Police Cost Recovery Plan: Assistance Requested

A few weeks ago, when the Heinz Field handcuffing of Interim Mayor Luke Ravenstahl was still fresh, new, and interesting -- and admittedly, it's beginning to lose all three of these qualities -- a few readers left some very interesting comments both here and on other local political blogs. To those of you who left those comments, I want you to know that I really haven't been ignoring you. But the issue that those readers brought up is rather complicated and buried deep within the inner workings of city government. I didn't -- and still don't -- feel that I really know enough about it to write about it with my usual degree of depth and understanding. I am hoping that some of you out there might be able to point me to some further resources that will make the story a bit more transparent for me.

The topic at hand concerns how city police officers are hired and paid by private employers to provide security, almost always in uniform, during the hours when they are not on duty for the City of Pittsburgh. Such arrangements are quite common in our city, as they are in many other jurisdictions. For police officers, these extra-duty jobs provide a way for them to earn an often significant amount of money on top of their police salaries. So it's a good deal for them. But these kinds of arrangements can also be a good deal for the rest of us, since they increase the amount of visible police pressence on the streets, particularly in very locations -- bars, clubs, sporting events, concerts, retail stores, etc. -- where trouble tends to concentrate.

The problem here is not that city police officers are permitted to be employed in this manner. Instead, the concerns center around questions of legal liability, other costs, and who should bear the burden of paying for these things. Whenever a police officer works in uniform, no matter who is employing them at the time, they can do things which inflict financial costs upon city taxpayers. Sometimes these costs are fairly minor, such as a replacing an empty canister of pepper spray. Other times, the costs can become astronomical, such as when the city is named as a defendant in a lawsuit stemming from an extra-duty officer's use of physical or deadly force. Because city taxpayers face these costs whenever a police officer works for a private employer, it seems legitimate to ask that the city receive some amount of money cover its financial exposure.

This issue first came to my attention a small number comments were made in response to one of my own posts. For those of you who don't wish to go diving into the comments to pull out all of the relevant bits, I will list them all here:

smittyfromtheflats: ... do you think there is any connection between Luke getting cuffed, then released; the city creating a cost recovery program for extra duty police work, and Luke discontinuing the program; and Sgt Fisher releasing Luke, and running the most lucrative extra duty work program?

Anonymous (1): I think Jeremy Boren, Rich Lord or someone else from the MSM should look into why the cost recovery program was killed by the Luke/Denny/Yarone administration. Not only are such programs common in other jurisdictions, but the City faces significant liability when its police officers work these special details... the officers may be working a private event for the Steelers, but if there's an incident -- the city will be the one sued due to the officers' conduct. Don't get me wrong -- we need a public safety presence at these type of events, but why should a cash-strapped city have all of the liability?

Anonymous (2): I agree w/ Anon above - Jeremy & Rich could ask these questions:
1. What's the purpose of a cost recovery program?
2. How much money could the City make if it employed such a program?
3. How much did the City make in the past?
4. When was the program halted?
5. How much has the City lost since the program was halted?
6. How much does Sgt. Fisher stand to lose if the City employs the cost recovery program?
7. When did the administration meet with Fisher & others about the program?

Anonymous (3): here's a link to a December 2005 article about the City's plan for managing the details. if this initiative was part of the City's Act 47 Plan, how did Luke/Denny pull the plug on the plan unilaterally?

This last comment provides a link to a Post-Gazette article describing an attempt by former Chief of Police Robert McNeilly to recover some of these costs. I'll discuss it in some detail later on. But for the moment, it makes sense to follow a string of similar, but far more detailed remarks made in response to a post on 2 Political Junkies:

Anonymous (4): Hmmm, so why is the FOP being so quiet? Either their officer was in fact acting up (which no one is buying) or the officers who were working Steelers' security don't want the FOP to come out against the interim mayor...hmmm...wonder why they are bending over backward to protect their boy...probably worth looking into...

Anonymous (5): somebody should [ask] Luke why he killed the secondary employment policy that had been developed/proposed by the O'Connor administration.

Anonymous (6): Fisher makes money scheduling security for the games. He hires other officers like Hoehn to work the games. If the City took over scheduling and collected a fee to cover its costs, Fisher would lose big money and officers like Hoehn wouldn't be guaranteed a spot at every game.

Did Luke stop the City from implementing this program right around the time reporters were asking Luke and Fisher about Luke's behavior? Answer: Yes

smittyfromtheflats: two questions... "why he killed the secondary employment policy" and "Would the killing of the policy have affected Fisher or Hoehn?

The second question must be answered first. Yes on both counts. Fisher supervises one of the extra duty cabals. He draws a percentage of all money paid out. He is the employment specialist. Hoehn on the other hand makes great money working the extra details, Fisher controls the flow of extra duty work Hoehn can have. Hoehn needs Fisher. Fisher on the other hand would not be reaping his piles of $$$ if the program was handled by the city.

Under Ravenstahl, the cost recovery program was shelved after discussions with FOP members who claimed that they could better manage the program. Who benefitted directly from this being handled by guys like Officer Fisher rather than the city? Who else but Officer Fisher. Now who is standing up for Luke; the same Officer Fisher. Is this a quid pro quo? In any way, shape or form, does this constitute a payoff? Does this stink to high heaven?? Does this answer question 1?

Anonymous (7): It certainly does answer question #1. Now how much did the city lose when Luke did this? I imagine it's a huge chunk of change. The County charges a 22% cost recovery fee for its personnel working off-duty employment. There must be 2 dozen cops working every Pirate and Steelers game!

smittyfromtheflats: $500,000 rough estimate.

These comments certainly suggest that there is a story here that is well worth developing further. But there isn't a great wealth of information out there for me to delve into.

The City of Pittsburgh does seem to have a procedure in place to recover its costs when on-duty police officers and other city employees are used to handle a special event. The process is governed by Chapter 471 of the City Code. In mid-2005, City Council approved a resolution which laid out exactly the city would charge for providing various kinds of services to those who wanted to organize a special event of some kind. The city later created a more extensive document which described all of the intricacies of this cost-recovery plan. I also found (in Microsoft Word format) a 2007 version of the application to hold a "Special Event", so it would appear that this policy is still in effect, although I have no idea if this on-duty cost recovery process is ever waived for some events. If so, then it might be interesting to know who has benefited from such waivers in the past.

All of these items, however, seem to focus exclusively on the costs of having on-duty police officers working on city time, and not off-duty cops working for private employers. At the moment, it's very hard to find out what has happened to the cost recovery plan for off-duty employment. In late 2005, as reported in the Post-Gazette article mentioned above by Anonymous (3), then-Chief of Police Robert McNeilly made some moves to bring the off-duty-employment of city police officers under city control. The idea was that private employers would contact the city directly when they wanted to hire off-duty police officers. The city would require the payment of certain fees to cover its costs, and would also be responsible for finding the off-duty police officers needed to handle the private employer's requirements. The employer would pay the city for these services, and the officer's portion of that payment would be added into their regular city paycheck.

All of these developments took place just weeks before Mayor Bob O'Connor was due to be sworn in and Chief McNeilly was due to leave office. The full implementation of the plan was not due to happen until May 2006, five months into the O'Connor administration. And the story seems to come to an end at that point.

From what one can tell from reading the Post-Gazette story, much of what Chief McNeilly was proposing seemed to make a decent amount of sense. But the O'Connor administration was decidedly non-committal, even skeptical, about implementing the plan after it took office. According to what the commenters quoted above tell us, however, Mayor O'Connor may have overcome this skepticism and made some moves to implement this system before he was hospitalized a few months later. The commenters then go on to suggest that the cost recovery plan was finally eliminated by Interim Mayor Raventahl's people after he took control, but I have no way to know if that part of the story is true.

I honestly don't know what happened to this cost recovery plan. It seems have been a common sense idea that most of the key players were largely willing to go along with. Based on what was written in the Post-Gazette, it didn't seem to have a great deal of union opposition to overcome. Even the police officers who manage some of the presumably more lucrative off-duty employment contracts, such as Sgt. Mike Fisher -- who handles these arrangements for PNC Park and Heinz Field -- indicated that they were not violently against the proposal. While he admitted to having some "mixed feelings" about the specifics of the plan, Sgt. Fisher also noted that it wouldn't be "the end of the world" if he no longer performed this role at the stadiums.

Without any strong opposition to it, why hasn't this cost recovery plan ever been put in place? From what was published in the newspaper, it might have brought in a fair amount of money -- perhaps as much as $1 million or so per year -- for our city's coffers. But apparently, from what these commenters are telling the rest of us, it never got off the ground.

I would like to know why not. I would like to write a decent post about this story. But I don't really have enough information to work with. And that, dear readers, is where you come in.

Some of you seem to be very well informed about this issue, and you should be able to fill in the significant gaps in my own understanding of what has taken place. It's still not clear to me what decisions have been made, when these decisions took place, and who played a role in making them. Has the cost recovery program been deliberately shelved, or is it simply one more item -- like the city ethics board -- which Master Ravenstahl's administration seemingly lost track of when they came into office?

If anyone would prefer to pass along their knowledge without publicly replying with a comment to this post, you can always email me directly at turner.richmond@gmail.com. I don't normally like to pester readers for information this way, but without your help I don't see how I can come up with anything else to say on this topic.

I look forward to hearing from you, and to diving a bit further into this issue. Thanks for your help.

UPDATE #1: A reader who is far more observant than I am has pointed out that the Post-Gazette did run a brief story when the Interim Mayor Ravenstahl killed the cost recovery plan back in November. I don't know how I missed it at the time, and I really don't know how I missed it when I was searching for these kind of things over the weekend.

UPDATE #2: Here are two more articles from late-2005, right before Mayor O'Connor took office. City Council did eventually agree to spend nearly $31,000 to purchase a special computer system to manage these extra-duty work assignments for the police. True to their Democratic-party roots, it should be noted that Council voted against this computer system before they voted for it.

UPDATE #3: An article from the more distant past highlights a decision by the police union to suspend these off-duty details for a certain period of time. They were evidently trying to send the city a message about how unwise it would be to lay off police officers. I have to confess that I don't really see the logic here; I guess the absence of off-duty cops was supposed to drive up the number of calls for service for those who were on-duty, and thus make a statement about how necessary the police are to public safety. But it is one more example of how the police union has a fair bit of control over these extra-duty work arrangements.

UPDATE #4: This article, which showed up during the firestorm surrounding Dennis Regan's nomination as Public Safety Director, has a few interesting details about the computer system which is meant to control off-duty assignments. [h/t to the Burgh Report]