Call her Chief Budget Buster

Beverly Harvard’s Operation Enduring Overtime for Atlanta cops costing millions

Christmas is coming early this year for Atlanta’s cops, who have spent the last five weeks working 12-hour shifts — despite no apparent threat to the city’s security.

With politicians distracted by local elections, Atlanta — a city flirting with insolvency — has been quietly doling out an estimated $700,000 a week for police overtime since the entire force of 1,500 sworn officers was placed on expanded duty.

So far, that’s a $3.5-million outlay for a city government already at least $45 million in the red — and there’s no end in sight. APD Chief Beverly Harvard says she has no idea what the total cost will be, adding that the city’s finance director “is going to have to figure out where the money’s coming from.”

Since Oct. 8, no would-be hijackers have been apprehended, no bombing plots foiled and no anthrax factories busted in Atlanta due to the extra manpower on the streets. Nor are they likely to be, at least not by Atlanta police, most of whom haven’t been given any special directives to accompany their additional time on the clock.

As one beat cop on the 7 p.m.-7 a.m. shift puts it: “The only thing that’s different now is we’ve got to get a bigger table at breakfast.”

While some officers clearly enjoy the larger paychecks, police union officials are bewildered and disturbed by the APD’s Operation Enduring Overtime and its implications for the department’s long-term financial health.

“We’re somewhat baffled as to why this is continuing,” says Chip Warren, national vice president of the Inter-national Brotherhood of Police Officers and an ex-Atlanta cop. “The officers are not performing any extraordinary duties; everybody’s doing pretty much what they always do.”

To understand how unusual the 12-hour shifts are, it’s helpful to realize that paid police overtime in Atlanta is as rare as Mitch Skandalakis sightings at Phipps Plaza. The O.T. checkbook comes out only under the most extreme circumstances — the Super Bowl, World Series, Freaknik, the Olympics — and even then the coffers are opened reluctantly.

“Every time we’ve had some major event that required increased security, we had to go to the council to get special dispensation to get paid for the extra hours,” says Sgt. Marc Lawson, president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers’ Atlanta chapter.

Initially, he says, many officers were suspicious that the city might try to squirm out of paying the overtime, but the first paycheck appeared as promised. “Atlanta police are used to being abused by daddy behind closed doors,” he explains.

Both Warren and Lawson, as well as police Investigator Richard Straut, president of the Police Benevolent Association’s Atlanta chapter, say that no one in the department has offered an official explanation for the continued 12-hour shifts.

“We’re assuming that it’s coming from the Department of Justice, but I’ve seen nothing in writing,” Straut says.

Even APD spokesman Officer John Quigley admits: “I don’t know what prompted the mayor and chief to take this posture.”

Well, certainly the events of Sept. 11 and their surreal aftermath have temporarily purged “business as usual” from the nation’s vocabulary. Immediately following the terrorist attacks, police stationed at Hartsfield Airport went on 12-hour shifts six days a week, only recently stepping down to five days a week at the world’s busiest airport. But why would the entire force need to work an extra four hours a day?

Chief Harvard says she — without Mayor Bill Campbell’s input — moved to place the APD on 12-hour shifts after the FBI called a meeting with local law enforcement agencies in early October to warn “that it had information to which it had not assigned a level of credibility that there may be further attacks at non-specified locations in Atlanta.”

That, coupled with U.S. Attorney General Richard Ashcroft’s Oct. 7 request that U.S. cities go to a “heightened state of alert” as bombs began dropping on Afghanistan, persuaded Harvard that “it would be in the best interests of the city to go on a higher level of security.” Thus, 12-hour shifts, five days a week, for every badge on the force.

But few, if any, police chiefs in other major cities share Harvard’s interpretation of Ashcroft’s statement.

Boston, where several of the hijackers launched their attack, hasn’t moved to longer shifts for officers. Baltimore, a 15-minute flight from Washington, adopted 12-hour shifts for five days following 9-11. San Francisco, which rode out recent warnings of attacks on bridges, saw no reason for extra police man-hours. And Oakland, Calif., has maintained its normal police schedule of 10-hour shifts, four days on, three days off. “We believe we have sufficient coverage to handle acts of terrorism,” a police spokesman says.

Union rep Warren says his police colleagues from other cities are shocked when he tells them of Atlanta’s longer shifts; of the union’s more than 300 member cities, he hasn’t heard of any adopting 12-hour days.

Harvard says she considered scaling back the shifts after the FBI returned to say its earlier warning had been proven unfounded. But then the nationwide anthrax scare began and Ashcroft went back on TV to urge homeland security to be on the “highest level of alert.”

“I dismissed any thoughts at that time of going off the 12-hour shifts,” she says, adding that she has no plans for when to end the extra duty. “I’m taking my lead from the federal government.”

As part of the alertness push, security has been beefed up at water-treatment facilities, schools, government buildings and a few sites police are keeping secret, although Harvard concedes that “we’ve not been informed of any direct threats or specific targets of attack.”

Although the number of phoned-in bomb and anthrax threats has risen in recent weeks, there are rarely more than a dozen a day, an insignificant percentage of the estimated 3,500 emergency 911 calls received in Atlanta on an average day.

With no additional duties to perform, the majority of officers have had more time to conduct roadblocks, check out suspicious characters and log more patrol hours.

“Crime in Atlanta has got to be zilch right now,” boasts Straut of the Police Benevolent Association. “We’ve arrested just about everyone there is to arrest.”

Apart from an increase in routine busts, the main benefit of the new schedule seems to be more spending money for our boys in blue. “As long as the City Council can find the funds to pay us, I consider it Merry Christmas,” says APD spokesman Quigley with a chuckle.

Which brings us to the question of the moment: Where is the money coming from?

One long-standing quirk of the APD’s finances has been the disconnect between its approved budget and its actual expenditures. The department receives funding for 1,870 positions, but consistently has about 400 vacancies, producing a de facto surplus. This past year, it totaled $16 million.

“But what we’ve been led to believe is that the police department under-budgets its other operations so it counts on using that extra money to cover overspending in other areas,” explains Councilman Lee Morris, who chairs the council’s Finance Committee.

Half of that $16 million surplus was sucked up by unforeseen jail staffing costs, he says; another $6 million went to fund an increase in police pensions (a measure initially opposed by Campbell, by the way).

Morris says he isn’t sure where the city is getting the money for police overtime, adding that the “cost is very significant, given the state of the city’s general fund right now.”

Harvard has asked the city’s federal lobbyist to try to wrest some reimbursement from Congress and is “surely hoping” he’s successful.

Councilwoman Cathy Woolard also is concerned about the effect of the long hours on officers. “I don’t think you can keep on a state of high alert indefinitely and actually stay alert. As with any force, you can only stretch it so far.”

Now facing a runoff for the council president’s seat, Woolard says she plans to call Harvard on the carpet soon to explain the reasoning behind the continued 12-hour shifts.

“We all have to be very careful at second-guessing security measures because there’s often something we don’t know,” she says, “but as a member of the Public Safety Committee, I want to be assured that there’s a plan behind this that justifies the cost. We don’t have money to throw around on anything.”

But will she be asking the right person? There are many rumors floating around City Hall at the moment. Here’s one of the more persistent among rank-and-file cops: that Campbell personally ordered the longer police shifts in an effort to see that the next mayor faces a serious budget crisis.

“I think Bill Campbell is just mean enough to try to leave the city broke,” says the police union’s Warren, a long-time critic of the mayor.

Equally outrageous is a rumor that Harvard’s deputy chiefs approached her last month to say the 12-hour shifts weren’t necessary, that she carried that message to Campbell and he told her to leave the cops on duty.

“That’s absurd,” responds Harvard, who says the policy is completely her own and needs no approval from the mayor. Which would mean that Harvard, a salaried city executive who earns $113,166 a year, had chutzpah to spare in asking the council in October to grant overtime pay to her and her top aides. If she had initiated the call for O.T. for her own department, it would seem a brazen attempt to cash out big on what could be her last weeks on the city payroll. Her request, which went against common practice, was soundly rejected and harshly criticized.

Whenever the longer shifts end, they will have brought a brief bounty to officers, but an as-yet unknown headache for the next city council, which could be forced to make some painful cuts, possibly even to the beleaguered police staff.

As Lawson says: “They’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, but this administration’s leaving office in two months, so we don’t yet know who Peter will be.”??