Why so Much OT?

We aren't sure if Channel 7 understands what this program is actually showing:

• More than $3 million. That's how much police overtime cost taxpayers last month alone.

  You can see how much the city is spending on those extra hours as the Office of Inspector General has created the "Sworn CPD Member Overtime Summary Dashboard."

  It provides information such as the rank and title of the officer, the reason for the overtime and the police district.

  The inspector general says the police department's overtime spending is larger than the entire budgets of many other city departments.

And why would the overtime budget be so large? Well, there are 277 police Beats in Chicago. To adequately man those beats, you need (at a minimum) 

• two officers on First Watch
• one officer on Second Watch
• two officers on Third Watch 

Remember, we're talking minimums here. We'd all like to see two on each watch, but that isn't happening. So that's a total of 1,385 Officers working every day just to man the beat cars. And one third of the Districts are RDO on any given day with the current schedule, so the math kind of works out to 2,078 Officers actively working beat cars and still getting their RDOs. 

Then supervision for twenty-two Districts, three Sectors per District:

• 1 sergeant per sector (+1 for RDO coverage) on three watches
• 2 lieutenants per District on three watches
• 1 captain per District
• 1 commander per District

We're up to 440 white shirts just for the Districts (again, minimum). The real numbers with furlough reliefs and such are significantly higher, but still, we haven't even cracked 4,000 with those basic numbers. Adding in a single wagon per watch makes little difference.

Anyone know the current manpower numbers? It's in the neighborhood of 9,000, nearly double the basic numbers we just came up with....and they still can't man the 277 beat cars on a daily basis. 

You want to track down the OT expenditures, it's far past time to take a long hard look at where the manpower is hidden. We've been pointing it out for years:

• Commander offices with seven-to-ten people for what should be four spots maximum;
• Detective Areas with PO's answering phones instead of ::gasp:: detectives....or civilians;
• FTO's working at HQ where they'll never teach a recruit;
• there are FTO timekeepers - a spot that was civilian at one point; 
• Academy staff with eight Officers teaching an eight-hour course - one for each hour;
• Homan Square with entire units that exist only to push paper and never see the street;
• HQ....have you tried parking there in the past ten years?

Imagine the massive cost savings if police officers did actual police work in police districts.