MATT STILES, STAFF
Copyright 2006 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
All Rights Reserved
A Houston police commander alerted Chief Harold Hurtt last year that officers were manipulating court appearances to rake in extra overtime, according to a memo obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
The two-page letter, released under the Texas Public Information Act, states that accident investigators participated in an “intentional scheme” to add themselves unnecessarily to court dockets for their own “personal gain.”
“This practice, in my view, is costing the Department tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary court overtime expenses,” wrote Capt. Michael Luiz, a 25-year veteran who supervises the Traffic Enforcement Division.
Police overtime has come under increased scrutiny since the Chronicle reported last month that a senior officer, William Lindsey Jr., was paid $100,000 last year working DWI cases, pushing his total pay over $170,000. The Chronicle also reported that more than 20 officers and sergeants were paid at least $50,000 in overtime during 2005, and that 122 of them made six-figure total pay.
Department officials have characterized the overtime as the unavoidable result of specially trained, aggressive officers making traffic stops or DWI arrests and then earning overtime at later court hearings.
The Luiz memo, sent to Hurtt in January 2005, is the first indication that a high-ranking police official had concerns otherwise.
Told of the memo Monday, City Controller Annise Parker, who is supervising a performance review of the department’s overtime policies, said she would send the document to her auditors. She began the general overtime review last year at Hurtt’s request, she said, but in recent weeks has focused the effort on the officers who were paid the highest amounts.
The review isn’t finished, but she said it’s clear now to the auditors “that there is no effective control of overtime at the department.”
Hurtt and other police commanders who received copies of the memo did not respond Monday to requests for interviews. Luiz declined to comment.
Lt. Robert Manzo, a police spokesman, said that one of the memo recipients, Executive Assistant Chief Martha Montalvo, told him Monday that the department had addressed the matter even before Luiz wrote the memo by asking municipal court not to subpoena more than two officers per trial.
Assigned one day a week
Officers, who get overtime when they testify in court outside their regular shifts, typically are assigned one day a week to attend Municipal Court, and the tickets they write are set for hearings on that day.
Luiz’s memo didn’t concern how many officers testify in trials. Rather, it raised an alarm about officers working with others they knew had different assigned court days so they could get more overtime.
Asked whether that would be improper, Manzo replied:
“If that was, in fact, the case, then it would involve misconduct, and possibly even a criminal situation involving falsification of a government document,” he said. “Again, we never came to the conclusion that anything illegal was occurring.”
When he wrote the memo, Luiz supervised specialized traffic enforcement officers and accident investigators.
The memo described the system by which officers pair up with others assigned different court days.
“They then issue citations and place both officers’ names on each other’s citations as witnesses,” Luiz wrote. “This scheme allows officers to attend court everyday of the week.”
The accident investigators, who deal with freeway collisions and other serious wrecks as well as routine traffic enforcement, have since moved to a new unit known as the Mobility Incident Management Division, outside Luiz’s command.
The traffic enforcement officers, many of whom also receive high overtime, are distinct from regular patrol officers, in that they focus on writing traffic tickets rather than responding to calls for service.
The situation Luiz described came to his attention when he noticed midway through the 2005 fiscal year that one officer had made $53,071 in overtime.
Luiz, who was concerned about exceeding his overtime budget, also wrote that his predecessor had raised similar concerns but had been overruled by higher-ranking commanders.
In a response to Luiz’s memo, written a week later, Assistant Chief George Buenik, like Montalvo, stated that only two officers attend a trial. But he didn’t address the concern about deliberate manipulation of the court-day system.
Court officials on Monday gave an example of circumstances that might require testimony from more than one officer.
Sometimes officers perform “spot and stop” operations, in which one officer observes an infraction and another officer makes the stop farther down the road, said Randy Zamora, assistant director of the Municipal Courts Administration Department. He said this is common in red-light enforcement, because it can be unsafe to give chase through an intersection.
A former city prosecutor, Zamora said he had noticed more than two officers for a single citation in the past, but that it doesn’t occur anymore.
Defense lawyer Paul Kubosh said it’s common for two officers to appear at trials. “It’s probably a cross between profit motive and officer safety,” he said, noting that he prefers more than one because he can try to elicit conflicting accounts of the traffic stop.
Grants fund some work
Parker said that some of the overtime money paid for DWI cases or, for example, focused enforcement of seat belt violations, is paid by state and federal grants that are earmarked for time-and-a-half pay.
Even so, she said the high amounts received by a few officers raise questions about whether the money is distributed fairly. Also of concern, she has said, is whether officers work so much they might be less effective on the job.
“The department has a problem that they are going to have to clean up,” she said.
matt.stiles@chron.com