Baltimore to reimburse $ 3.45 million in unpaid occupational therapy to current former police employees

By Jessica Anderson
Baltimore Sun

BALTIMORE – Baltimore has agreed to pay nearly 2,500 current and former Baltimore Police employees $ 3.45 million in unpaid overtime, ending a lawsuit filed in 2016.

The city’s board of directors voted unanimously to approve the bylaw at its weekly meeting on Wednesday morning.

The settlement is the latest dispute over police overtime in the city, which struggles with persistent crime but a shortage of officers. For years, the department steadily spent significantly more overtime than expected, with some agents more than doubling their paychecks, raising concerns about the well-being of agents and the risk of abuse.

Police Commissioner Michael Harrison has worked to curb rising overtime costs, cutting spending from $ 50 million to $ 12 million, by instituting new policies that require officers to seek approval for supervisors, among other measures. The department also recently said it had ended a long-standing practice of allowing vacationing officers to work overtime shifts at overtime rates of time and a half or more.

The 2016 federal class action lawsuit filed on behalf of 2,425 police department employees claimed the city violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by failing to pay employees the appropriate overtime rate for hours worked. These rates had been negotiated in a memorandum of understanding between the police union and the city.

The plaintiffs argued that employees were supposed to be paid 1.5 times their hourly wages for overtime, but the lawsuit included payslips for officers which showed employees were paid 3 percent less than time. and half.

According to a Board of Estimates summary of the dispute, the police department calculated officers’ normal hourly rates, not counting 11 minutes for those working on patrol, or 15 minutes for those not on patrolling, at the end. unpaid shift. Unpaid minutes have been included in the overtime calculation, lowering agents’ overtime pay rate, according to the summary.

“The claimants claimed that the regular rate should have been calculated on the basis of the hours actually worked and that by including the time normally not worked in the calculation of overtime, the BPD artificially reduced the overtime rate,” said he declared.

The city’s latest memorandum of understanding with officers corrected the overtime calculation, deputy city attorney Darnell Ingram told the panel at Wednesday’s meeting.

“This disputed provision has been corrected,” Ingram said in response to questions from City Council Chairman Nick J. Mosby. “This specific problem should no longer occur.”

Mosby also raised concerns about how the regulation would affect officers who have been convicted or released from the ministry on the basis of misconduct issues, and asked Ingram to provide the board with how many officers regulation could affect.

The plaintiffs asked for $ 14.8 million in damages plus interest, but in a settlement conference with the judge, the two sides reached a settlement of $ 3.45 million, according to the summary of the panel.

The president of the police union did not respond to a request for comment.

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