MPD's 571 officer "overtime force"

Overtime is burning out officers and costing DC millions

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) recently posted several overtime reports and significant overtime hours continues to be the norm in 2023. While some overtime is unavoidable in policing; the scale of overtime at MPD is both a serious threat to officer morale and retention in addition to being incredibly expensive for the public. Stakeholders across the political spectrum agree that overreliance on overtime is a problem and hopefully with a new chief MPD will accelerate efforts to fix the root causes of excessive overtime.

• MPD is averaging over 45,000 hours of overtime each pay period in 2023

  • This is equivalent to 571 full time equivalents (FTEs)

  • The estimated hourly cost is $65.11; so overtime is costing MPD over $2.9M every 2 weeks

• MPD is on pace this fiscal year (FY) to slightly exceed FY 2021’s previous record of 1.16 million overtime hours

  • MPD had more officers in FY 2021 so this represents a larger burden per officer and officer responses make it clear that this is a retention problem

  • In dollar terms, MPD is on pace to rack up $77.3M in overtime costs, exceeding the FY 2021 record of $72.9M, and about twice as large as the entire ONSE budget

• About 15% of MPD’s on-the-ground staffing is coming from overtime

• There are opportunities to maintain safety and reduce MPD overtime that could have a positive return-on-investment for DC’s finances

MPD reports overtime data by pay period (which is 2 weeks at MPD, like most employers) so every 80 hours is equivalent to one full time employee (often called FTEs). In the report submitted to the DC Council (a product of the Metropolitan Police Department Overtime Spending Accountability Temporary Act of 2022) MPD notes 2 major events that drove significant MPD overtime and one can clearly see their impact in the graph:

• “staffing for the US–Africa Leaders Summit”

• “release of video in a police-involved death in Memphis, TN.”

Because different officers are entitled to different overtime rates all of the financial costs in these reports are estimates. MPD seems to be using a planning estimate of $65.11 an hour for MPD overtime. What we see is that overtime costs usually range between $1.6M-$2.4M every pay period but can spike significantly to over $9M in response to events:

Operationally, using overtime to “flex up” staffing in response to emergencies or simply very irregular staffing needs is 100% legitimate. MPD’s Reserve Corps can help a bit with these kinds of situations but when MPD needs over a thousand extra officers like it did in a few pay periods there are no other short-term options.

The larger concern is the ongoing, “regular” use of overtime that is still the equivalent of 300-500 additional officers. This represents the majority of MPD’s overtime spending. Average MPD overtime in the “ordinary” pay periods was about 366 FTEs which would boost MPD’s “effective” staffing from 3,242 (non-recruit) officers up to 3,608. This means that “regular overtime” staffing is ~10% of MPD’s total effective staff and larger than any of MPD’s 7 police districts. When we also include the “extraordinary” pay periods raises the “overtime force” to 571 FTEs or ~15% of MPD’s total effective staffing.

In historical context, MPD overtime hours shot up significantly in FY 2020, peaked in FY 2021 and then declined ~10% in FY 2022:

However, we are halfway through FY 2023 and MPD is on pace to end up at record high overtime utilization of 1.18M hours and $77.3M. Part of the cost increase this year represents higher pay, which with inflation is understandable, and FY 2021’s cost is still higher in inflation-adjusted dollars. For context, MPD overtime is about twice as large as the entire budget for the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) which had a FY 2023 budget of $35M.

MPD’s leadership is quite clear that lots of overtime is not ideal: “While the use of overtime is a necessary tool, it is not a good solution as it contributes to employee stress, illness, injury, and burnout.” (Page 74 of MPD’s oversight responses). Likewise, MPD officers clearly stated in the PERF report that overtime was a huge problem:

“Personnel reported two of the greatest contributors to low morale are canceling employees’ days off and requiring them to repeatedly work overtime, often without prior notice. Personnel also reported frustration with the lack of a standard process for assigning unscheduled or impromptu overtime.”

What MPD's own report says is wrong with MPD

It also doesn’t take long to find unhappy Glassdoor posts discussing MPD’s mandatory overtime practices like this one:

As a reminder, overtime in MPD is often involuntary. When employees describe being kept late, suddenly called in to work or having vacation cancelled they also still have to work their regular shift (i.e. they usually don’t get “comp time.”) So at the end of the pay period they end up with overtime hours. When we see tens of thousands of overtime hours in a report that really represents a lot of people having their regular schedules disrupted.

While overtime at MPD is widespread, there are also some officers that seem to consistently seek out overtime. MPD reports out the top overtime earners each fiscal year and while I’ve excluded their names I can say that there is a lot of year-to-year consistency in who the top earners are. These 25 officers are making over $100K in overtime alone and collectively represent just under $4M in overtime cost. However, MPD had $72.9M in overtime costs in FY 2022 so remember that it’s not only a few high-earners driving overtime:

With everyone from MPD leadership to frontline officers to the DC Council united in saying that MPD overtime can be excessive why is it persisting and increasing?

• MPD’s leaders decide their staffing need and then management has to “make the schedule work” to find the necessary staffing; closing any gaps through overtime.

  • “Making it work” when there is a gap between a unit’s regularly scheduled staffing and leadership’s expectation often looks like calling in officers on their days off, cancelling vacation etc.

    • In 2022 a MPD Captain was suspended for “Neglect of Duty” because he “failed to staff overtime units.” We don’t know the details of this case but that kind of finding will send a message to management-level officers to “make it work” at all costs.

• MPD has been unable to translate record funding for recruitment into a steady stream of recruits (or even offset attrition) and so “regular” staffing continues to shrink:

  MPD got an extra ~$5M to hire more police...it's not going well

• So long as MPD’s regular staffing is shrinking, the main way to avoid incurring increasing amounts of overtime is to reduce MPD’s staffing need so that its leaders/management don’t turn to overtime to “cover the gap.” Economic-minded readers could think about this in terms of officer supply (shrinking) vs. officer demand.

  • While MPD has cut back in some duties like traffic enforcement, there have been few large scale efforts to offload work from MPD at the scale of the attrition it has experienced.

  • MPD does not have a public-facing transparent staffing model so it’s very difficult for the public to assess how much of MPD’s staffing need is driven by different elements of public safety.

However there are ways to both reduce overtime and mitigate its effects on officer morale. MPD has been slow to embrace these steps but with ongoing attrition and a new chief perhaps this is the year for change:

• The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) recommended in their report for MPD that a significant number of support roles (>100) be “Civilianized” to free up sworn officers for frontline roles. This would effectively increase “regular” officer staffing and so shrink the gap that management fills via overtime.

• Offloading some MPD work to other departments can lower MPD’s staffing need and thereby shrink the staffing gap

  • Efforts to transition some calls-for-service to non-MPD responders have been incredibly small scale thus far but could be expanded; especially in low-violence PSAs that have disproportionately high MPD staffing already

  • MPD’s traffic enforcement arrests are down 73% from the pre-COVID baseline so transitioning this would likely only be a small reduction in MPD’s current workload but still may help on the margins (and improve enforcement)

• Work with DCPU to adopt PERF’s recommendation for an overtime policy to establish “uniform, department-wide practices for determining who will work mandatory overtime and when; spread the burden of mandatory overtime among personnel; give personnel as much notice as possible when they must work overtime; hold supervisors accountable for limiting the amount of mandatory overtime spent by each patrol shift; and track the amount of overtime that personnel work to reduce employee fatigue”

  • The Baltimore Police Department and FOP already do this and it would likely help with MPD retention as well

• In general, any efforts to improve MPD’s recruitment and retention situation (like fixing the organization problems that PERF identified or expanding the Cadet program) should help reduce MPD’s reliance on overtime.

One sad note in researching this post is how often googling “[City Name] Police Overtime” turns up news stories about overtime scandals. This is true in Baltimore, Boston (though those officers were acquitted), and Philadelphia. And of course here in DC, former DCPU Vice Chairman Medgar Webster recently pled guilty to $33K worth of fraud (including claiming fake overtime at $80 an hour) while working a second job at Whole Foods:

Thanks as always for reading! Please share this and my Twitter with your friends and neighbors that are concerned or interested in crime in DC. In future weeks I’ll be trying to write about some of the proposed crime-related legislation in DC and finish some long-deferred posts on illegal gun prosecution rates and our crime lab.