They’re people like everyone else,” said former Boston police Lt. “Officers get injured because they’re overtired, they’re fatigued. It also presents danger to the officers themselves. Similarly, an audit of the King County Sheriff’s Office in Washington in 2017 found that working one additional hour increased the chances that an officer was involved in a use of force incident or an ethics violation. There were significantly more complaints against those working the three extra hours. A study of the Phoenix police department in 2015 compared officers working 10 hour shifts to those working 13 hour shifts. Overtime can also be an issue because of the fear of overworked police.
“A lot of towns and cities are really good about it, but it was obviously widespread in the Massachusetts State Police,” said McDevitt. There was the recent Troop E overtime scandal, in which 22 officers in the Massachusetts State Police department submitted false payroll records allowing them to collect pay for overtime hours they didn’t work. Overtime, too, has been a cause for concern. “There are obviously things that are paid by a city, like police detail at protests or the Boston Marathon.” Though oftentimes detail work is paid by private contractors, it can work its way back to the taxpayer, says McDevitt. Even in 2010, some officers threatened to arrest a construction worker directing traffic around a site. The law change over a decade ago prompted anger from the police. There may be something to that, but you have to decide if it’s worth that investment of money,” said McDevitt. “They’d rather they do it than a civilian, they think it’s safer. “In some states, civilians do it, but in Massachusetts, there’s been efforts against that.” This summer, he was appointed by university president Joseph Aoun to chair a board focused on improving the Northeastern University Police Department. Jack McDevitt, a professor in criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University. “Detail work is usually being outside with a construction crew directing the flow of traffic, and that’s one of the big ways of making detail and overtime,” said Dr. Lawrence’s payroll had an “other” category, showing that about $50,000 of each officer’s pay came from “other” work.
On average, officers in that city were making $9,000 of overtime and almost $40,000 in detail last year. Though not all of the payrolls broke it down, the data from Malden showed that police officers were largely making up the difference through overtime and detail work.
Malden was similar, with an average base pay of $80,000, but an average gross of nearly $130,000. The average gross pay, or actual wages received, ended up being more than double that. In Quincy specifically, the average base pay, or the standard rate of pay, for police officers was about $73,000 a year. Though the average annual wage for police officers in Massachusetts in 2019 was $72,000 a year, those making the most in these towns often earned upwards of $150,000 in 2020. Mayor Thomas Koch made $160,000.Īn analysis of eight payrolls for 2020, received through FOIA requests to cities and towns in the Greater Boston area including Quincy, Malden, Gloucester, Lawrance, Randolph and Bridgewater, showed that top earners were almost all members of law enforcement. The other top nine earners on Quincy’s payroll were members of the police force and all made more than $225,000.
Richard McCusker of the Quincy Police Department made $263,000.
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