Scores of Austin police officers earned six figures in overtime last year. Is that sustainable?
Austin police officers get orders at Zilker Park during the Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2019. Officers can get time-and-a-half for working security at these events, directing traffic and being on site if there's a need for police.
The Austin Police Department paid out nearly $50 million in overtime in the last fiscal year, a KUT analysis of city data has found.A record number of officers left the police force last year, forcing other officers to fill in the gaps and work overtime. At last check, the department had 358 officer vacancies. But it’s not just patrol officers. There are also roughly 200 vacancies in non-patrol positions at the department. APD struggled to staff its 911 call center last year, for example, leading toIt’s hard to tell how much overtime officers are individually working. The system is kind of a black box, because state law protects certain employment records from being released. KUT tried to get a breakdown from the city on how many hours each of the highest earning officers worked, but the city’s public information office said that wasn't possible under current law.Right, but how much money are they making? While the city won't provide data on the total number of OT hours worked, officers' 2023 salaries — and what they made in overtime — are publicly available.Nine of the top 15 highest-paid city employees were veteran officers. They’re all paid more than the top brass on the fifth floor at APD headquarters. Of APD's top-earning employees, three are patrol officers and the other seven are detectives. On average, they earned more than $180,000 last fiscal year in overtime. That's on top of their salaries, which averaged out to $107,000. APD's top earner, who’s a patrol officer, earned almost $335,000 — three times her salary. For context, she was the third-highest paid city employee last year behind former City Manager Spencer Cronk and the former head of Austin Energy, Jackie Sargent.. The most reported crime in Austin is typically thefts — particularly stuff getting stolen from cars — but those have been down over the last few years, same with most major crimes APD tracks. Austin had a pandemic-era spike in crime — as did other major cities across the U.S. — but that’s gone down since 2021.Michael Bullock, the Austin Police Association president, told KUT, quite simply, it can't — at least not in the long term.Bullock said the staffing shortage is so dire that the department offers overtime just to cover day-to-day patrols — and those officers are earning twice their wages. That's why we’re seeing these high payouts. On top of that, Austin has a lot of events like ACL Fest and SXSW that are staffed by cops who get time-and-a-half for working security, directing traffic and being on site if there's a need for police. At its last update with the city’s Public Safety Commission, APD said it had spent nearly 40% of its overtime budget in just the first three months of the fiscal year — October, November and December. While the numbers may be alarming, Bullock said those payments likely won't go anywhere until APD and the city address the department's staffing issues. "If you start paring back our overtime budget, well, then we're just going to go back to having night shifts and evening shifts and day shifts that are showing up at half-staffed or less, which means in an entire sector that may have 200,000 plus people in it, you have five officers," he said."That's not healthy for the city. That's not an appropriate response level.”But the city has struggled to staff up over the last four years or so, when we’ve seen record rates of attrition. Measures toAPD Chief of Staff Jeff Greenwalt told the Public Safety Commission last month that the department could see a net gain of officers this year. That's after a record-breaking 160 departures in 2023, Greenwalt said. "We're hoping to ... get to a point where we're actually not losing more people than we're gaining," he said."We might be in a situation to actually gain more or at least break even, which would be a win for us right now." Looming over this is the fact that Austin doesn’t have a long-term labor contract with its police union. The union backed out of talks with the city last year in part because of the citywide vote to increase transparency in police complaint-reporting. That’s going to be a huge topic of discussion this year at City Hall. Bullock told KUT the union and city staff are working to reach a deal and get more officers hired, so the city isn’t just throwing money at overtime to staff basic patrols.Andrew Weber is a general assignment reporter for KUT, focusing on criminal justice, policing, courts and homelessness in Austin and Travis County. Got a tip? You can email him at aweber@kut.org. Follow him on Twitter @England_Weber.The police department's hate crime review committee said the case meets the definition of a hate crime. The Travis County District Attorney's Office will review the evidence and decide how to move forward.The Austin Police Department has about $30,000 to assist victims of all sorts of crimes, from drunk driving to domestic violence. The City Council voted to increase the fund earlier this year.Changes have been made in the years since a 2018 lawsuit, but survivors said there is more to be done. The changes will not impact most of the plaintiffs, but many said their fight was about how the system serves people moving forward.Voters approved a proposition in May to expand police oversight, but the measure hasn't been fully implemented. Contract negotiations with the police union and a lawsuit filed this month have made things tricky.The lawsuit argues that the city is violating its own ordinance by not allowing the Office of Police Oversight to access internal disciplinary files of officers.A resolution approved by council Thursday requires the city to enforce some aspects of Proposition A, including providing investigators with the Office of Police Oversight unrestricted access to police records to review complaints.
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