents, inhibiting commanding officers from knowing if overtime is being incurred on days on which authorized leave is taken.

After each biweekly pay period, the Fiscal Division compiles an overtime summary report, which records the number of overtime hours by unit and purpose (arrest, investigation, court appearance, EWW, miscellaneous). The overtime summary reports are distributed to the Chief and the Deputy Chiefs for review. High overtime usage is highlighted for each deputy chief, who is responsible for investigating the cause of increased overtime. The Fiscal Division also performs periodic audits of overtime use, such as the report on top overtime earners. This report was discontinued by the former Chief for unknown reasons.

General Fund Non-Holiday Overtime Expenditures

Table 3.3 below presents General Fund non-holiday overtime budget amounts and actual expenditures for FY 1991-92 through FY 1995-96. The General Fund Non-Holiday Overtime budget for FY 1996-97 is $8,792,503.

Table 3.3
Budgeted Overtime and Actual Overtime Expenditures
San Francisco Police Department FY1991-92 through FY1995-96

The increase in overtime expenditures since FY 1992-93 reflected in Table 3.3 above can be explained in part by the five percent annual pay increases police officers have received during that period. Additionally, Table 3.3 shows that police overtime has been significantly underfunded in the past two fiscal years.

Table 3.4 and Exhibit 3.1 show overtime use by category from 1991-92 through 1995-96.

Table 3.4
Hours of Overtime by Category (a)
San Francisco Police Department FY 1991-92 through FY 1995-96

Exhibit 3.1
Hours of Overtime by Category (a)
San Francisco Police Department FY 1991-92 through FY 1995-96

Table 3.4 illustrates that total paid overtime hours have fluctuated widely during the past five years. Additionally, Exhibit 3.1 demonstrates that while court and miscellaneous overtime have generally declined over the past five years, investigative and arrest overtime have increased during the same period. A separate calculation shows that investigative overtime increased by an average of 12.6 percent per year between FY 1992-93 and FY 1995-96 and increased by 19.5 percent between FY 1994-95 and FY 1995-96. Arrest overtime has increased by 41.2 percent since FY 1991-92.

Table 3.5 presents the distribution of non-holiday General Fund overtime by bureau for FY 1995-96.

Table 3.5
Distribution of Non-Holiday General Fund Overtime Hours
by Bureau - San Francisco Police Department FY 1995-96

Table 3.6 and Exhibit 3.2 compare the use of non-holiday General Fund overtime hours by purpose for each bureau during FY 1995-96.

Table 3.6
San Francisco Police Department
Distribution of Non-Holiday General Fund Overtime Hours
by Category and Bureau for FY 1995-96

The data included in Table 3.6 is visually presented in Exhibit 3.2, below.

Exhibit 3.2
San Francisco Police Department
Distribution of Non-Holiday General Fund Overtime Hours
by Category and Bureau for FY 1995-96

(a) The SFPD does not track compensatory time earned by type of overtime.

Based on the data contained in Tables 3.5 and 3.6, and Exhibit 3.2, we have drawn the following conclusions:

• The majority of police overtime expenditures are incurred by the Field Operations Bureau, followed by Investigations and Administration.

• Field Operations uses the highest levels of EWW, court and arrest overtime. EWW overtime represents the largest source of overtime (55 percent) for Field Operations.

• The highest level of investigative overtime is in the Investigations Bureau. Investigative overtime represents over half (54 percent) of all overtime used by the Investigations Bureau.

• The highest level of miscellaneous overtime is in the Administration Bureau. Miscellaneous overtime represents nearly 75 percent of all overtime used by the Administration Bureau.

Special Event Overtime

Special events are the single largest reason for overtime in the Police Department. In FY 1995-96, the Department logged 103,858 overtime hours for special events, which represents 35.8 percent of all General Fund non-holiday overtime hours (excluding Special Law Enforcement Services or SLES).

Although the Department maintains that it deploys sufficient staff for its average workload, the Department must usually re-deploy or extend shifts of on-duty personnel, or schedule off-duty personnel in order to respond to emergency situations or special events and still maintain a basic level of law enforcement services. Because special events often involve extending the shifts of on-duty personnel or scheduling off-duty personnel, special event overtime is categorized and tracked as Extended Work Week or EWW overtime.

Incidents requiring added Police presence may include emergencies such as the 101 California Street shooting, planned events such as the Cinco De Mayo or Gay Freedom Day parades, or a particularly high incidence of crime on any given day or night. In the case of an emergency that requires mobilization of the entire Department (such as the Loma Prieta earthquake), overtime hours are limited by the Department as soon as the emergency situation has stabilized enough for the Department to set up scheduled shifts. During such emergency situations, shifts are limited to 12 hours.

The deployment of sworn employees at special events, cost recovery for special event coverage (including SLES) and recommendations to reduce special event overtime are discussed in detail in Section 4 of this report.

Overtime Quotas

Based on our initial interviews with the Police Department, one of our preliminary recommendations had been to establish overtime quotas for each unit in the Police Department in order to better control overtime expenditures. As of the writing of this report, the Police Department had independently established overtime quotas for each unit. If implemented, these quotas would result in a reduction of 43,564 paid overtime hours from the 1995-96 level of 186,174 hours (excluding EWW and SLES overtime), for an annual savings of approximately $1,677,214 in regular, General Fund overtime. The Budget Analyst supports the implementation of these overtime quotas. However, the Budget Analyst believes that overtime expenditures could be further reduced by implementing other recommendations included in this report.

Savings

Implementation of all of the recommendations contained in the following sections, and our assessment of the savings that will occur from the new overtime quota policy recently implemented by the SFPD, would save up to $4,535,972 in sworn overtime expenditures annually. However, all of the findings would result in somewhat greater savings if implemented without any of the others. Therefore, we have presented the table below which shows a high range for each finding, in the column entitled "High Estimated Savings" (i.e., the savings that would occur if implemented alone). There is no cumulative total for this column since concurrent implementation of all of the findings would affect the total savings to be achieved. Accordingly, if all of the recommendations are implemented concurrent with one another, the savings identified in the "Low Estimated Savings" column would occur, up to the cumulative total of $4,535,972.