>This is generally about 1.5 times their normal pay.
>Lieutenant Timothy Dolan, a 26-year veteran who leads the traffic unit and serves as vice president of the OPOA police union, was paid $493,247 in overtime in 2024. Combined with his salary and other pay, this netted him a $711,000 paycheck, making him OPD’s highest-paid employee
Well I'm just going to have to guess his OT is actually 2x and not 1.5x, as otherwise he's working more than 80 hours a week. Or maybe he's only expected to work something like 20 hours a week?
>On July 9, Dolan reported he worked 23 hours. The next day, he worked 16 hours, and for the following three days, he worked 15 hours each.
It just looks like the attorney general in this area has been asleep at the wheel.
> It just looks like the attorney general in this area has been asleep at the wheel.
Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare, that there's no need to do things like audit the books or to ask that there be a documented reason why this particular cop needed to do all that OT. The chain of responsibility just abruptly terminates with someone who has the prerogative to approve things without explanation, and that person doesn't (legally or department-policy-wise) owe anyone an explanation, and he won't give one. (Because usually the answer is "Because he's in on the scam himself")
Note: I'm not saying that every civil servant scams. Far from it. I'm saying that conditions are nearly always ripe for this type of thing because those in charge won't be held responsible, and those at the very top are elected officials, who are in more and more areas only vulnerable to primary challenges. So if you have a good enough rep for "supporting team blue/red" you can cruise past plenty of oopsie-daisies like this by just scoring cheap political points.
> Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare
The guy who sold me my last car at my Toyota dealership was in his late 50s.
What's weird is that he told me that I would be his 1st sale!
I asked him what he did before and he said he was "in construction" but that it was a young man's game.
Something didn't add up and I googled his name.
Turns out that he was a former state police officer, ensnared in a fake overtime scandal. He served a prison sentence and lost his pension. I think the scandal nailed a few more cops, too.
> Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare, that there's no need to do things like audit the books or to ask that there be a documented reason why this particular cop needed to do all that OT.
That is every large company I've ever worked at. It's not a government specific issue, it's an issue of large organizations.
>Whoever it is, that's always the case in government.
"government" here can be replaced with any sufficiently large organization. There's nothing special about corruption in overly sized organizations. We've just decided businesses get to do whatever they want because their grift is primary.
In non-government organizations, if you as a manager find out someone on your staff is scamming the company for a huge amount of money, you can choose to fire him and know that your P&L will improve, which is the metric you're evaluated by.
In government organizations, well, the manager is probably not "evaluated" at all (and certainly not on financial terms), rather just guaranteed promotions in title at certain milestones of not (being caught) committing official misconduct, and guaranteed a pension after X years of service. Why rock the boat by investigating rumors of misconduct of your subordinates?
This framing is so incredibly speculative and imaginary that it's barely above the level of conversation one would hear at 11:00pm between drunkards at the tavern.
> In non-government organizations, if you as a manager find out someone on your staff is scamming the company for a huge amount of money, you can choose to fire him and know that your P&L will improve, which is the metric you're evaluated by.
There are plenty of companies in the US that are essentially old boys clubs where you entrench yourself with political games and then spend your golden years playing solitaire in your corner office. This is pretty much the real American dream.
> Why rock the boat by investigating rumors of misconduct of your subordinates?
Why do anything good, ever? Why not just be the caricature of an evil, sneering bureaucrat chasing shiny pennies into your pension account?
Unless you’ve worked in government, honestly, just stop.
I spent years in a metro water system and this class of corruption is rampant. You get 90k maximum salary, but your last 5 years dictate your retirement… so guess what you find yourself with maximum overtime.
We tried to fire an employee for cause… who hired counsel, so we caved immediately because of optics. So we gave them a do nothing barely-show-up job for the last 7 years.
I personally went on a death march for 12+ hour days for 6 months, 7 days a week, off the clock and without compensation, only to be screwed out of my “accrued” PTO. The VP, two years from retirement, suffered not a bit of repercussion for this violation.
The public sector is rife with corruption, no question, but if you worship it as your God, you’ll have to look past this sacrilege to find the truth.
I make these arguments because privatization is not a panacea, as the subtext of many of these types of would imply, but not because I "worship the public sector as a God".
For some reason, many critics of the public sector are willing to look past the many inefficiencies of our private sectors, especially the anticompetive and rent seeking practices.
The public sector needs solutions to its unique problems, it does not need to be eliminated entirely with privatization.
I'm not a privatization crusader either. But I do detest the hideous amount of waste in our municipal, state, and federal governments, and argue that it's a very hard problem to solve, and that we should never feed that beast by entrusting more things to them than they already control and mismanage.
Most companies where corruption significantly defrauds the owner (shareholders, for public companies), there's a strong chance it'll get shut down. That incentive simply doesn't happen when it's just taxpayers being fleeced. Otherwise, how else do you explain Sacramento?
The only distinction in this discussion that matters: public funds are "teh people's money". If an "old boys club" giant Fat Cats Inc. wants to spend their shareholder's money on hookers and blow, that's the shareholders problem. It was the shareholder's _choice_ to invest with company, _they took the risk_.
Municipal, state, and federal taxes are mandatory: you do not have a choice.
It's my view that, just like if we lived in a hunter-gatherer society, ideally everyone would strive to authentically contribute their fair share.
Money flows in very complicated ways and "shareholder's choice" is a technicality, especially in a world filled with monopolies, oligopolies, natural resource speculation and extraction, broad-based index funds, government subsidies, regulatory capture, and all manners of rent-seeking.
Economic deadweight is economic deadweight, no matter the source of funding: whether its a 30 year old widower of three at the grocery store cash register paying their dues to the oil barons who happen to own the land above which the oil is pulled, or the 50 year old executive who pays a 16% effective tax rate to ensure that the speech pathologist has their own office at the local school to help a child learn to cope with their stutter.
There's a counteracting force in non-government organizations though: competition and bankruptcy. Also, waste in non-government organizations hardly matters because they only get your money if you choose to give it to them.
ok but the vast majority of businesses aren't lucky enough to expect those.
The government didn't bail out Kmart, or Spirit Airlines.
And when Washington Mutual got fire-saled to Chase, I don't think a lot of the decision-makers at corporate who got them into that mess got to keep their jobs.
I know corporate America has a lot of problems, but embezzlement and fraud at large scale can easily cause the company to die (problem solved). In government it just means they'll have to raise taxes again.
> but embezzlement and fraud at large scale can easily cause the company to die (problem solved)
The legitimate societal good that those corporations produced (useful products, valuable services, large scale employment, etc) are gone. The people responsible may lose their jobs, but if they get new jobs they are likely to just infect another corporation. Further, those responsible may have left long before the the institution buckled under the weight of their actions, and in the process convinced others to engage in the same practices. I reject the claim that the problem is solved by company death.
You're not wrong there. The bad actors still suck and ruin good companies and people's lives. I guess what I should have said it's the downside is limited in private business, compared to a public agency where they not only can raise taxes to make up for the losses, in many cases they're basically compelled to. Like, you can't just close the police or fire department if they lost so much money that we can't afford to run them in the current budget, so they'll borrow - regardless of the interest cost - and saddle the grandchildren of the current taxpayers with the bill.
Your take is naïve and over simplified at best. While there's argument to be made that shareholders of publicly traded cooperation perform the same "responsibility black hole" function as politicians and voters do for government but more importantly the exact failure modes tend to be different. Shitty governments just kinda limp along creating misery forever. There's very little pressure upon them to not suck compared to the alternatives. Companies tend to either go tits up or get acquired if they get real bad and they don't have captive markets to the same extent that governments do. Though of course companies are always trying to get the sorts of captive markets that governments have.
Musk is the richest man head of multiple large orgs.
Theres zero evidence that his destructive behaviors are checkrd any better than tge president.
The fact that the richest man and current president suggests the typs of org is meaningless
>On July 9, Dolan reported he worked 23 hours. The next day, he worked 16 hours, and for the following three days, he worked 15 hours each
That sounds like one of the jobs I've had. One job was so bad that when they were designing their new offices, I asked if they could add a shower since I was pretty much living there. (Came back as a no because of insurance/liability costs.) The shit of it was that I was a salary employee so I never saw a dime of overtime. It did not take long for me to look for a new job. Worst experience ever for me.
Police overtime is quite complicated. Assuming 23 hours of work represent actually 23 hours of work will lead to confusion. Alot of these overtime jobs are where the government mandates that a police officer simply be on site. Regardless if they are sleeping or actually doing any police work.
California base overtime schedule is 1x for 8 hours in a day, 1.5x for the next 4 hours in a day, then 2x for any time after that. Additionally, any time above 40 hrs in a workweek or on a 7th day of consecutive work in a workweek gets 1.5x, and any time after 8 on that 7th day gets 2x.
Thus, it's possible to only get paid your base rate for 16 hours in a workweek, if you work more than 40 hours in the first 2 days of the week. For example, if I worked 24 hours on Monday, and 16 hours on Tuesday, I'd be making 1x * 8hrs on Monday + 1.5x*4hrs on Monday + 2x*12 hours on Monday, then 1x*8hrs on Tuesday + 1.5x*4hrs on Tuesday + 2x*4hrs on Tuesday. On every subsequent day of that week, my standard workday would be paid at 1.5x for the first 12 hours, then 2x for any time after that, until the seventh consecutive day, where I'd get 1.5x for 8hrs, then 2x after that.
All together, in California, if you work 24/7 for a week, you end up with
16hrs@1x + 64hrs@1.5x + 88hrs at 2x, netting out to an effective 188hrs per week.
IMO, this whole system is a little busted owing to the fixed workweek (it's not "any 7 day period", it's "over the course of a recurring 7 day schedule")
The issue seems to be what's defined as "work", given the amount of time he claimed to work, and not necessarily how much he is paid per hour.
Sitting in a cruiser playing candy crush counting as "work" is funny when you compare it to the fact that flight attendants only get paid for the time when the door is closed on a plane.
You really think he was working 23 hours one day and then 15-16 for the rest of the week? That sounds like timecard padding to me. No way he's not spending a significant portion of the job asleep, unless he's severely abusing stimulants.
Doing the job asleep is actually possible in some cities. There's a book called "Rough Justice: Days and Nights of a Young D.A." by David Heilbroner about his 3 years starting in 1985 as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney's office fresh out of law school.
The new ADAs were started working on the vast number of minor crimes that occur daily in NY that result in an arrest but that will almost certainly end up resolved with just a fine after a short (a few minutes often) bench trial.
The courts that handle these run 24 hours a day. The ADAs operate in shifts. He describes how when arriving for his shift he'd have to step over a large number of sleeping police officers in the hall.
The officers are there either to give a statement to the ADA or to give a statement in court when the case of the person they arrested comes up.
It can take many hours between arrest and an ADA starting to work on the case or it getting called in court so as soon as the officer finishes their regular work shift they come and wait at the ADAs office. That waiting time is on the clock and all overtime.
He would often arrive for a morning shift and there would be officers who had been waiting since the end of the day shift the day before, or longer, if I remember correctly.
Two or three of those in a week and an office could get a lot of overtime, most of it spent sleeping.
I agree that in this case its VERY likely to be fraud.
However, there are many jobs where you might be stuck at work. Being at work == getting paid. Thats not really that shocking of a thing. My wife's dad worked at a children's 'training school' (kid jail) and they often had lock downs or were legally required to have certain number of people on site for certain operations. So he might be there and simply couldn't leave, but might not be 'working'. He was paid for those hours, which I think is pretty reasonable.
Yeah this is “butt on chair” definition of working at best. I’ve worked 80 hour weeks, doing 15-16 hour days consecutively will obliterate you, and also hopefully you live upstairs because commute times start eating into your sleep time quickly
>The Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with agents from the Internal Revenue Service and United States Postal Inspection Service, raided Thao's home on June 20, 2024 as part of a corruption investigation
that's a nightmare group of people to be after you.
This is the system. I was a juror in a trial against Oakland where they were found to have been doing this - well over a decade ago. Oakland’s police department in particular has been in disarray for a very long time.
Employees in any profession are going to test boundaries and see what they can get away with. There was a similar report of a BART employee racking up incredible overtime as well.
This, and what it demands. Is the place understaffed? Last I checked, yes. Are the overtime hours unnecessary, or there literally aren’t any others staffed to cover them? I did a ride along with OPD, and they were severely understaffed and the number of active unit cars at any given time were insanely small for the size of the city, not to mention a city with such a high crime rate.
If there are abuses of the system, they should be prosecuted, absolutely. I’m not sure that’s the entire story here though
> A recent report by several civilian city unions found that over the past 15 years, even when department staffing increased, overtime continued to go up. From 2011 to 2024, staffing increased by nearly 9%. Over the same period, overtime went up by almost 200%.
Some quick googling seems to indicate that Oakland's population also increased nearly 15% in the same time frame. And then, of course, COVID wreaked havoc on everyone in the early 2020s. Crime rates went up, but police staffing remained the same, so more opportunities for overtime?
edit: actually, it looks like Oakland froze police staffing completely in the wake of the George Floyd event, and then cut the OPD budget by $15 million and also reduced sworn officer staffing from 780 to 730. Eliminated 50 police officer jobs.
People who are payed by taxes should all be required to use time-tracking apps and justify their time. This is smells of abusing a broken system for personal gain.
This smells of a system working as designed. Cops exist to protect property, capital, and the status quo. The people whom they actually exist to serve have no issue using tax dollars for this purpose.
So what you're saying is there are two problems. Why frame that to imply it's not worth making sure people stay accountable, so that people CAN be held accountable again once you help fix the country?
that's automated review, which could be considered automated triage, such that any protest of the automated review, by the human offender, requires human review (to your point).
I think a system that looks like how many hours someone puts in and then sends an email to both them and their boss going "you're abusing overtime, you will work the hours that are in your contract" would work a hell of a lot better to stop that grift. Nothing stopping someone from finding another trick to get those overtime hours if the system rewards that.
It's not fraud if it's the point. Oakland's government isn't poorly run from the perspective of the criminals, in and out of government, profiting off of the dysfunction.
I know "defund the police" brings extreme ire from the neo-liberals to the conservatives in the US, but I don't know how you can look at this, and think anything else. These guys are decked out in fully blown war paraphernalia (despite roofers and garbage men being much more dangerous professions). They have drones, helicopters, humvees, all kinds of tactical war tech...
100% of that money should go toward investing in the community and it will provide better results, I'm sure it will lower crime too.
Has anyone ever called the police? I have, a couple of times. They did nothing and seemed to have sub-highschool education when I interacted with them.
I also knew police families growing up. Every single one of them was a raging racist. Something is dangerously wrong with policing in the US (we have the largest prison population in the world). Cutting their funding seems like a great step 1.
A non-extreme position is that we do need the police… but not like this. We need systemic reform from the ground up, but punitive measures wouldn’t do that.
I agree, I think this is a conversation we need to be having with a focus on reallocating most of the money currently spent on police back to community infrastructure.
People hate crime than they hate any of these faults of police.
With modern surveillance technology, you could probably get rid of a fair number of cops, but you’d still need some muscle to actually enforce the law. The other option is regulatory penalties, but those tend to work best on middle-class people, not on the classes that commit physical theft and violence, which people hate most of all.
The argument for defunding the police (that I agree with) is that crime goes down when you address the root cause: poverty. The money spent on policing could more effectively lower crime by being used for building healthier communities.
I just don't agree that poverty explains a lot of crime, particularly in developed nations. There's probably some explained by legitimate need, but a rational person would probably find welfare and other benefits easier to use and less risky. Some is due to "poverty", but really envy for luxuries that others have.
I think the largest part is either due to being caught up in a bad social set, or straight up because they think crime is fine. Poverty doesn't cause this, at least not primarily - it's rather that personal characteristics such as lack of impulse control and high time preference lead to both poverty and a propensity to crime.
> I know "defund the police" brings extreme ire from the neo-liberals to the conservatives in the US, but I don't know how you can look at this, and think anything else
In my area, the "Defund the Police" folks on the city council have directly caused a massive increase in overtime by actively thwarting efforts by the mayor and police chief to help improve work conditions and recruiting for the police force.
I look at this and see what I see when I look at any government agency: mismanagement and government worker unions with too much power.
> These guys are decked out in fully blown war paraphernalia
What "guys" are? I see cops every day and none of them are dressed like that.
> Has anyone ever called the police? I have, a couple of times.
Yep, they've been very responsive and helpful.
> I also knew police families growing up. Every single one of them was a raging racist.
Sounds like you surrounded yourself with bad people?
> In my area, the "Defund the Police" folks on the city council have directly caused a massive increase in overtime by actively thwarting efforts by the mayor and police chief to help improve work conditions and recruiting for the police force.
Paying cops overtime is not defunding the police. If they were defunded, they wouldn't be getting overtime.
> What "guys" are? I see cops every day and none of them are dressed like that.
I see cops standing around the mall in full body armor. In the 1980s they didn't even have bullet proof vests, now every cop looks like they're cosplaying Call of Duty.
> Yep, they've been very responsive and helpful.
I've never heard anyone ever say this. Also cops come after a crime has been committed. It's almost by definition useless to call them.
> Sounds like you surrounded yourself with bad people?
Sadly I didn't get to decide where I lived as a child and I lived in a cop heavy area, so yeah, I was surrounded by bad people but not by choice.
> In my area, the "Defund the Police" folks on the city council have directly caused a massive increase in overtime by actively thwarting efforts by the mayor and police chief to help improve work conditions and recruiting for the police force.
Here you try to shift blame. Is it really the fault of the defund-the-police folks that a single cop gets almost 500k paid per year? How were this the case? Something is fundamentally broken if cops are paid so much more than regular people.
Do they need to spell it out for you?
'Defund the Police' mentality in politicians means they don't try to improve police staffing -> number of police stays stagnant, even while population is increasing, crime may be increasing w/ the population -> the work doesn't magically disappear, each cop works more hours -> higher pay per-cop, especially with overtime rates
Sure, you can dislike the specific numbers here in the bay area (your OP didn't say anything specifically about that btw), but the general principle is very easy to understand
That's not what defund the police means. It means cutting most or all funding from police departments and redirecting it toward crime lowering initiatives like universal childcare. It's 100% not "higher pay per-cop" or even keeping the number of police stagnant. It's letting them go altogether.
Why does a police department need an executive team, complete with corporate headshots? These officers need to be tried and convicted of fraud and whoever let this happen in the city needs to face charges for criminal conduct.
> Lieutenant Timothy Dolan, a 26-year veteran who leads the traffic unit and serves as vice president of the OPOA police union, was paid $493,247 in overtime in 2024
All that overtime with the traffic unit, and what to show for it? Anyone who lives in the Bay knows that cops have completely abdicated their mandate and responsibility for traffic enforcement. The roads truly feel like the Wild West, and those who "serve and protect" are laughing their way to the bank.
There is no police agency in the Bay Area more deserving of dissolution than the Oakland Police. Oakland should take a page from the playbook of Camden, New Jersey, and completely delete the department, creating a new one under different leadership and with none of the former staff. In Camden, cops who wanted to stay on had to apply and take a psychiatric evaluation, which I think is a great idea for Oakland. I doubt even a bare majority of the current cops would survive a competitive evaluation.
If they all quit everybody else would be better off.
But you are delusional if you think anybody as dumb as a US cop is giving up $100/hr for sitting at a desk pretending to do paperwork just because someone wants to take video of it and never review it.
> If they all quit everybody else would be better off.
Look, I get where you’re going, but if you think about what would _actually_ happen, it would definitely be much worse if they suddenly had to rehire the majority of the force.
I fail to see how you can get much worse than the systemic corruption and internal police gangs we already have while we pay them more than a top neurosurgeon.
Incompetent cops is better than competent extortion.
You'd think the USA would be very transparent about it here. After all cops are paid by the public. So when a city can not explain cops becoming millionaires, this is a much bigger problem than merely that individual cop getting rich. It also undermines a system since cops have certain privileges by default.
It's bad that cities and states can't get a firm grip on this kind of stuff.
But this is a transparency success story. The wages were reported on. The press published a story about it. They were able to get "overtime worked forms" records from OPD. In many other places (including may places in the US) you would never find out about this.
> Lieutenant Timothy Dolan, a 26-year veteran who leads the traffic unit and serves as vice president of the OPOA police union, was paid $493,247 in overtime in 2024. Combined with his salary and other pay, this netted him a $711,000 paycheck, making him OPD’s highest-paid employee — a title he’s held for several years now. His pay was almost double that of the chief of police and nearly three times the mayor’s paycheck. His total compensation, including pension and healthcare benefits, was $879,000.
People pay taxes, so that is their money really. Of course it does matter. The system is broken when money is stolen from the public like in this case (most likely if found out to be true). That's a problem that is much bigger than merely one cop abusing the system. Several people must have benefitted here.
This is business as usual for public sector unions. Focusing on police unions is a good way to highlight these issues to leftists who reflexively both defend unions and criticize police
So therefore, everybody should be fine with 490.000 USD for someone who is not developing "ad tech" and instead doing something "at least somehow useful"?
Also I do not understand the downvoters: Is that civil cervants like police should not be able to bill overtime?
All these things are the reasons why those jobs are mostly considered not attractive, therefore the gov should think about payment?
I don't make North of 150, don't look at me. And also it's 490 on top of his base salary, which is already higher than mine to start with.
But also he's transparently not actually working those overtime hours, so he is not "doing something useful". Like a lot of cops, he's just draining public money pretending to work. Unfortunately this is not uncommon. Anyone reporting 80 hours of overtime in a week should really be looked into - 23 hours in a day the same. Even if someone actually was awake and in theory working that long, they shouldn't be allowed to, and should be required to go home after some cap of hours to actually be able to usefully work. I would put it at 10 hours a day personally.
> […] even when department staffing increased, overtime continued to go up. From 2011 to 2024, staffing increased by nearly 9%. Over the same period, overtime went up by almost 200%.
The data in this article is good, but this piece is really weak. They should have just left this blurb out.
It implies that these two should be directly related without acknowledging any other contributing factors.
It’s implying “overtime is a function of staffing, staffing went up so overtime should go down”.
What if the population went up? What if there’s more work for 1 person to do for whatever reason, like some new process? What if crime rates changed? What if traffic beats were more demanding due to new roads or whatever?
The rest of the data in the article is more damning and directly correlated to the point they’re trying to make.
This specific data point just raises more questions than answers and feels like they’re trying to dogpile instead of being journalists, and it would have made their case stronger if they left it out, imo.
The department is understaffed by hundreds of officers forcing them to work double shifts in a lot of cases at time-and-a-half pay. This is a very dangerous situation for the city to be in as that drives more officers to quit and with the financial impact already sustained will force future cuts creating a downward spiral that will be felt in the crime stats.
> This is a very dangerous situation for the city to be in as that drives more officers to quit
Police unions often resist head count increases if it eats into the overtime scam. And zero cops are "forced" into this, but it's one of the biggest piggy at the trough scams going.
Further, police are just shockingly, unbelievably unaccountable for often being profoundly terrible and completely incompetent at their jobs. Budgets and headcounts keep exploding -- it is usually far and away the #1 cost for local budgets -- while the often far-right police force intentionally doesn't do their job to make some sort of statement.
Adding funding and number of cops, it turns out, is almost meaningless, and instead crime just fluctuates on other society macro elements.
I am not a defund the police person, but policing is at the very top of institutions that needs an extremely close investigation and retooling, being torn down and rebuilt on new foundations if necessary. If police were held to the efficiency standards most of the rest of society is, we would have an infinitely more capable policing system at much lower cost. Instead we have lazy, inept cops who intentionally do a shit job because it earns them overtime, and also sticks it to that "lefty" mayor, etc.
And for the "put their lives on the line" people who invariably drop their rhetoric as a diversion -- https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j... -- dangerous, but if you aren't also hero worshipping delivery drivers, garbage collectors and roofers, maybe tone down the nonsense.
You're just describing most municipal employment actually. Grifting, padding work hours, ghost jobs, happens in fire departments, street departments, sanitation departments, etc. as well. It's been a piggy bank for political favoritism for centuries.
This seems like the kind of thing that exposes the uncomfortable truth about our civil society.
In the natural pre-civilized state of things, people did bad things out of selfishness and greed just because they can. Like, one comes upon a weaker caveman and murders him to take his food or tools or whatever.
We tell ourselves our society is way beyond that. But at the end of the day it's actually still about force and violence. The only way to end corruption like this is for some very efficient and morally upright 'Boy Scout' to be put in charge of reforming these departments. They scrutinize everything and terminate everyone responsible. That sometimes happens, but also, doing that is very dangerous and makes a lot of enemies. To the point they get death threats or maybe even not just the threats. Because the ones doing the scams are willing to use force, and if we're being honest, strong bullies in numbers are still a force to be reckoned with.
Did you read the article? The head of the union billed 800 hours of overtime for reviewing traffic reports that could have been reviewed by lower level officers for a fraction of the cost. There was no tracking of how many reports he actually reviewed. Overtime has gone up even as staffing has. It's clear the system is being abused.
>that could have been reviewed by lower level officers for a fraction of the cost.
Did you read it? They are understaffed by hundreds of officers. What lower level officers are going to do it when it's all hands on deck to keep the ship afloat?
According to the cops they are understaffed. I don't believe them at all, they are US cops making more money than top level surgeons and doing overtime "reviewing traffic reports." It is no secret that US cops are corrupt and criminal as fuck.
"From 2011 to 2024, staffing increased by nearly 9%. Over the same period, overtime went up by almost 200%."
EDIT: Between 2010 and 2020 Oakland's population increased 12% and total homicides, not per capita, remained flat. The Covid years (2021-23) saw a big increase in homicides (and presumably other crime) which may account for some of the increase. However by 2024, homicides returned to pre-Covid levels.
"“At this staffing level, more officers will be forced to work excessive overtime, which in turn will accelerate attrition,” Nguyen said in a statement. “We cannot meet the needs of our community without forcing officers into more shifts.”
It is true that OPD is severely understaffed by hundreds of officers. Mayor Barbara Lee is attempting to shrink the staffing gap, with plans to increase the number of officers. "
That's the head of the police union. Not an objective outsider.
> It is true that OPD is severely understaffed by hundreds of officers
And despite increasing staffing a little, overtime went up a lot. Two things can be simultaneously true: Oakland PD is understaffed and Oakland PD isn't managing overtime spending well.
If they only correct the understaffing problem without fixing overtime, they're going to exacerbate the budgetary issues. It's important for officers to be well-rested when doing their work.
Summary: population up by the same amount as staffing, crime flat or lower (if you're measuring per-capita).
Population increased 12% between 2010 and 2020. Total homicides, not per 100k, were roughly the same - 95 vs 110. There was a marked increase in homicides during the Covid years but it dropped back down in 2024.
I'm not an expert in police staffing levels, just poking around and asking questions. This seems interesting from your second link:
> The number of Oakland Police Department officers has varied from a low of 626 (in 1996 and in 2012) to a high of 814 (in 2002). There were 723 officers at the end of 2015. The city's strategic plan recommended 925 officers, and an independent study commissioned by the city in the mid-1990s recommended 1,200 officers. As of 2025, the city employed only 675 police officers, budgeted for only 600, and of these, 100 were on leave.
> 1 in 6 officers were on leave the entire year? What is that about?
No clue my friend. Public sector unions do weird things.
> Like I wrote in another comment, both can be simultaneously true. The department is both understaffed and possibly does not manage its overtime well.
I didn't see that comment, but I don't disagree with you. I was just trying to understand a little more about the staffing levels.
>This is generally about 1.5 times their normal pay.
>Lieutenant Timothy Dolan, a 26-year veteran who leads the traffic unit and serves as vice president of the OPOA police union, was paid $493,247 in overtime in 2024. Combined with his salary and other pay, this netted him a $711,000 paycheck, making him OPD’s highest-paid employee
Well I'm just going to have to guess his OT is actually 2x and not 1.5x, as otherwise he's working more than 80 hours a week. Or maybe he's only expected to work something like 20 hours a week?
>On July 9, Dolan reported he worked 23 hours. The next day, he worked 16 hours, and for the following three days, he worked 15 hours each.
It just looks like the attorney general in this area has been asleep at the wheel.
> It just looks like the attorney general in this area has been asleep at the wheel.
Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare, that there's no need to do things like audit the books or to ask that there be a documented reason why this particular cop needed to do all that OT. The chain of responsibility just abruptly terminates with someone who has the prerogative to approve things without explanation, and that person doesn't (legally or department-policy-wise) owe anyone an explanation, and he won't give one. (Because usually the answer is "Because he's in on the scam himself")
Note: I'm not saying that every civil servant scams. Far from it. I'm saying that conditions are nearly always ripe for this type of thing because those in charge won't be held responsible, and those at the very top are elected officials, who are in more and more areas only vulnerable to primary challenges. So if you have a good enough rep for "supporting team blue/red" you can cruise past plenty of oopsie-daisies like this by just scoring cheap political points.
> Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare
The guy who sold me my last car at my Toyota dealership was in his late 50s.
What's weird is that he told me that I would be his 1st sale!
I asked him what he did before and he said he was "in construction" but that it was a young man's game.
Something didn't add up and I googled his name.
Turns out that he was a former state police officer, ensnared in a fake overtime scandal. He served a prison sentence and lost his pension. I think the scandal nailed a few more cops, too.
> Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare, that there's no need to do things like audit the books or to ask that there be a documented reason why this particular cop needed to do all that OT.
That is every large company I've ever worked at. It's not a government specific issue, it's an issue of large organizations.
>Whoever it is, that's always the case in government.
"government" here can be replaced with any sufficiently large organization. There's nothing special about corruption in overly sized organizations. We've just decided businesses get to do whatever they want because their grift is primary.
In non-government organizations, if you as a manager find out someone on your staff is scamming the company for a huge amount of money, you can choose to fire him and know that your P&L will improve, which is the metric you're evaluated by.
In government organizations, well, the manager is probably not "evaluated" at all (and certainly not on financial terms), rather just guaranteed promotions in title at certain milestones of not (being caught) committing official misconduct, and guaranteed a pension after X years of service. Why rock the boat by investigating rumors of misconduct of your subordinates?
This framing is so incredibly speculative and imaginary that it's barely above the level of conversation one would hear at 11:00pm between drunkards at the tavern.
> In non-government organizations, if you as a manager find out someone on your staff is scamming the company for a huge amount of money, you can choose to fire him and know that your P&L will improve, which is the metric you're evaluated by.
There are plenty of companies in the US that are essentially old boys clubs where you entrench yourself with political games and then spend your golden years playing solitaire in your corner office. This is pretty much the real American dream.
> Why rock the boat by investigating rumors of misconduct of your subordinates?
Why do anything good, ever? Why not just be the caricature of an evil, sneering bureaucrat chasing shiny pennies into your pension account?
Unless you’ve worked in government, honestly, just stop.
I spent years in a metro water system and this class of corruption is rampant. You get 90k maximum salary, but your last 5 years dictate your retirement… so guess what you find yourself with maximum overtime.
We tried to fire an employee for cause… who hired counsel, so we caved immediately because of optics. So we gave them a do nothing barely-show-up job for the last 7 years.
I personally went on a death march for 12+ hour days for 6 months, 7 days a week, off the clock and without compensation, only to be screwed out of my “accrued” PTO. The VP, two years from retirement, suffered not a bit of repercussion for this violation.
The public sector is rife with corruption, no question, but if you worship it as your God, you’ll have to look past this sacrilege to find the truth.
I make these arguments because privatization is not a panacea, as the subtext of many of these types of would imply, but not because I "worship the public sector as a God".
For some reason, many critics of the public sector are willing to look past the many inefficiencies of our private sectors, especially the anticompetive and rent seeking practices.
The public sector needs solutions to its unique problems, it does not need to be eliminated entirely with privatization.
I'm not a privatization crusader either. But I do detest the hideous amount of waste in our municipal, state, and federal governments, and argue that it's a very hard problem to solve, and that we should never feed that beast by entrusting more things to them than they already control and mismanage.
Most companies where corruption significantly defrauds the owner (shareholders, for public companies), there's a strong chance it'll get shut down. That incentive simply doesn't happen when it's just taxpayers being fleeced. Otherwise, how else do you explain Sacramento?
Your anecdotal story is perfectly representative of all govt entities, surely.
The only distinction in this discussion that matters: public funds are "teh people's money". If an "old boys club" giant Fat Cats Inc. wants to spend their shareholder's money on hookers and blow, that's the shareholders problem. It was the shareholder's _choice_ to invest with company, _they took the risk_.
Municipal, state, and federal taxes are mandatory: you do not have a choice.
It's my view that, just like if we lived in a hunter-gatherer society, ideally everyone would strive to authentically contribute their fair share.
Money flows in very complicated ways and "shareholder's choice" is a technicality, especially in a world filled with monopolies, oligopolies, natural resource speculation and extraction, broad-based index funds, government subsidies, regulatory capture, and all manners of rent-seeking.
Economic deadweight is economic deadweight, no matter the source of funding: whether its a 30 year old widower of three at the grocery store cash register paying their dues to the oil barons who happen to own the land above which the oil is pulled, or the 50 year old executive who pays a 16% effective tax rate to ensure that the speech pathologist has their own office at the local school to help a child learn to cope with their stutter.
There's a counteracting force in non-government organizations though: competition and bankruptcy. Also, waste in non-government organizations hardly matters because they only get your money if you choose to give it to them.
Excluding of course corporate bailouts.
ok but the vast majority of businesses aren't lucky enough to expect those.
The government didn't bail out Kmart, or Spirit Airlines.
And when Washington Mutual got fire-saled to Chase, I don't think a lot of the decision-makers at corporate who got them into that mess got to keep their jobs.
I know corporate America has a lot of problems, but embezzlement and fraud at large scale can easily cause the company to die (problem solved). In government it just means they'll have to raise taxes again.
> but embezzlement and fraud at large scale can easily cause the company to die (problem solved)
The legitimate societal good that those corporations produced (useful products, valuable services, large scale employment, etc) are gone. The people responsible may lose their jobs, but if they get new jobs they are likely to just infect another corporation. Further, those responsible may have left long before the the institution buckled under the weight of their actions, and in the process convinced others to engage in the same practices. I reject the claim that the problem is solved by company death.
You're not wrong there. The bad actors still suck and ruin good companies and people's lives. I guess what I should have said it's the downside is limited in private business, compared to a public agency where they not only can raise taxes to make up for the losses, in many cases they're basically compelled to. Like, you can't just close the police or fire department if they lost so much money that we can't afford to run them in the current budget, so they'll borrow - regardless of the interest cost - and saddle the grandchildren of the current taxpayers with the bill.
Excwpt for zuckerbberg or musk or thw boards backing them.
Do you reason actually or are you just LLMing it.
Your take is naïve and over simplified at best. While there's argument to be made that shareholders of publicly traded cooperation perform the same "responsibility black hole" function as politicians and voters do for government but more importantly the exact failure modes tend to be different. Shitty governments just kinda limp along creating misery forever. There's very little pressure upon them to not suck compared to the alternatives. Companies tend to either go tits up or get acquired if they get real bad and they don't have captive markets to the same extent that governments do. Though of course companies are always trying to get the sorts of captive markets that governments have.
> Shitty ________ just kinda limp along creating misery forever. There's very little pressure upon them to not suck compared to the alternatives.
US utility companies are like this. Railroad. Very large ISPs. Any org with some level of regulatory capture.
Musk is the richest man head of multiple large orgs.
Theres zero evidence that his destructive behaviors are checkrd any better than tge president. The fact that the richest man and current president suggests the typs of org is meaningless
>On July 9, Dolan reported he worked 23 hours. The next day, he worked 16 hours, and for the following three days, he worked 15 hours each
That sounds like one of the jobs I've had. One job was so bad that when they were designing their new offices, I asked if they could add a shower since I was pretty much living there. (Came back as a no because of insurance/liability costs.) The shit of it was that I was a salary employee so I never saw a dime of overtime. It did not take long for me to look for a new job. Worst experience ever for me.
This is assuming the work hours are real which they are surely not. More likely this is fraud.
Police overtime is quite complicated. Assuming 23 hours of work represent actually 23 hours of work will lead to confusion. Alot of these overtime jobs are where the government mandates that a police officer simply be on site. Regardless if they are sleeping or actually doing any police work.
I can assure you, I was in the office every one of the hours I claimed. How you can suggest they are fraud is wildly libelous on your part.
They're definitely talking about the police officer from this story, not you!
California base overtime schedule is 1x for 8 hours in a day, 1.5x for the next 4 hours in a day, then 2x for any time after that. Additionally, any time above 40 hrs in a workweek or on a 7th day of consecutive work in a workweek gets 1.5x, and any time after 8 on that 7th day gets 2x.
Thus, it's possible to only get paid your base rate for 16 hours in a workweek, if you work more than 40 hours in the first 2 days of the week. For example, if I worked 24 hours on Monday, and 16 hours on Tuesday, I'd be making 1x * 8hrs on Monday + 1.5x*4hrs on Monday + 2x*12 hours on Monday, then 1x*8hrs on Tuesday + 1.5x*4hrs on Tuesday + 2x*4hrs on Tuesday. On every subsequent day of that week, my standard workday would be paid at 1.5x for the first 12 hours, then 2x for any time after that, until the seventh consecutive day, where I'd get 1.5x for 8hrs, then 2x after that.
All together, in California, if you work 24/7 for a week, you end up with
16hrs@1x + 64hrs@1.5x + 88hrs at 2x, netting out to an effective 188hrs per week.
IMO, this whole system is a little busted owing to the fixed workweek (it's not "any 7 day period", it's "over the course of a recurring 7 day schedule")
He'll be investigated by other thin blue line cops who also nap in their squad cars and be found innocent of any wrong doing.
It sounds way worse than just napping.
Union rules cause double time (2x pay) to kick in at lower daily and weekly thesholds than at non union jobs.
The issue seems to be what's defined as "work", given the amount of time he claimed to work, and not necessarily how much he is paid per hour.
Sitting in a cruiser playing candy crush counting as "work" is funny when you compare it to the fact that flight attendants only get paid for the time when the door is closed on a plane.
Flock will eventually be there to take that job too.
The police officers will still get paid though, even if the machines are doing the work.
You really think he was working 23 hours one day and then 15-16 for the rest of the week? That sounds like timecard padding to me. No way he's not spending a significant portion of the job asleep, unless he's severely abusing stimulants.
Doing the job asleep is actually possible in some cities. There's a book called "Rough Justice: Days and Nights of a Young D.A." by David Heilbroner about his 3 years starting in 1985 as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney's office fresh out of law school.
The new ADAs were started working on the vast number of minor crimes that occur daily in NY that result in an arrest but that will almost certainly end up resolved with just a fine after a short (a few minutes often) bench trial.
The courts that handle these run 24 hours a day. The ADAs operate in shifts. He describes how when arriving for his shift he'd have to step over a large number of sleeping police officers in the hall.
The officers are there either to give a statement to the ADA or to give a statement in court when the case of the person they arrested comes up.
It can take many hours between arrest and an ADA starting to work on the case or it getting called in court so as soon as the officer finishes their regular work shift they come and wait at the ADAs office. That waiting time is on the clock and all overtime.
He would often arrive for a morning shift and there would be officers who had been waiting since the end of the day shift the day before, or longer, if I remember correctly.
Two or three of those in a week and an office could get a lot of overtime, most of it spent sleeping.
I agree that in this case its VERY likely to be fraud.
However, there are many jobs where you might be stuck at work. Being at work == getting paid. Thats not really that shocking of a thing. My wife's dad worked at a children's 'training school' (kid jail) and they often had lock downs or were legally required to have certain number of people on site for certain operations. So he might be there and simply couldn't leave, but might not be 'working'. He was paid for those hours, which I think is pretty reasonable.
Yeah this is “butt on chair” definition of working at best. I’ve worked 80 hour weeks, doing 15-16 hour days consecutively will obliterate you, and also hopefully you live upstairs because commute times start eating into your sleep time quickly
This. And his position of seniority in the union likely gets him close to first pick of the shifts and jobs that lend themselves best to this.
Somebody's gotta man the night shift at the empty lockup!
If you work 40 hours in two days, everything except 16 hours that week is overtime.
> It just looks like the attorney general in this area has been asleep at the wheel.
Oakland mayor and progressive DA ousted amid crime complaints: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/09/oakland-mayor-progr...
As a Bay Area resident and someone who leans very far left - I was not surprised by the impact, and outcome of "policy by slogan".
Not just ousted, former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao goes to trial for federal criminal corruption and bribery charges in October.
no kidding.
>The Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with agents from the Internal Revenue Service and United States Postal Inspection Service, raided Thao's home on June 20, 2024 as part of a corruption investigation
that's a nightmare group of people to be after you.
It looked like the mayor was getting railroaded at the time.
Look up her current scandal and FBI case involving the local garbage company.
This is the system. I was a juror in a trial against Oakland where they were found to have been doing this - well over a decade ago. Oakland’s police department in particular has been in disarray for a very long time.
Employees in any profession are going to test boundaries and see what they can get away with. There was a similar report of a BART employee racking up incredible overtime as well.
It’s ultimately whatever the system permits.
This, and what it demands. Is the place understaffed? Last I checked, yes. Are the overtime hours unnecessary, or there literally aren’t any others staffed to cover them? I did a ride along with OPD, and they were severely understaffed and the number of active unit cars at any given time were insanely small for the size of the city, not to mention a city with such a high crime rate.
If there are abuses of the system, they should be prosecuted, absolutely. I’m not sure that’s the entire story here though
It's both. OPD is dramatically under-staffed, and also trash. Needs a complete overhaul.
> A recent report by several civilian city unions found that over the past 15 years, even when department staffing increased, overtime continued to go up. From 2011 to 2024, staffing increased by nearly 9%. Over the same period, overtime went up by almost 200%.
Some quick googling seems to indicate that Oakland's population also increased nearly 15% in the same time frame. And then, of course, COVID wreaked havoc on everyone in the early 2020s. Crime rates went up, but police staffing remained the same, so more opportunities for overtime?
edit: actually, it looks like Oakland froze police staffing completely in the wake of the George Floyd event, and then cut the OPD budget by $15 million and also reduced sworn officer staffing from 780 to 730. Eliminated 50 police officer jobs.
Did crime rates go up 218% like police spending did? And are they still up there?
The city could pay a full-time auditor to just follow this cop around and count his hours of work and they would still pay less money in total.
The police unions own SF and Oakland politically. It's really quite embarrassing.
And teachers unions.
And it’s funny how fans of one hate the other and vice versa.
All government unions make no sense. You can't have fair labor bargaining when the employees are responsible for electing their own bosses.
Says a lot if you are a fan of the police union and aren't a cop.
I’m neutral. My point is that it says a lot to be “pro union… except that one”
Classic beat 'em vs teach 'em dilemma.
A drastic over simplification, since police do more than beat random strangers, and teachers are performing worse than they ever have, by far.
People who are payed by taxes should all be required to use time-tracking apps and justify their time. This is smells of abusing a broken system for personal gain.
This smells of a system working as designed. Cops exist to protect property, capital, and the status quo. The people whom they actually exist to serve have no issue using tax dollars for this purpose.
First there was the 10x engineer, now there’s the 10x cop.
That is Robocop minus the maintenance costs.
> minus the maintenance costs.
Given the context (government), the taxpayers are probably footing the bill for expensive therapy sessions that go unattended.
LOL
this police officer made most the $490k in overtime "reviewing traffic reports".
sounds like $50 of work for Gemini could replace $490,000 of that officer's overtime.
Don't dare them to replace cops with AI. That's what they want you to demand, so they can replace cops with AI.
that's desk job work, not policing, it seems, from the article.
A computer cannot be held accountable, and so a computer should never be allowed to replace decision making.
How many cops or feds do you see being held accountable anymore?
So what you're saying is there are two problems. Why frame that to imply it's not worth making sure people stay accountable, so that people CAN be held accountable again once you help fix the country?
A computer is paid for and/or run by at least one human being.
This is so factually incorrect I don't even know where to begin. Have you even read about modern LLM usage?
that's automated review, which could be considered automated triage, such that any protest of the automated review, by the human offender, requires human review (to your point).
that alone should decimate the grift.
I think a system that looks like how many hours someone puts in and then sends an email to both them and their boss going "you're abusing overtime, you will work the hours that are in your contract" would work a hell of a lot better to stop that grift. Nothing stopping someone from finding another trick to get those overtime hours if the system rewards that.
It's not fraud if it's the point. Oakland's government isn't poorly run from the perspective of the criminals, in and out of government, profiting off of the dysfunction.
If he worked those hours, it seems fair. If he wasn't working, it's fraud. Comparable to CEO pay at most companies, excluding the huge ones?
I know "defund the police" brings extreme ire from the neo-liberals to the conservatives in the US, but I don't know how you can look at this, and think anything else. These guys are decked out in fully blown war paraphernalia (despite roofers and garbage men being much more dangerous professions). They have drones, helicopters, humvees, all kinds of tactical war tech...
100% of that money should go toward investing in the community and it will provide better results, I'm sure it will lower crime too.
Has anyone ever called the police? I have, a couple of times. They did nothing and seemed to have sub-highschool education when I interacted with them.
I also knew police families growing up. Every single one of them was a raging racist. Something is dangerously wrong with policing in the US (we have the largest prison population in the world). Cutting their funding seems like a great step 1.
A non-extreme position is that we do need the police… but not like this. We need systemic reform from the ground up, but punitive measures wouldn’t do that.
I agree, I think this is a conversation we need to be having with a focus on reallocating most of the money currently spent on police back to community infrastructure.
People hate crime than they hate any of these faults of police.
With modern surveillance technology, you could probably get rid of a fair number of cops, but you’d still need some muscle to actually enforce the law. The other option is regulatory penalties, but those tend to work best on middle-class people, not on the classes that commit physical theft and violence, which people hate most of all.
The argument for defunding the police (that I agree with) is that crime goes down when you address the root cause: poverty. The money spent on policing could more effectively lower crime by being used for building healthier communities.
I just don't agree that poverty explains a lot of crime, particularly in developed nations. There's probably some explained by legitimate need, but a rational person would probably find welfare and other benefits easier to use and less risky. Some is due to "poverty", but really envy for luxuries that others have.
I think the largest part is either due to being caught up in a bad social set, or straight up because they think crime is fine. Poverty doesn't cause this, at least not primarily - it's rather that personal characteristics such as lack of impulse control and high time preference lead to both poverty and a propensity to crime.
> I know "defund the police" brings extreme ire from the neo-liberals to the conservatives in the US, but I don't know how you can look at this, and think anything else
In my area, the "Defund the Police" folks on the city council have directly caused a massive increase in overtime by actively thwarting efforts by the mayor and police chief to help improve work conditions and recruiting for the police force.
I look at this and see what I see when I look at any government agency: mismanagement and government worker unions with too much power.
> These guys are decked out in fully blown war paraphernalia
What "guys" are? I see cops every day and none of them are dressed like that.
> Has anyone ever called the police? I have, a couple of times.
Yep, they've been very responsive and helpful.
> I also knew police families growing up. Every single one of them was a raging racist.
Sounds like you surrounded yourself with bad people?
> In my area, the "Defund the Police" folks on the city council have directly caused a massive increase in overtime by actively thwarting efforts by the mayor and police chief to help improve work conditions and recruiting for the police force.
Paying cops overtime is not defunding the police. If they were defunded, they wouldn't be getting overtime.
> What "guys" are? I see cops every day and none of them are dressed like that.
I see cops standing around the mall in full body armor. In the 1980s they didn't even have bullet proof vests, now every cop looks like they're cosplaying Call of Duty.
> Yep, they've been very responsive and helpful.
I've never heard anyone ever say this. Also cops come after a crime has been committed. It's almost by definition useless to call them.
> Sounds like you surrounded yourself with bad people?
Sadly I didn't get to decide where I lived as a child and I lived in a cop heavy area, so yeah, I was surrounded by bad people but not by choice.
> In my area, the "Defund the Police" folks on the city council have directly caused a massive increase in overtime by actively thwarting efforts by the mayor and police chief to help improve work conditions and recruiting for the police force.
Here you try to shift blame. Is it really the fault of the defund-the-police folks that a single cop gets almost 500k paid per year? How were this the case? Something is fundamentally broken if cops are paid so much more than regular people.
Do they need to spell it out for you? 'Defund the Police' mentality in politicians means they don't try to improve police staffing -> number of police stays stagnant, even while population is increasing, crime may be increasing w/ the population -> the work doesn't magically disappear, each cop works more hours -> higher pay per-cop, especially with overtime rates Sure, you can dislike the specific numbers here in the bay area (your OP didn't say anything specifically about that btw), but the general principle is very easy to understand
That's not what defund the police means. It means cutting most or all funding from police departments and redirecting it toward crime lowering initiatives like universal childcare. It's 100% not "higher pay per-cop" or even keeping the number of police stagnant. It's letting them go altogether.
Why does a police department need an executive team, complete with corporate headshots? These officers need to be tried and convicted of fraud and whoever let this happen in the city needs to face charges for criminal conduct.
> Lieutenant Timothy Dolan, a 26-year veteran who leads the traffic unit and serves as vice president of the OPOA police union, was paid $493,247 in overtime in 2024
All that overtime with the traffic unit, and what to show for it? Anyone who lives in the Bay knows that cops have completely abdicated their mandate and responsibility for traffic enforcement. The roads truly feel like the Wild West, and those who "serve and protect" are laughing their way to the bank.
There is no police agency in the Bay Area more deserving of dissolution than the Oakland Police. Oakland should take a page from the playbook of Camden, New Jersey, and completely delete the department, creating a new one under different leadership and with none of the former staff. In Camden, cops who wanted to stay on had to apply and take a psychiatric evaluation, which I think is a great idea for Oakland. I doubt even a bare majority of the current cops would survive a competitive evaluation.
This is ridiculous. These guys need a body cam and GPS on them even for desk work.
Would you put up with that at your own job? They’d just all quit and the problem would be worse than before.
If they all quit everybody else would be better off.
But you are delusional if you think anybody as dumb as a US cop is giving up $100/hr for sitting at a desk pretending to do paperwork just because someone wants to take video of it and never review it.
> If they all quit everybody else would be better off.
Look, I get where you’re going, but if you think about what would _actually_ happen, it would definitely be much worse if they suddenly had to rehire the majority of the force.
I fail to see how you can get much worse than the systemic corruption and internal police gangs we already have while we pay them more than a top neurosurgeon. Incompetent cops is better than competent extortion.
Seems like classic felony embezzling.
You'd think the USA would be very transparent about it here. After all cops are paid by the public. So when a city can not explain cops becoming millionaires, this is a much bigger problem than merely that individual cop getting rich. It also undermines a system since cops have certain privileges by default.
It's bad that cities and states can't get a firm grip on this kind of stuff.
But this is a transparency success story. The wages were reported on. The press published a story about it. They were able to get "overtime worked forms" records from OPD. In many other places (including may places in the US) you would never find out about this.
maybe he just worked 40 hour days....
> Lieutenant Timothy Dolan, a 26-year veteran who leads the traffic unit and serves as vice president of the OPOA police union, was paid $493,247 in overtime in 2024. Combined with his salary and other pay, this netted him a $711,000 paycheck, making him OPD’s highest-paid employee — a title he’s held for several years now. His pay was almost double that of the chief of police and nearly three times the mayor’s paycheck. His total compensation, including pension and healthcare benefits, was $879,000.
He is also the head of the labor union…
> He is also the head of the labor union…
Source?
I misread. Article (part I quoted) says he is vice president but it seems he isn’t any longer. Current leadership: https://www.opoa.org/about
Thieves, but does it matter. But what does it matter? Thievery runs to the highest post of the land.
It does matter and you're lying to yourself if you think it doesn't.
People pay taxes, so that is their money really. Of course it does matter. The system is broken when money is stolen from the public like in this case (most likely if found out to be true). That's a problem that is much bigger than merely one cop abusing the system. Several people must have benefitted here.
This is business as usual for public sector unions. Focusing on police unions is a good way to highlight these issues to leftists who reflexively both defend unions and criticize police
Actually, quite OK and absolutely in range, Id say?
Civil cervants need more & better options to get a higher payment within their org structure, I say.
490k on a salary of 200k is in range? I want to know what sector you work in, that sounds like a very lucrative role.
Here on HN everyone talks about 300-400k north?
So therefore, everybody should be fine with 490.000 USD for someone who is not developing "ad tech" and instead doing something "at least somehow useful"?
Also I do not understand the downvoters: Is that civil cervants like police should not be able to bill overtime?
All these things are the reasons why those jobs are mostly considered not attractive, therefore the gov should think about payment?
I don't make North of 150, don't look at me. And also it's 490 on top of his base salary, which is already higher than mine to start with.
But also he's transparently not actually working those overtime hours, so he is not "doing something useful". Like a lot of cops, he's just draining public money pretending to work. Unfortunately this is not uncommon. Anyone reporting 80 hours of overtime in a week should really be looked into - 23 hours in a day the same. Even if someone actually was awake and in theory working that long, they shouldn't be allowed to, and should be required to go home after some cap of hours to actually be able to usefully work. I would put it at 10 hours a day personally.
> […] even when department staffing increased, overtime continued to go up. From 2011 to 2024, staffing increased by nearly 9%. Over the same period, overtime went up by almost 200%.
The data in this article is good, but this piece is really weak. They should have just left this blurb out.
Care to elaborate?
It implies that these two should be directly related without acknowledging any other contributing factors.
It’s implying “overtime is a function of staffing, staffing went up so overtime should go down”.
What if the population went up? What if there’s more work for 1 person to do for whatever reason, like some new process? What if crime rates changed? What if traffic beats were more demanding due to new roads or whatever?
The rest of the data in the article is more damning and directly correlated to the point they’re trying to make.
This specific data point just raises more questions than answers and feels like they’re trying to dogpile instead of being journalists, and it would have made their case stronger if they left it out, imo.
The department is understaffed by hundreds of officers forcing them to work double shifts in a lot of cases at time-and-a-half pay. This is a very dangerous situation for the city to be in as that drives more officers to quit and with the financial impact already sustained will force future cuts creating a downward spiral that will be felt in the crime stats.
> This is a very dangerous situation for the city to be in as that drives more officers to quit
Police unions often resist head count increases if it eats into the overtime scam. And zero cops are "forced" into this, but it's one of the biggest piggy at the trough scams going.
Further, police are just shockingly, unbelievably unaccountable for often being profoundly terrible and completely incompetent at their jobs. Budgets and headcounts keep exploding -- it is usually far and away the #1 cost for local budgets -- while the often far-right police force intentionally doesn't do their job to make some sort of statement.
Adding funding and number of cops, it turns out, is almost meaningless, and instead crime just fluctuates on other society macro elements.
I am not a defund the police person, but policing is at the very top of institutions that needs an extremely close investigation and retooling, being torn down and rebuilt on new foundations if necessary. If police were held to the efficiency standards most of the rest of society is, we would have an infinitely more capable policing system at much lower cost. Instead we have lazy, inept cops who intentionally do a shit job because it earns them overtime, and also sticks it to that "lefty" mayor, etc.
And for the "put their lives on the line" people who invariably drop their rhetoric as a diversion -- https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j... -- dangerous, but if you aren't also hero worshipping delivery drivers, garbage collectors and roofers, maybe tone down the nonsense.
You're just describing most municipal employment actually. Grifting, padding work hours, ghost jobs, happens in fire departments, street departments, sanitation departments, etc. as well. It's been a piggy bank for political favoritism for centuries.
Yes they also do essential work.
This seems like the kind of thing that exposes the uncomfortable truth about our civil society.
In the natural pre-civilized state of things, people did bad things out of selfishness and greed just because they can. Like, one comes upon a weaker caveman and murders him to take his food or tools or whatever.
We tell ourselves our society is way beyond that. But at the end of the day it's actually still about force and violence. The only way to end corruption like this is for some very efficient and morally upright 'Boy Scout' to be put in charge of reforming these departments. They scrutinize everything and terminate everyone responsible. That sometimes happens, but also, doing that is very dangerous and makes a lot of enemies. To the point they get death threats or maybe even not just the threats. Because the ones doing the scams are willing to use force, and if we're being honest, strong bullies in numbers are still a force to be reckoned with.
Did you read the article? The head of the union billed 800 hours of overtime for reviewing traffic reports that could have been reviewed by lower level officers for a fraction of the cost. There was no tracking of how many reports he actually reviewed. Overtime has gone up even as staffing has. It's clear the system is being abused.
I'm betting it looked something like this, repeated every day for who knows how many years:
- [Fetch reports]
- "Select All"
- "Mark as Reviewed"
- Log 7 hours of OT
- Go home
>that could have been reviewed by lower level officers for a fraction of the cost.
Did you read it? They are understaffed by hundreds of officers. What lower level officers are going to do it when it's all hands on deck to keep the ship afloat?
According to the cops they are understaffed. I don't believe them at all, they are US cops making more money than top level surgeons and doing overtime "reviewing traffic reports." It is no secret that US cops are corrupt and criminal as fuck.
Probably one of the lower level officers who billed hundreds of hours less overtime than the union head.
"From 2011 to 2024, staffing increased by nearly 9%. Over the same period, overtime went up by almost 200%."
EDIT: Between 2010 and 2020 Oakland's population increased 12% and total homicides, not per capita, remained flat. The Covid years (2021-23) saw a big increase in homicides (and presumably other crime) which may account for some of the increase. However by 2024, homicides returned to pre-Covid levels.
Literally from the article if you had read it:
"“At this staffing level, more officers will be forced to work excessive overtime, which in turn will accelerate attrition,” Nguyen said in a statement. “We cannot meet the needs of our community without forcing officers into more shifts.”
It is true that OPD is severely understaffed by hundreds of officers. Mayor Barbara Lee is attempting to shrink the staffing gap, with plans to increase the number of officers. "
> Nguyen said in a statement
That's the head of the police union. Not an objective outsider.
> It is true that OPD is severely understaffed by hundreds of officers
And despite increasing staffing a little, overtime went up a lot. Two things can be simultaneously true: Oakland PD is understaffed and Oakland PD isn't managing overtime spending well.
If they only correct the understaffing problem without fixing overtime, they're going to exacerbate the budgetary issues. It's important for officers to be well-rested when doing their work.
How much did crime go up? How much did the population increase? What other factors were there? Those would be helpful data points too.
Summary: population up by the same amount as staffing, crime flat or lower (if you're measuring per-capita).
Population increased 12% between 2010 and 2020. Total homicides, not per 100k, were roughly the same - 95 vs 110. There was a marked increase in homicides during the Covid years but it dropped back down in 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland,_California#Demographi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland,_California#Crime
I'm not an expert in police staffing levels, just poking around and asking questions. This seems interesting from your second link:
Maybe that explains some of the overtime numbers?1 in 6 officers were on leave the entire year? What is that about?
Like I wrote in another comment, both can be simultaneously true. The department is both understaffed and possibly does not manage its overtime well.
> 1 in 6 officers were on leave the entire year? What is that about?
No clue my friend. Public sector unions do weird things.
> Like I wrote in another comment, both can be simultaneously true. The department is both understaffed and possibly does not manage its overtime well.
I didn't see that comment, but I don't disagree with you. I was just trying to understand a little more about the staffing levels.
Looks like population is up roughly 10% in that time period https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/oakland-ca-population-by-...
What about crime?