In a department that leans on overtime to fulfill basic job functions, a former Little Rock officer was able to more than double her salary before supervisors took notice.
Natasha Sims, who joined the department in 1996, was fired on April 10 for nine violations of Little Rock rules and regulations, and general orders, in two separate internal investigations, one of which focused on the investigator’s excessive overtime hours and off-duty work.
According to Little Rock police records, the department increased its total overtime hours from 5,976 in 2010 to 10,023 in 2012, a move Chief of Police Stuart Thomas said was necessary to cover the daily gaps left from an overall shortage of approximately 40 officers.
Sims, one of three “special traffic accident reduction team” investigators who work accident reconstruction and intoxicated driving interdiction, more than doubled her overtime between 2010 and 2011, going from the second-most hours of paid overtime, with 984 hours in 2010, to the highest amount of overtime earned by an officer, with 1,959 hours in 2011.
In 2011, Sims earned at least $72,847 in overtime, which, combined with her base pay of approximately $55,328, totaled $128,175, according to payroll records.
In 2012, that figure fell to 1,500 overtime hours, paying out $54,065 in addition to her base salary of $56,992, according to payroll figures released by the city’s Human Resources Department.
Those overtime figures do not include court time and other types of hours which result in officers earning time-and-a-half pay, and may be artificially low, officials said. Sims’ total take-home in real overtime pay was not available.
Repeated efforts to reach Sims were unsuccessful.
Although Thomas declined to comment directly on the circumstances of Sims’ investigations and ultimate termination, which she appealed to the city’s Civil Service Commission, he said that before Sims’ case, he had never disciplined an officer for breaking the department’s caps on how much they can work.
“It’s not an indication that there hasn’t been a [similar] problem in the past, but on this one,” he said. “[W]e were aware and have taken action.”
Among the department’s restrictions on overtime, officers cannot work more than 60 hours during their five-day workweek, or 80 hours in a total week, without special approval by supervisors, which is usually reserved for special events or urgent assignments, Thomas said.
Those conditions are in place to ensure “quality police work,” Thomas said, as well as to make sure officers don’t overwork themselves.
Within those same policies, an officer’s immediate supervisors are charged with monitoring an officer’s hours, and they are responsible for making sure an officer’s work schedule best fits the needs of the department.
Some overtime is pre-approved, some is approved after the fact, but not all of it is approved by an immediate supervisor. Oftentimes, overtime slips come in signed by sergeants or lieutenants who do not work directly with the officer and the hours they’re approving.
Although he wouldn’t say if that was the case with Sims, Thomas said there is no immediate oversight or mechanism to alert supervisors when an employee has worked more than he should.
“The problem is, sometimes you’re getting overtime forms from multiple divisions and you don’t see it on a composite rate,” Thomas said. “So supervisors may not see everything, they may not see every off-duty form either.”
Thomas said the department has a “flaw in the monitoring” of its overtime and off-duty hours and that command staff are re-evaluating how those hours are overseen.
Thomas said that it wasn’t necessarily the volume of hours that Sims pulled down, but the regularity and intervals between them.
Officers are also prohibited from working past 16 consecutive hours without taking eight hours away from work, whether it’s for the department or in an off-duty capacity.
According to Thomas’ termination letter to Sims, she violated the last section “on multiple occasions.”
“Sometimes you’ll go over that cap inadvertently,” Thomas said. “In retrospect, we can sit here and look … but when you’re in the middle of a third SWAT call-out that week … you may not know how much you’ve worked.”
In North Little Rock, a large portion of overtime goes only to its criminal investigation division and narcotics detectives, according to spokesman Sgt. Brian Dedrick.
When they are short of officers, instead of bringing someone in to work overtime, commanders try to spread the officers already there to cover a shift.
Dedrick said he hasn’t seen a North Little Rock officer suspended or terminated for working too many hours, but his department doesn’t have a cap on how much an officer can work.
Pulaski County sheriff ’s office spokesman Lt. Carl Minden said his agency doesn’t have an overtime or hours policy either, and that a supervisor is charged with making sure an officer doesn’t work too many hours.
According to the payroll figures from the Little Rock Police Department’s human resources staff, Sims went over the department’s cap 14 times in 2011, including a nine-week period in the summer where she didn’t work less than 84 hours a week. In 2012, Sims went over 14 times again, including another nine week period in the first few months of the year.
Thomas said the Sims investigation will lead to him re-evaluate some of the ways supervisors monitor their employees’ hours, and that it’s likely the caps for work, both on- and off-duty, will get tighter, especially as more officers get worked into the rotation to fill current staffing gaps.
According to a city finance report, the department spent $3.2 million on overtime, more than double the $1.5 million budgeted for that purpose. The difference was paid for by the savings from the total vacancies in the department, according to city finance officials.
“The overtime budget is not predicated on us going in and saying, ‘This is how much we need,’ it’s predicated on ‘This is what you get,’” Thomas said. “As you bring on more people … you tend to rely on it less.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/22/2013