U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

OFF ICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAMS

BJA NI J OJJDP BJS OVC

R e s e a r c h i n B r i e f

National Institute of Justice

Jeremy Travis, Director

continued...

Police Overtime:

An Examination of Key Issues

by David H. Bayley and Robert E. Worden

May 1998

Issues and Findings

Discussed in this Research in

Brief: Results from a national study

sponsored by NIJ on police overtime

to examine how State and local

police departments managed overtime and how local law enforcement agencies used Federal money

authorized for overtime payments.

Key issues: Overtime work has

been generally viewed from inside

and outside the criminal justice

community as overused, misused,

and inadequately regulated. In the

past 15 years, Federal support to

State and local police agencies for

overtime has grown. As a result,

interest in whether funds used by

local law enforcement agencies for

overtime payments are well spent

has increased.

Study findings:

• U.S. Department of Justice

funding accounted for 60 percent

of Federal support of State and local police overtime in 1994, with

Operation Weed and Seed and the

Edward Byrne Memorial State and

Local Law Enforcement Assistance

Grant Program being the primary

providers of funding for local police agencies.

• Overtime was funded primarily

though local sources; Federal funds

accounted for 5 to 10 percent of

local police overtime outlays, which

were less than 6 percent of the departments’ total budgets.

There is a sense both inside and outside

the law enforcement community that

overtime is overused, misused, and only

halfheartedly controlled. Federal officials

want to be sure that the funds they award

to local police agencies for overtime payments are well spent. Local police agencies are equally concerned. For this

reason, the National Institute of Justice

commissioned a study of the use of

Federal funds provided to local law

enforcement agencies for overtime. (See

“Methodology” and “Federal Funding of

Police Overtime.”) This Research in

Brief reports what we have learned about

improving the management of overtime in

American police departments.

The study discovered enormous differences

among local police departments in the attention given to the issue, the capacity to

produce information about it, and the policies and procedures for managing it.

Clearly, some departments do an excellent

job of managing overtime. This Research in

Brief also shares information about some of

these practices as a way to help agencies

grappling with the issue and attempts to answer the following questions: Can overtime

be responsibly managed? If so, how?

Very little has been written about the management of overtime, except to report that

overtime management is viewed as a recurring problem by both private- and publicsector managers.1

 Regarding overtime in

policing, almost no information exists in the

public domain. For this study, researchers

canvassed the major professional organizations specializing in police research, as well

as prominent police scholars, and could not

find any studies of the use of overtime in

policing. Management consultants write

private reports to individual police agencies

that sometimes address the overtime issue,

but this is unpublished literature that is

generally not available.

Police departments themselves have vast

experience in managing overtime, but

they have not yet shared that knowledge.

Professionals contacted often chuckled

when told of the topic being studied, urging that the research proceed but indicating that there were good reasons why no

studies had been performed previously.

The universal opinion was that the inquiry was long overdue but that the subject matter might prove too sensitive to

study successfully. Readers should understand, therefore, that what the authors

present here by way of suggestions for

managing overtime very much represents

a first cut at a difficult subject.

How does one control overtime in policing?

The answer: by recording, analyzing, managing, and supervising. This Research in Brief
2

R e s e a r c h i n B r i e f

• U.S. police departments varied

enormously in the attention paid to

overtime management and their

ability to produce information

about it.

• Overtime can be successfully

controlled through a combination

of analysis, recordkeeping, management, and supervision.

• Police managers should analyze

overtime in terms of work done on

paid overtime and on unpaid, or

compensatory, overtime. Paid overtime increases policing activity,

while compensatory time represents less policing because it must

be repaid by taking time and a half

from other activities.

Implications: Federal money invested in overtime by State and local law enforcement agencies does

not supplant local spending on police overtime. Overtime should be

viewed, within limits, as an unavoidable cost of policing. Overtime charges cannot be eliminated

altogether, regardless of the number of police officers employed, because of inevitable shift extensions,

court appearances, unpredictable

events, and contract requirements.

Concerns about overtime usage

should be addressed through controlling overtime usage with improved management techniques.

Target audience: State and local

law enforcement officials and

administrators, city and county

officials, criminal justice policy

researchers and practitioners, and

policymakers.

Issues and Findings

continued...

will examine each of these activities, so that

police managers may better understand what

they can do in a practical way to improve

overtime performance.

The four activities listed would appear to

suggest a temporal order of tasks for police departments: build databases, analyze them for patterns, make appropriate

managerial decisions, and supervise the

resulting policies. Nothing could be more

mistaken. The key element that precedes

all others is management. Useful records

systems cannot be constructed unless

managers anticipate what they need to

know. Management is also essential for

analysis, and analysis needs to be specified before responsive data systems can

be designed. In other words, although it

is certainly true that analysis cannot be

done without records, records cannot be

sensibly constructed without prefiguring

analysis. Recording, analyzing, managing, and supervising are interactive, not

sequential. The key is managing. One of

the problems besetting contemporary

policing, as managers everywhere ruefully recognize, is that the new computerbased information systems pour out data

that are not used. Unmanaged information systems are like the legendary

sorcerer’s apprentice—madly producing

data that bury consumers.

In short, the management of overtime

comes in two forms: creating an infrastructure for recording and analyzing

the use of overtime and making policies

about overtime based on an understanding of what is happening. The first sort of

management precedes all other activities.

The second sort can only take place if the

first sort has been done well.

Recognizing that managerial decisions

about the kinds of analysis and, consequently, of records that are needed must

be made at the very beginning of any

attempt to control overtime, the topics will

be presented in the following order: analysis, recording, managing, and supervising.

Analyzing overtime

What should managers know to ensure

that overtime is used responsibly? What

are the major questions they must

indings from this study are based primarily on information collected from three

sources:

• An inventory of U.S. Department of

Justice programs administered through the

Bureau of Justice Assistance, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement

Administration, and Executive Office for

Weed and Seed.

• A seven-page questionnaire on overtime

expenditures and practices. This survey was

mailed to 2,183 State and local police

agencies—a representative sample of police

departments that had responded to the

1990 Bureau of Justice Statistics Law Enforcement Management and Administrative

Statistics Survey (LEMAS).a

 Followup calls

were conducted with 100 of the largest

police agencies, which in the aggregate account for most of the police overtime

worked in the United States.

• Case studies of overtime practices in 11

police departments of various sizes nationwide.

a

 Conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the LEMAS survey included all U.S. police agencies, except for half of those with

five or fewer full-time personnel, which

LEMAS data show generated little overtime.

F Methodology
3

R e s e a r c h i n B r i e f

A Federal Funding of Police Overtime

number of observations on how

Federal funds are used within local law enforcement agencies for overtime emerged

from the study, including the following:

• Total Federal support for policing by

State and local governments has been

growing in the 1990s. Federal support for

overtime has also been growing, but is

difficult to estimate because expenditures

are scattered among so many agencies

(Department of Justice, Department of

Housing and Urban Development, Department of Transportation, Department of

the Treasury) and programs (Executive

Office for Weed and Seed, Edward Byrne

Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Grant Program, Office

of Community Oriented Policing Services).

• According to the study, the Department

of Justice now accounts for approximately

60 percent of the Federal Government’s

expenditures on overtime by State and

local law enforcement agencies.

• Federal expenditures by the Department

of Justice invested in overtime by State and

local law enforcement agencies do not

supplant local spending on police overtime.

• By and large, overtime money is provided

and used to supplement traditional programs, rather than to sponsor programmatic

innovations. Federal expenditures shift enforcement priorities somewhat, but they do

not bring about substantial organizational

change.

• Although overtime expenditures by the

Department of Justice provide a genuine increment in policing, analysis is needed to determine whether the increment is valuable

enough to be paid for at premium wages.

• Police departments in the United States

vary enormously in the attention they pay to

overtime, their management of it, and their

ability to produce information about it.

• Overtime should be viewed, within limits,

as an unavoidable cost of policing. Overtime

charges cannot be eliminated altogether,

regardless of the number of police officers

employed, because of inevitable shift extensions, court appearances, emergency situations, and contract requirements.

• Reimbursing overtime in money is preferable to reimbursing in compensatory time. Paid

overtime increases policing activities, while

compensatory time results in less policing

because every hour worked must be repaid

by the department at time and a half—time

taken away from other activities.

• Reliance on overtime in American policing may have harmful consequences that

are not sufficiently considered by police

managers, such as exhaustion on the part

of officers, unwillingness to provide any

service without a tangible reward, increased antagonism between supervisors

and line officers, and the undermining of

professionalism.

• Overtime practices represent substantial possibilities for cost savings. Though

overtime can never be eliminated, it can

be more successfully controlled.

• Publicizing the practices of police departments found to excel in regulating

overtime can contribute to improving

overtime management nationally.

• The key to improving overtime management is foresight on the part of senior

officers, which requires attention to analysis, recordkeeping, and supervision.

continually ask about overtime in their

departments?

Are overtime expenditures justified in terms of the work being

done? Because overtime represents

police work performed at premium

rates—time and a half—managers

need the ability to determine whether

the same work could be performed at

less cost on straight time. Thus, they

need to know how much of their

agency’s work is being performed on

overtime, what sort of work it is, and

the circumstances of its use.

When analyzing the cost-effectiveness

of overtime, it is critical to distinguish

work done on paid overtime from work

done on unpaid, or compensatory, overtime. Work done on paid overtime generally increases policing activity, even

though paid at time and a half. The cost

is borne by city councils as an addition

to the police budget. Compensatory

time, on the other hand, represents less

policing because every hour worked

must be repaid by the department at

time and a half. Compensatory time

comes out of existing capacity. Therefore, managers need to be able to determine whether the work performed on

compensatory time is more important

than work being “scrimped” through

the compensatory time payback.

The implication for recordkeeping is

that not only must records on paid

time and compensatory time be kept,

but also information on their respective uses, including the nature of the

work forfeited to pay for compensatory

time. These are called opportunity

costs—the costs of taking one action at

the expense of another.

Do the police and the local government have the capacity to pay for

overtime? Answering this question requires police managers to know whether

they are “on budget” throughout the

year, so as to avoid cost overruns and

consequent political exposure. This
4

R e s e a r c h i n B r i e f

means managers need to know how

much has been spent throughout the

current fiscal year and how the rate of

expenditure compares with previous

years. They should also examine current

expenditures against likely future contingencies; planning requires forecasting

overtime needs based on analyses of past

patterns. Although some overtime expenditures cannot be predicted, repeated surprises indicate a lack of

analysis. As the philosopher George

Santayana said, “People who do not

know the past are doomed to repeat it.”

Because compensatory time does not

come out of existing budgetary allocations, some police departments do not

monitor its use as systematically as they

do paid overtime. Compensatory time is

not costless. Unless police departments

keep close track of the amount of compensatory time earned and paid back,

cities may suddenly face large unfunded

liabilities—financial payouts they have

not anticipated. In some departments officers who do not use their compensatory

time can claim it as money at retirement.

Police departments also need to track

accumulations of compensatory time by

individual officers, because departments

cannot require officers (under the Fair

Labor Standards Act or their own labor

agreements) to work more than specified

maximums of compensatory time without

being paid.2

 Overtime beyond this

amount must be paid as money. Police

departments need to know where they

stand with respect to this obligation.

Is overtime being abused? “Abused”

here is defined as being used in ways

that cannot be justified and may cause

embarrassment to the organization. Generally, overtime abuses take the form of

large, undetected overtime earnings by

individuals or units within a police department. Such abuses represent a failure of supervision, which in turn reflects

the inability of an organization to know,

in a timely manner, what is happening.

To avoid embarrassment, police departments need to analyze patterns of overtime expenditure—both as time and as

money—by individuals, by units, and

by the nature of the work performed.

Unusual payouts to individuals or units

may indicate problems of organizational

management.

In sum, if a police department is to

manage overtime, it must be able to justify expenditures in terms of the work

performed, to anticipate the rate and

amount of payouts, and to explain why

overtime had to be paid to particular individuals and units at particular times.

Recording overtime

To analyze the issues described above,

the following records must be current:

• A police department’s total obligations and payments for overtime,

both paid overtime and compensatory

time.

• Obligations and expenditures of

overtime by individual officers and

commands or budgetary units—for example, investigations, traffic, patrol,

and SWAT. Computer programs can

automatically notify managers whenever overtime obligations exceed specified thresholds—for example, when a

police officer earns more than 10 percent of monthly salary or at a projected

yearly rate over $25,000, or when a

unit’s overtime budget is running 10

percent ahead of the previous year’s

expenditures.

• The uses of overtime. Setting up a

system that adequately captures the uses

of overtime requires forethought because

relevant categories can vary with local

conditions. The most common categories

are holdovers or shift extensions; backfilling or buybacks (that is, paying

people on leave to fill temporary vacancies); holidays; briefings and roll calls;

court appearances; callbacks to duty;

emergencies such as homicides and

snowstorms; planned events beyond normal duty, for example, traffic control at

venues; and meetings or training outside

of working hours.

Monitoring the opportunity costs associated with compensatory overtime involves identifying those tasks that were

not carried out because officers were

granted time and a half off. This tracking is key to determining the true public safety cost-effectiveness of claiming

overtime as time, rather than as money.

• Circumstances of overtime use.

Knowing where, when, and under what

circumstances overtime was incurred is

necessary if managers are to anticipate

overtime, to justify its payment, and perhaps to find ways to reduce the need for

overtime expenditures. For example, if

overtime occurs chronically in particular

units, then hiring additional officers or

reallocating existing personnel may

solve the problem. On the other hand, if

overtime is concentrated at particular

times of the year, hiring additional staff

would probably not be the solution.

• Sources of overtime payments.

Records of such sources of overtime

funding as city councils, State government, Federal Government, or private

consumers should be kept. When tracking city expenditures, it would be useful

to separate overtime accounts from the

general fund, the police budget, and

charges against the budgets of other municipal agencies.

Not surprisingly, it appears that police

departments invest resources in collecting information primarily when it

has clear fiscal significance. Of the

police departments responding to the

overtime survey, the majority (69 percent) were able to provide all 5 years

of expenditure information (1990–94);
5

R e s e a r c h i n B r i e f

a much smaller percentage (38 percent) was able to provide the number

of overtime hours worked.

Respondents provided limited information about overtime’s functional uses.

Among respondents who reported the

total number of overtime hours, about

40 percent accounted for all (or virtually

all) of those hours by functional category, while another 40 percent could

account for about half. The limited ability to monitor and report information

about overtime appeared in police agencies of all types (though sheriffs’ departments in this study were somewhat less

likely to be able to report overtime information, and State police agencies somewhat more likely) and occurred in all

regions of the country.

Developing informative record systems

need not be a particularly daunting or

costly activity. Commitment seems to be

the critical ingredient. Record systems

can be put in place within a year or so,

with the largest cost probably being incurred for staff to input data. Departments can also make the transition more

easily by adapting systems already developed by other departments. Every

region of the country has exemplary

departments that have developed protocols for recording and analyzing data,

programs that automatically provide

managers with perspective on overtime.

(See “Dollars and Recordkeeping.”)

Managing overtime

Again, it is important to note that managing is not a separate activity from

recording, analyzing, and supervising.

Recording, analysis, and supervision

are required for successful overtime

management, but they must be managed so that useful knowledge is available to the managers who set overtime

policies. Responsible overtime management requires leadership from the top.

If the chief is indifferent about overtime, the support systems—both human

and technical—necessary to manage

overtime will be neglected. A chief’s

indifference will also leave middle

managers exposed—reluctant to go

where the chief prefers not to tread, but

at risk if overtime problems occur.

It is also important to be realistic about

what management can achieve in controlling overtime. For example, some

shift extensions are inevitable because

police officers generally work 8-hour

shifts, and time-consuming problems

can occur at any time. Sensational

crimes or natural disasters are imposDollars and Recordkeeping I n the one department surveyed in

which all overtime is compensated with

dollars, rather than compensatory time,

we found one of the most complete and

sophisticated information systems for

monitoring overtime use.a

 In that department, hours worked and dollars paid

were tracked by organizational unit and

by function, and this information was updated and disseminated to department

managers every 2 weeks.

By contrast, another department, in which

much of the overtime was compensated

with time off rather than money, had a

much more limited capacity to monitor

overtime. Numbers of hours worked by

individuals were tracked carefully within

each division over the course of each 28-

day work cycle, so that steps could be

taken to minimize the likelihood that patrol officers would accrue hours for which

they must be compensated monetarily

and at a higher (time and a half) rate. But

the aggregate patterns of overtime work

were not monitored, and the only information that could easily be retrieved

(from payroll records) for analysis was information on expenditures. Overtime

could be analyzed in terms of the activities

that were performed only by manually reviewing the paper forms that officers

completed.

In another department, overtime was typically compensated monetarily. However,

little overtime was incurred, partly because it had to be preauthorized by supervisors, and supervisors took steps to avoid

overtime work. Given that overtime was

not considered a significant budgetary issue, little information was computerized

for analysis. Records of overtime were

available, and particularly detailed records

of overtime incurred under the auspices

of Federal grant programs were kept, but

they were not routinely compiled and

analyzed; the latter records were available

in the event of a Federal audit.

a

 An equally complete and sophisticated

information system was found in a department that uses both compensatory

time and paid compensation. This department is widely regarded as one of the

most progressively managed in the country. Furthermore, it is very concerned

about the prospect of unfunded liabilities.

sible to predict and require extraordinary outlays of effort. Police work also

inevitably generates court appearances,

roll calls, meetings, and holidays. This

sort of overtime can be viewed as a

fixed cost of normal policing and will

occur regardless of the number of officers employed. Overtime is not a discretionary category that can simply be

managed out of existence. Policymakers

and the public should be wary about

judging the police according to unrealistic expectations.

Overtime is also critically affected by

labor rules—the “contract”—that mandate uses and rates. Visits to police
6

R e s e a r c h i n B r i e f

departments revealed the following

examples of contract stipulations with

respect to overtime:

• Any court appearance by an officer,

no matter how short, earned a fixed

minimum amount of overtime, as much

as 3 to 4 hours.

• Officers called back to work were

guaranteed a minimum of 2 hours of

overtime, no matter how long they

actually worked.

• Supervisors who were on standby in

the event of an emergency earned a

minimum of 3 hours overtime.

• Patrol officers were given between

15 and 30 minutes of overtime each

shift for attending roll calls.

• An officer waiting at home to be

called to court was allowed a fixed

amount of overtime, on the premise

that the officer was forfeiting an opportunity to work at another job.

• All meetings outside the department

were charged to overtime.

In the survey, 45 percent of police

departments reported that overtime

was governed by collective bargaining

agreements; 39 percent said that such

agreements applied specifically to

patrol personnel, which is the largest

specialty among police officers.

Some departments have tried to divide

overtime expenses according to whether

they are controllable—probably a fruitless exercise. The issue generally is not

whether a particular form of overtime is

controllable, but rather by whom and at

what cost. Contract stipulations, for instance, are frequently treated as uncontrollable. This may be true from line

supervisors’ point of view, but not from

the view of senior managers who are

responsible for contract negotiations.

Contract provisions are controllable in

principle, even though the likelihood of

doing so, given the political power of

unions, is small. Even in the case of shift

extensions, the option exists for police to

pass work to later shifts. All overtime is

potentially manageable by someone, but

the costs of doing so in some cases are

greater than the benefits. So, when departments say that some proportion of

overtime is not controllable, they are

making a judgment about options they

are willing to try. Their willingness may

be based on entirely correct assessments

of what is likely to be achieved.

Interviews with police officers nationwide yielded several suggestions for

policies to control overtime more tightly.

Court appearances. Agreements between police and court personnel could

improve overtime usage. For example,

policies could call for court appearances to coincide with usual working

hours, rather than with time off. While

officers are waiting to appear, they can

be given indoor work, such as staffing

property rooms, interviewing complainants, preparing shift rosters, or answering questions on the telephone. In

addition, district attorneys can be asked

to subpoena only those officers listed on

arrest reports whose testimony might be

important. There is no reason for supervisory personnel to appear in courts,

since their testimony would be hearsay.

Police can be asked not to list supervisory personnel on incident reports and

arrest warrants.

Shift extensions. Responsibility for

approving shift extensions rests with

immediate supervisors. Managers can

assist immediate supervisors by providing them with updated and revised

guidelines for approving shift extensions, as well as by reviewing their

performances periodically. Survey results show that immediate supervisors

were authorized to approve overtime in

91 percent of the responding police

departments, and 73 percent had

guidelines that specified the purposes

for which overtime could be used.

A more general solution, well beyond the

capacity of any police force to enact, is

to abolish the 40-hour week as the basis

for overtime, aggregating hour-maximums by months or years.3

 This would

allow departments to require longer

hours of work for short periods without

incurring overtime costs, compensating

officers by less work during slack periods. In 1995, a U.S. Representative proposed hearings on the idea.4

Staff size. Persistent backfilling, or employing off-duty officers to fill necessary

positions, indicates a chronic shortage of

personnel in relation to work needing to

be completed. Since local governments

determine the strength of police forces,

this imbalance is generally beyond the

ability of departments to fix unless hiring

is allowed. Departments may, however,

be able to reduce the period of the imbalance, and hence overtime, by shortening the time needed to recruit and

train new police officers. Departments

may even consider using civilians, volunteers, or police academy students in

nonenforcement lines of police work,

thereby freeing experienced personnel

for tasks requiring powers of arrest or

those where minimum staffing levels

must be maintained.

Emergency mobilizations. By carefully studying all unplanned emergency

mobilizations, departments can determine how best to use existing capacity

and thereby minimize callbacks or

extensions. Emergencies require overtime, but they do not justify unlimited

overtime. To some degree, overtime can

be minimized in emergency situations

by fine-tuning responses and making

them more efficient, as well as by

building the capacity to handle contingencies that singly are unpredictable
7

R e s e a r c h i n B r i e f

but in the aggregate are not. These possibilities are probably more likely for

large departments, which can often develop such procedures more easily than

small departments, because unpredictable events occur in greater numbers in

their jurisdictions and therefore can be

“averaged” on a yearly basis. In a small

department, on the other hand, events

such as a sensational murder may occur

once every 20 years.

Special events. Departments often

pay officers overtime for handling special events, such as crowd control at

festivals or traffic at sporting events.

Because these are episodic, it is not

cost effective to maintain capacity to

handle them. If these events are privately sponsored, departments might

consider requiring sponsors to pay the

costs of policing as a condition for

granting a permit. Many large cities

now require event sponsors to complete

official statements regarding the effect

of special events on police duties. The

Madison, Wisconsin, police department, for example, requires that a police impact statement be filed as part of

the permit process. In addition, cities

and police departments should develop

policies about when the costs of policing special events are to be publicly or

privately borne. This may be a touchy

political matter. For example, some local ordinances (strongly supported by

police unions) require police, rather

than private security, to work such

events. Finally, work schedules of police could be adjusted, if permitted by

contract regulations, so that officers can

accumulate slack time that can later be

allocated for policing predictable manpower-intensive events.

We determined from site visits that police departments throughout the country

are experimenting with ways to minimize

the burden of overtime. Frustrated by

the rigidities of current practice and

fearful of embarrassing public revelations, concerned managers are learning

valuable lessons about managing overtime. Unfortunately, this knowledge is

not being systematically collected and

shared within the profession, which does

not generally know which departments

are the benchmarks for overtime management. Hence, a national canvas of

techniques for managing overtime could

be worthwhile to practitioners.

Supervising overtime

Supervision of overtime is often seen as

the first line of defense against overtime

abuses. Middle-rank commanders everywhere complained that one of their

major responsibilities is controlling

overtime. They believe it is critical to

how they are judged as commanders. In

fact, front-line supervision of overtime

is the last line of defense, and supervisors are often made the scapegoats for

more general failures of management.

Most of the factors that determine overtime are beyond the control of any

middle-rank manager, such as contract

regulations, calls for service, crime

emergencies, vacations, injuries, retirements, and approval for special events.

Although first-line supervisors formally

approve overtime, in some departments

their ability to refuse is restricted. Moreover, in many departments first-line

supervisors are frequently not given the

information needed to anticipate demands and adjust work schedules. With

inadequate recordkeeping and analysis,

supervisors cannot control overtime, they

can only audit it. The control of overtime

looks to be decentralized, but in reality it

is not; it is structured by policies set at

more senior levels or from outside the

police force altogether.

Overtime can also be supervised by the

officers themselves through peer pressure if amounts of overtime worked by

individual officers are posted publicly

at regular intervals. We visited several

departments using this method. Knowing that overtime will be scrutinized by

their peers, officers will be careful that

extra hours claimed are justifiable in

operational terms.

Successful management of police overtime requires assistance outside police

departments. At present, police managers often fear that providing outsiders,

such as city councils and the media,

with information about overtime practices will expose the department to

unfair criticism. This is one reason

why some departments are reluctant to

implement computer-based monitoring

and online analysis of overtime. Police

managers should realize, however, that

factual information about overtime, if it

is properly explained, can strengthen

their position in advocating needed

reforms both inside and outside their organization. Managers have more to fear

from lack of information than from too

much. Gradually, information in

the public domain about overtime will

expand. Some cities now regularly report

all forms of overtime to city councils and

even encourage the media to publish

their departmental pattern analyses.

City councils and other outside auditors

should also understand that overtime

cannot be effectively controlled by frontline supervisors. They should not allow

senior officers to pass the responsibility

for managing overtime to junior officers.

Councils and the media could be educated, most likely by police themselves,

about the elements of an effective overtime management system. Analytic reports of overtime could provide police

managers with information to explain to

others the limits on their ability to control overtime and to construct a factbased division of responsibilities

between themselves and city councils.

Police managers have more to gain from
8

R e s e a r c h i n B r i e f

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice

Washington, DC 20531

Official Business

Penalty for Private Use $300

making overtime information available

and visible than from keeping it hidden.

Additional References

Balles, Joe, et al. May 17, 1989. “City of

Madison Police Department Overtime

Project.” Madison, WI: Police Department.

Bureau of Justice Statistics. September

1995. Law Enforcement Management and

Administrative Statistics, 1993: Data for

Individual State and Local Agencies with

100 or More Officers. Washington, DC:

Bureau of Justice Statistics.

DiIulio, John, Jr., Steven K. Smith, and

Aaron J. Saiger. 1995. “The Federal Role

in Crime Control.” In Crime, ed. James Q.

Wilson and Joan Petersilia. San Francisco, CA: ICS Press.

Elliot, John, Timothy J. Fisher, Kay

Hutchison, and Neil Turner. December

18, 1988. “City of Madison Police Overtime Final Report.” Madison, WI: Police

Department.

Executive Office for Weed and Seed.

1992. Operation Weed and Seed Implementation Manual. Washington, DC:

U.S. Department of Justice.

Goldstein, Herman. 1990. Problem-Oriented Policing. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Kelling, George L., and Mark H. Moore.

1988. The Evolving Strategy of Policing.

Washington, DC: National Institute of

Justice.

Madison Police Department. June 1993.

“Report of the Police Department Overtime Study Committee.” Madison, WI: Police Department.

Nathan, Richard P. 1983. “State and

Local Governments Under Federal

Grants: Toward a Predictive Theory.”

Political Science Quarterly 98 (Spring):

47–57.

Nathan, Richard P. 1982. “The Methodology of Field Network Evaluation Studies.”

In Studying Implementation: Methodological and Implementation Issues, ed. Walter

Williams. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House

Publishers, Inc.

United States General Accounting Office.

April 1993. War on Drugs: Federal Assistance to State and Local Drug Enforcement. Washington, DC: GAO/

GGD–93–86.

Notes

1. The authors would like to thank Professor Hal

Gueutal, School of Business, The University at Albany,

State University of New York, and his graduate students

for searching the economic and business literature.

2. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, an officer who

agrees to work compensatory time in lieu of cash cannot

accumulate more than 480 hours during a lifetime. Many

union contracts stipulate more restrictive maximums.

3. Mazur, Laura, “Coming: The Annual Workweek,”

Across the Board (April 1995): 42–45.

4. Laabs, Jennifer, “The Changing Workplace Stirs

Up Overtime Pay Debate,” Personnel Journal (April

1995): 12.

BULK RATE

U.S. POSTAGE PAID

DOJ/NIJ

Permit No. G–91

Findings and conclusions of the research reported here are those of the authors and do not

necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

This study was conducted by David

H. Bayley, Ph.D., and Robert E.

Worden, Ph.D., from the School of

Criminal Justice, The University at

Albany, State University of New

York. This research was supported

by the National Institute of Justice,

U.S. Department of Justice, through

grant number 95–IJ–CX–0020.

Copies of the full report of the

study, Federal Funding of Police

Overtime: A Utilization Study, are

available from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service

(NCJRS) on a cost-recovery basis.

To order, call NCJRS at 800–851–

3420 and ask for NCJ 170614.

NCJ 167572

The National Institute of Justice is a component

of the Office of Justice Programs, which also

includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the

Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of

Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,

and the Office for Victims of Crime.