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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

>This is generally about 1.5 times their normal pay.

>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.

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> 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.

>Whoever it is, that's always the case in government.

"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.

There's a counteracting force in non-government organizations though: competition and bankruptcy. Also, waste in non-government organizations hardly matters because they only get your money if you choose to give it to them.

Excluding of course corporate bailouts.

ok but the vast majority of businesses aren't lucky enough to expect those.

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.

> but embezzlement and fraud at large scale can easily cause the company to die (problem solved)

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.

You're not wrong there. The bad actors still suck and ruin good companies and people's lives. I guess what I should have said it's the downside is limited in private business, compared to a public agency where they not only can raise taxes to make up for the losses, in many cases they're basically compelled to. Like, you can't just close the police or fire department if they lost so much money that we can't afford to run them in the current budget, so they'll borrow - regardless of the interest cost - and saddle the grandchildren of the current taxpayers with the bill.

Your take is naïve and over simplified at best. While there's argument to be made that shareholders of publicly traded cooperation perform the same "responsibility black hole" function as politicians and voters do for government but more importantly the exact failure modes tend to be different. Shitty governments just kinda limp along creating misery forever. There's very little pressure upon them to not suck compared to the alternatives. Companies tend to either go tits up or get acquired if they get real bad and they don't have captive markets to the same extent that governments do. Though of course companies are always trying to get the sorts of captive markets that governments have.

Musk is the richest man head of multiple large orgs.

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

> Shitty ________ just kinda limp along creating misery forever. There's very little pressure upon them to not suck compared to the alternatives.

US utility companies are like this. Railroad. Very large ISPs. Any org with some level of regulatory capture.

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.

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?

This framing is so incredibly speculative and imaginary that it's barely above the level of conversation one would hear at 11:00pm between drunkards at the tavern.

> 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?

The only distinction in this discussion that matters: public funds are "teh people's money". If an "old boys club" giant Fat Cats Inc. wants to spend their shareholder's money on hookers and blow, that's the shareholders problem. It was the shareholder's _choice_ to invest with company, _they took the risk_.

Municipal, state, and federal taxes are mandatory: you do not have a choice.

It's my view that, just like if we lived in a hunter-gatherer society, ideally everyone would strive to authentically contribute their fair share.

Money flows in very complicated ways and "shareholder's choice" is a technicality, especially in a world filled with monopolies, oligopolies, natural resource speculation and extraction, broad-based index funds, government subsidies, regulatory capture, and all manners of rent-seeking.

Economic deadweight is economic deadweight, no matter the source of funding: whether its a 30 year old widower of three at the grocery store cash register paying their dues to the oil barons who happen to own the land above which the oil is pulled, or the 50 year old executive who pays a 16% effective tax rate to ensure that the speech pathologist has their own office at the local school to help a child learn to cope with their stutter.

It's possible to rationalize anything.

Unless you’ve worked in government, honestly, just stop.

I spent years in a metro water system and this class of corruption is rampant. You get 90k maximum salary, but your last 5 years dictate your retirement… so guess what you find yourself with maximum overtime.

We tried to fire an employee for cause… who hired counsel, so we caved immediately because of optics. So we gave them a do nothing barely-show-up job for the last 7 years.

I personally went on a death march for 12+ hour days for 6 months, 7 days a week, off the clock and without compensation, only to be screwed out of my “accrued” PTO. The VP, two years from retirement, suffered not a bit of repercussion for this violation.

The public sector is rife with corruption, no question, but if you worship it as your God, you’ll have to look past this sacrilege to find the truth.

I make these arguments because privatization is not a panacea, as the subtext of many of these types of would imply, but not because I "worship the public sector as a God".

For some reason, many critics of the public sector are willing to look past the many inefficiencies of our private sectors, especially the anticompetive and rent seeking practices.

The public sector needs solutions to its unique problems, it does not need to be eliminated entirely with privatization.

I'm not a privatization crusader either. But I do detest the hideous amount of waste in our municipal, state, and federal governments, and argue that it's a very hard problem to solve, and that we should never feed that beast by entrusting more things to them than they already control and mismanage.

Most companies where corruption significantly defrauds the owner (shareholders, for public companies), there's a strong chance it'll get shut down. That incentive simply doesn't happen when it's just taxpayers being fleeced. Otherwise, how else do you explain Sacramento?

Your anecdotal story is perfectly representative of all govt entities, surely.

> Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare

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.

> 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.

That is every large company I've ever worked at. It's not a government specific issue, it's an issue of large organizations.

>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

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.

This is assuming the work hours are real which they are surely not. More likely this is fraud.

I can assure you, I was in the office every one of the hours I claimed. How you can suggest they are fraud is wildly libelous on your part.

They're definitely talking about the police officer from this story, not you!

Police overtime is quite complicated. Assuming 23 hours of work represent actually 23 hours of work will lead to confusion. Alot of these overtime jobs are where the government mandates that a police officer simply be on site. Regardless if they are sleeping or actually doing any police work.

> It just looks like the attorney general in this area has been asleep at the wheel.

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".

It looked like the mayor was getting railroaded at the time.

Look up her current scandal and FBI case involving the local garbage company.

Not just ousted, former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao goes to trial for federal criminal corruption and bribery charges in October.

no kidding.

>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.

California base overtime schedule is 1x for 8 hours in a day, 1.5x for the next 4 hours in a day, then 2x for any time after that. Additionally, any time above 40 hrs in a workweek or on a 7th day of consecutive work in a workweek gets 1.5x, and any time after 8 on that 7th day gets 2x.

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")

He'll be investigated by other thin blue line cops who also nap in their squad cars and be found innocent of any wrong doing.

It sounds way worse than just napping.

Union rules cause double time (2x pay) to kick in at lower daily and weekly thesholds than at non union jobs.

You really think he was working 23 hours one day and then 15-16 for the rest of the week? That sounds like timecard padding to me. No way he's not spending a significant portion of the job asleep, unless he's severely abusing stimulants.

Yeah this is “butt on chair” definition of working at best. I’ve worked 80 hour weeks, doing 15-16 hour days consecutively will obliterate you, and also hopefully you live upstairs because commute times start eating into your sleep time quickly

This. And his position of seniority in the union likely gets him close to first pick of the shifts and jobs that lend themselves best to this.

Somebody's gotta man the night shift at the empty lockup!

I agree that in this case its VERY likely to be fraud.

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.

Doing the job asleep is actually possible in some cities. There's a book called "Rough Justice: Days and Nights of a Young D.A." by David Heilbroner about his 3 years starting in 1985 as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney's office fresh out of law school.

The new ADAs were started working on the vast number of minor crimes that occur daily in NY that result in an arrest but that will almost certainly end up resolved with just a fine after a short (a few minutes often) bench trial.

The courts that handle these run 24 hours a day. The ADAs operate in shifts. He describes how when arriving for his shift he'd have to step over a large number of sleeping police officers in the hall.

The officers are there either to give a statement to the ADA or to give a statement in court when the case of the person they arrested comes up.

It can take many hours between arrest and an ADA starting to work on the case or it getting called in court so as soon as the officer finishes their regular work shift they come and wait at the ADAs office. That waiting time is on the clock and all overtime.

He would often arrive for a morning shift and there would be officers who had been waiting since the end of the day shift the day before, or longer, if I remember correctly.

Two or three of those in a week and an office could get a lot of overtime, most of it spent sleeping.

The issue seems to be what's defined as "work", given the amount of time he claimed to work, and not necessarily how much he is paid per hour.

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.

Flock will eventually be there to take that job too.

The police officers will still get paid though, even if the machines are doing the work.

If you work 40 hours in two days, everything except 16 hours that week is overtime.

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