Sounds corrupt but they're the police so...I guess not?
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Law in the US ceased to exist on January 20, 2025. The rest of us are just going through the motions until the reality catches up. (So, while in the past, something might have happened, now, they will get medals.)
The problem is not getting paid overtime for time spent working wtf. The problem is being the fucking worst??
3000 hours OT would mean over 5000 hours worked or 14 hours every damn day of the year.
#doubt
Even if true, that’s terrible management from a budgetary view (they could hire a second person for less cost) and an operations view (stretching a “high stress” position very thin).
terrible management from a budgetary view? are you kidding? where are we supposed to spend all this money? feeding the poor? housing people? if we do that, where will the cops find the resources to arrest people for feeding the the poor and also shoot the homeless? they work so hard.
They are almost certainly not actually working that much though. Look up the recent Massachusetts state police overtime scandal.
Okay, fuck it, I'm getting out of this software engineering thing, I'm moving to the US to become a cop. I think I'm white enough for Trump, definitely whiter than he is.
I've eaten oranges whiter than he is
Here's a test for you:
There's a chunk of cash in an envelope. Do you take it?
A non white person could be close by at any moment, are you fearing for your life?
You're walking outside and you hear a dog bark in the distance. Are you shooting wildly in the basic direction of the sounds?
You've just killed an innocent person and been given a ~~paid holiday~~ whoops, I mean 'suspension', where would you like to go?
True heroes, these rich cops. Not like schoolteachers, who are suspicious villains and possibly freeloaders, am I right?
*sigh
Not incentivizing our teachers/academics/social workers but highly incentivizing cops is going to devastate our country's output soon.
We need to cap police OT. They are making off like bandits.
Best part is, they're either overreporting it, or they're legitimately dangerous to society from being so overworked in a job that already seems to put them on edge.
I have no quarrel with people being paid for their overtime (in fact, it would be shady for overtime to NOT be paid out), but I don't think 19 hours of overtime per week over the course of an entire year (or 20 if they take 2 weeks off a year) for police officers is OK. Tbh I don't think it's OK for anyone who doesn't earn dividends or bonuses based on company profits, but it's even less OK for police.
If I worked 5 hours overtime every week for a year, my entire combined income would be less than what these guys make in 2 months ):
Nah they definitely take it all. Usually just parked out side a gated community taking a nap or "working" the sideline at a sporting event or any number of other bullshit like "helping" at the dui checkpoint in the middle of the night chilling in the big air conditioned trailer maybe also napping. My buddy is a statie in another state overtime is plentiful but not actual hard police work like overtime at your job is just more of your job. For police it's just paid hang out
Think about a surgeon. We put peoples lives in their hands. We expect them to be preposterously educated, able to perform extreme tasks under significant duress, to maintain ongoing technical and specialized training, to prove that the training is effective, and they are compensated accordingly. If they fuck up, they can be held personally liable for their fuck ups. There are consequences to the career and its not a role to be taken on lightly.
Hear me out.
We raise the amount we pay cops to 1.5 million dollars a year... but.
No qualified immunity. It no longer exists (guess what? it already doesn't exist for military service members). Any crimes they commit, the consequences are 10x'd and they are no longer allowed to engage in public service, ever. They can be publicly executed for any crimes beyond misdemeanor. They have to pay for their own equipment. They have to carry liability insurance for any violations of civil rights which might occur in the line of performing their duties.
The minimum qualification is a PhD in constitutional law. They need to be able to run a 6 minute mile, do 100 push ups in 2 minutes, 200 sit ups in 2 minutes, and 80 burpees in 2 minutes. They need to be able to carry 120 lbs for 10 minutes up an incline. They need to be able to recite the US Constitution, the state constitution, and the local city and county charters where they are stationed. They are expected to have advanced knowledge of any and all laws they are expected to be enforcing. They have to undergo annual psychological, physical, technical, and legal reassessments to prove their suitability for the job; these reassessments are maintained as a part of public record.
We 10x the pay and we hire 1/10th the number of cops. It becomes a career path somewhere between than a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut. Its not something a HS drop out should be able to consider as a career path.
Look, obviously, hyperbole. Or is it?
What about this, instead we just take that 1.5 mill a year and put it towards things that actual solve problems, rather than making sure we have the best and brights super soldiers doing traffic stops and taking notes on your break in.
Since we're engaging in fantasy, sure.
But I think you'll find no matter what you do, some version of a person whose role in society is to enforce the laws, a kind of "law enforcement", emerges.
The properties of that role can vary widely from society to society, but pretty much every society independently comes to the same conclusion, that the role is necessary, once the society determines a common and well structured code of conduct is necessary.
100% abolish the police. They are a corrupt institution which finds their roots in re-enforcing a slave culture. 100% let every prisoner free. The roots of the prison system in the US are the same as the police state.
But countries with no history of slavery have police forces and prison systems. They are an emergent property of large social systems. Society will re-invent the role. We might as well fill the niche in a manner we want, instead of a manner we dont want.
But countries with no history of slavery have police forces and prison systems. They are an emergent property of large social systems. Society will re-invent the role. We might as well fill the niche in a manner we want, instead of a manner we dont want.
I mean yeah, if you don't have means of enforcing law, the law becomes pointless, might as well abolish all laws.
And I mean that MIGHT be possible, but do we really want to test what it'd be like in a lawless society where it's probably going to be money and violence that decides who's right, kinda like now, but with no possibility of suing the people with money or violence, you could only respond with your own violence.
The idea that things devolve into a lawless society because a lack of police is absurdist reductionism.
Firstly, we already live in a lawless society; see any of the actions Trump has taken since January. Its just a matter of "for whom does the law apply?"
Second, and I posted this to your other response, the idea that we can't "abolish a police department and rebuild it into something that serves its intended purpose" is also absurdist, in at least that we have the counter-factual of it actually happening: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/12/camden-policing-reforms-313750
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We are so bad about this across the board. Why is society so content to expect the worst from people like police and politicians?
Honestly, probably because we've been conditioned to get angry at the employees of the super rich rather than the hoarders themselves.
This is the way. I can’t tell you how much it hurts me when I see an obese cop.
Practicality-wise though, if the police have recruitment issues now though, finding recruits with a PhD will be impossible. People really overestimate how many PhD’s are out here in the wild.
police preferentially dont hire people with that much education on purpose.
1.5 million dollars a year.
Maybe I'm too easy to please but I'd be happier if they took the money that currently goes towards tanks and "how to shoot first" seminars and put it towards ongoing education for officers on law, de-escalation tactics, and critical thinking in stressful situations.
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It's impossible to work 3000 hours of overtime in a year. This is fraud. If that person is actually working those hours, then it's incompetence by the Sergeant above them allowing them to work that many overtime hours for no reason.
14.47 hour days to the maximum legal amount of days before days off. And working on holidays is time and a half or double time by default as well. Could be done. Not good, but not fraud.
The trick I read before is to arrest someone at the end of your shift, then you have to process them at overtime and possibly wait for a judge or something. They know the tricks to draw it out.
Of course why didn't I think of arresting someone just to get overtime? Probably because I'm not a fucking psychopath
The system is absolutely fucked. My mother, years ago, had just recently given birth to my youngest sister. She was pulled over with a suspended license. She didn't know she had unpaid parking tickets. The cop was gonna let her go until backup stopped by (why this cop needed backup for a car that had two small women and baby is suspect). One of the backup cops was vehement on arresting my mom, her newborn be damned. The first cop explained that they get a $250.00 bonus for any arrests made. He tried and tried to convince the second cop not to arrest but said cop did not care in the slightest about separating a newborn from our mom. My mother spent the night in jail because that second cop only saw dollar signs looking at her.
It's absolutely disgusting that they have financial incentive to put people through hell.
Depending on internals it doesn't even necessarily need to be an arrest, just something that requires a report. My local PD apparently needs an incident report done within 12 hours of said incident taking place, this could be as simple as checking on a weird noise and finding a cat.
Sorry to inform you but your application to the police academy has been denied
The money is in police detail work And a lot of them are able to do it during their normal shifts. The person probably did legitimately log that many hours or near that many hours, the problem is that they were able to do it in the first place.
3151 hrs of overtime.
78.775 full-time 40 hour weeks there.
So assuming 2 weeks of vacation, he somehow managed to work 128.775 weeks in a year?
128.775/50 - let's see how many work weeks he had to work each week to get there - 2.5755
So each week he had to be working about 2.6 normal weeks, or about 103 hours a week.
Assuming he worked 7 days each week, he was doing 14.7 hour shifts every day of those 50 weeks of working 7 days with no breaks.
Hmm.
theres that doubletime, trippletime, quadrupletime and time and a half multipliers to factor in too. I think you for overtime past a 40 hour wk, past 8 hours day, on a holiday, with hazard pay you can pump it way way up. We should give the same to teachers.
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Cops at my hospital are all in overtime. They bring in inmates for psych holds/psych eval and then supervise them hands-off for the entire hospital stay. Easy money. Then the really entitled ones try to act pushy and basically want us to give the patient shots for unjustified reasons. Just so they can sit and watch movies without being bothered.
They must already get a hazard pay designation by being there, or else they'd be looking for ways to create hazards. So it could be worse.
For some reason my lemmy app glitched as I was scrolling and I was seeing this title above This post
He surely did work 11,5hours everyday additionaly to his regular shift 🥴
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