Atrios notes today that New York City spent $155 million on police overtime this year in the subway and got little in return except lots of arrests and citations of fare dodgers. But it's actually even worse than that. Transit crime so far this year is down 2.3%. Overall serious crime excluding auto theft, which isn't part of transit statistics for obvious reasons, was down 2.7%.
In other words, $155 million—up from $4 million last year—produced more serious crime than the city average. Nice work.
POSTSCRIPT: What's the deal with the obsessive use of overtime in police departments, anyway? I know the cops like it, but why are cities seemingly more willing to pay overtime than to just hire more cops?
Costs of benefits for a new employee
Labor flexibility, I.e. you can flex overtime but can’t really have a reduction in force in the PD.
The UAW strike was mostly a refusal to accept overtime and that was crippling to the automakers.
As a rule, you generally try to use overtime before hiring new people.
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Indeed: Fixed versus variable cost.
Without knowing the labour specifics, the Why is not hard to guess at relative to unionised labour forces and particularly where there is a trade union that is politically powerful (as police is understood to be).
Reducing staffing under union contracting becomes defacto impossible, whereas overtime is something more variable and also more easily put forward for cost retraint politically than cutting absolute numbers of staff.
Drum's naivete in these areas is really quite baffling.
Perhaps inflating incomes with lots of overtime is the only way to recruit and retain police officers.
In my last small city, hiring more cops was actually kinda hard. The rate of turnover was high and they had job openings posted 365 days a year.
It's really really hard to fire cops. Cutting overtime hours is a lot easier.
Kevin, the right term isn't "waste" or "corruption"; it's "officer-involved inefficiency". Please be more sensitive next time, thank you in advance.
Overtime doesn't add (as much) to the city's pension obligations.
In many jurisdictions, salary + overtime is used to compute retirement pay... but often only for police (and maybe firefighters). So if a high school teacher makes $70k for her three highest paid years, then she'll get a pension of $70k x 0.2 x number of years worked (or something like that). 30 years would result in a pension of $42k. And even if our theoretical teacher made an extra $10k teaching summer school or $5k as a sports coach, that wouldn't count toward her pension.
A police officer who made $75k for his three highest years would be able to include overtime, so if he was willing to load up on overtime for three years, he could easily make $100k or more. That would raise his pension from $45k (only a little more than the teacher's pay) to $60k or more. Police officers may also be younger when they join the force than teachers are when they start teaching, so the police officer might also be collecting that pension longer.
You could certainly rewrite contracts so that overtime doesn't add to the city's pension obligation, but right now it does count, and it inflates those obligations... sometime quite a bit.
This is exactly right.
I'd have thought the chart in the Gothamist article would have been right up Kevin's alley.
The $150 million added ca. 1000 more officers on top of the normal contingent of 2500 officers, so big addition to budget (funded in part from the state).
Though robbery was down, assaults were up. Most of effort was spent looking for fare jumpers.
I was wondering if the State, of which we New Yorkers are by far the biggest taxpayers, put any money in since the Subway is part of a state agency.
What a waste of dollars which could have been better spent elsewhere. But not hard to believe in the crazy world of Mayor Adams, the man who made Bill DeBlasio seem normal.
Easy peasy! Excessive use of overtime can really juice your pension payout...
All the snarks above ignore the real answer, which is actually very simple. Sabremetrics figured it out years ago.
In major league baseball it’s called WAR—Wins Above Replacement. You measure the value of your left fielder, not by comparing him to the average major league left fielder, but rather by comparing him to the likely best left field replacement you could bring up from the minors.
Those run-of-the-mill journeymen cops are likely worth quite a bit more than the unnamed, and as yet unidentified, hypothetical additions you might try to find, and train, and integrate into your organization.
Because no politician ever said no to the police, especially in NYC where they have a belligerent union that places itself above the mayor and the city council.
My naive thought is that it is hard to hire police. If I recall correctly, I recently read that San Francisco is paying a lot of police overtime and they have quite a few unfilled positions for police.
I know the cops like it, but why are cities seemingly more willing to pay overtime than to just hire more cops?
The proper comparison isn't overtime vs. hiring more cops, but overtime vs. increase in base pay. Overtime probably makes a lot of sense in many cases: it may well be cheaper, and at least it is contingent (unlike a general salary increase) upon increased output.
Does anyone believe that Derek Chauvin deliberately murdered George Floyd? He may have deliberately been unnecessarily rough but he had no intention of killing him.
He now has a prison sentence that is longer than that of many premeditated murderers.
Would you take a job as a police officer today with that sort of risk hanging over your head if you fuck up? I wouldn't even at a considerable salary premium.
I assume hiring new police officers today is extremely difficult and overtime is essential to retain the ones who are already working.
None of the charges against Chauvin required that he intentionally murdered Floyd. As I understand it, the second degree murder charged required that he intentionally assaulted Floyd and that Floyd died as a result of the assault. You seem to agree that Chauvin DID intentionally assault Floyd.
The third degree murder charge required that Floyd died from actions Chauvin took with reckless disregard to Floyd’s life.
The second degree manslaughter charge required that Floyd died because of Chauvin’s culpable negligence.
He was convicted of all three crimes, none of require he intended to murder Floyd. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/derek-chauvin-trial-george-floyd-death-jurors-charges/
If Chauvin’s conviction results in fewer people like Chauvin deciding to be cops, I say all the better. If cops are afraid of being punished when someone dies after cops are “unnecessarily rough” with them, good.
Not withstanding your point that being a major city police officer is not an easy job, I believe Chauvin did mean to kill Floyd. So, maybe the punishment Chauvin got was merited. There are 700,000 police in the country….i don’t think 1 of them being charged with murder is going to dissuade too many people from choosing to be an officer.
Deliberately 'accidentally' murdered him, yes.
This was likely a show of force, to increase rider confidence after a significant increase in subway violent crime, which started late in 2020 through 2021. Seeing a cop on your train or on the platform made you feel safer, and was aimed at increasing ridership post pandemic.
The question KD should be asking is did this tactic increase subway ridership and did the riding public feel safer.
“Seeing a cop on your train or on the platform made you feel safer.” That assumes “you” are not a member of a group the NYPD has perennially subjected to random illegal searches and gratuitous violence.
Mayor Cop just taking care of his buddies.....