>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.
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.
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.
That is every large company I've ever worked at. It's not a government specific issue, it's an issue of large organizations.
"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 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?
> 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?
Municipal, state, and federal taxes are mandatory: you do not have a choice.
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.
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.
Do you reason actually or are you just LLMing it.
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
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.
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")
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.
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.
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".
>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.
Look up her current scandal and FBI case involving the local garbage company.
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.
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.
If there are abuses of the system, they should be prosecuted, absolutely. I’m not sure that’s the entire story here though
And it’s funny how fans of one hate the other and vice versa.
Given the context (government), the taxpayers are probably footing the bill for expensive therapy sessions that go unattended.
sounds like $50 of work for Gemini could replace $490,000 of that officer's overtime.
that alone should decimate the grift.
The data in this article is good, but this piece is really weak. They should have just left this blurb out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
He is also the head of the labor union…
Source?
Civil cervants need more & better options to get a higher payment within their org structure, I say.
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?
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.
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.
Yes they also do essential work.
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.
- [Fetch reports]
- "Select All"
- "Mark as Reviewed"
- Log 7 hours of OT
- Go home
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?
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.
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...
> 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.
Like I wrote in another comment, both can be simultaneously true. The department is both understaffed and possibly does not manage its overtime well.
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.