NYPD officers working extra hours are more likely to suffer on-the-job injuries or be accused of misconduct, says a city government report issued amid debate between the City Council and Mayor Adams over the department’s ballooning overtime costs.
“Policing is a high-risk profession and our preliminary analysis makes clear that overtime hours are associated with an increased risk of certain negative policing outcomes,” city Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber said in a statement released with the report on Wednesday.
Long overtime shifts — stretching from eight to 24 hours — “were associated with a substantially increased risk of lawsuits, substantiated CCRB [Civilian Complaint Review Board] complaints, workplace injuries, vehicle collisions, and threat, resistance, or injury reports,” the study said.
“Law enforcement officers are particularly prone to workplace fatigue,” the study notes.
The report, which Strauber and her staff co-authored with acting NYPD Inspector General Jeanene Barrett and her staff, said the NYPD should “develop and incorporate policies related to fatigue in its written overtime procedures.”
“NYPD’s overtime hours can create risks to NYPD’s officers, the communities in which they work, and the City of New York, and that NYPD does not currently have policies in place to mitigate the risk caused by overtime hours,” Barrett said in her own statement.
Asked for comment on the report, Adams — who recently defended police overtime spending and blasted City Council Democrats pushing for a crackdown on it — told the Daily News that “responsible use of overtime for NYPD is necessary given the public safety challenges we face today.”
“We have been and remain focused on ensuring overtime doesn’t affect officer performance — balancing our city’s public safety needs with officer health,” the mayor said.
“As a former officer, I personally know the toll and stress longer shifts can have on those sworn to protect and serve. That’s why I commend DOI for reviewing any area not typically reviewed in the past, and why we look forward to working with the NYPD to continue to keep New York City the safest big city in America.”
The report comes as City Council Democrats have pushed to rein in the police department’s overtime spending, which in the last fiscal year amounted to $670 million — twice the $354 million budgeted. The extra 2022 spending came in spite of the fact that Adams promised on the 2021 campaign trail that he would cut NYPD’s overtime budget in half during his first year in office.
Adams last week blasted some of the Council Dems who have pushed for curbing cop overtime. “Is it anti-overtime? Or is it anti-police? And if it’s anti-police, shame on us,” Adams, a retired NYPD captain, said at City Hall on April 26.
The Police Department was in the 2022 fiscal year by far the largest overtime spender of all city agencies, and it is on track to blow through its overtime budget this fiscal year, too, public records show. The second largest OT spender in fiscal 2022 was the FDNY, which dished out $392 million.
The Strauber-Barrett report was based on a study of a random sample of 993 NYPD officers. It found that the odds officers will become involved in a CCRB complaint, an accident, or other “negative policing outcomes” spike when they work at least four hours and 12 minutes of overtime, which is an average OT shift.
The odds that an officer becomes the subject of a substantiated CCRB compliant the day after working an average OT shift increases by 36.8%, while the odds that he or she is named in a lawsuit for a misconduct incident goes up by 36.5%, according to the report.
The odds also tick up by 20.5% for the risk that an officer after working the average OT shift is involved in an incident that prompts a Threat, Resistance, or Injury report. “And the odds that they will suffer a workplace injury the next day increase by 18.8%,” the report states.
The reason risks go up like that is because OT shifts increase “fatigue,” which “can lead to decreased alertness, impaired performance, impaired decision making, and mood changes,” the report continues.
The report compared the fatigue officers experience in extended overtime shifts “to moderate alcohol intoxication.”
Based on the report’s findings, Strauber and Barrett recommended that the NYPD hire outside experts to conduct a “comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits of NYPD’s use of overtime hours and to make risk for mitigation.”
In addition, the two watchdogs urged the NYPD to develop a system for more closely tracking off-duty employment hours worked by officers, as well as promulgating department policies on how to detect and prevent fatigue in the ranks.
An NYPD spokesman would not say if the department plans to adopt the recommendations, but noted that it recently launched a new overtime portal “giving officers a hands-on digital tool for building an overtime schedule that best serves their needs and ensures they can plan for sufficient time off between tours.”
“Overtime is a critical tool, and one that the NYPD manages daily to efficiently and effectively enhance deployments on the streets and subways, to investigate crimes, to address gun violence, and to otherwise pursue our public safety mission,” the spokesman said.
In knocking unnamed Council members last month for raising concern about NYPD overtime, Adams said he doesn’t understand why “no one gets riled up” about OT spending at other agencies.
“Nobody gets riled up in overtime anywhere else but the New York City Police Department,” said Adams. “That’s all we focus on — NYPD.”
Manhattan Councilwoman Gale Brewer, a Democrat who chairs the Council’s Oversight and Investigations Committee, said the reason there’s more scrutiny on the NYPD is that other agencies’ OT budgets pale in comparison to the police department’s.
Brewer also said the new report shows it’s in the city’s public safety interest to make sure the NYPD doesn’t exceed its overtime budget.
“It’s the opposite of what the mayor has been saying. He says overtime is public safety, but it seems overtime is just the opposite,” Brewer said.
