The lawsuit filed in 2016 claims members of the LMPD SWAT time should have been paid for 'on-call' time dating back to 2002.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Current and former Louisville Metro Police SWAT officers said they are owed back pay going back nearly two decades for time spent on-call.

Opening statements began Wednesday morning in the case that's expected to last several weeks. The lawsuit filed in 2016 claims members of the LMPD SWAT time should have been paid for "on-call" time dating back to 2002. 

"The plaintiffs submit to you that an employer is not allowed to accept free work," plaintiffs' attorney Ann Oldfather said during opening statements. "Not once would Metro recognize it as an item to be negotiated." 

SWAT is the elite team for LMPD that deals with situations involving hostages, barricaded suspects and serving dangerous warrants. Each member is highly trained. And back in 2016, the team went full-time, meaning those officers assigned to the SWAT team only work doing that.

The officers claim to have missed family functions, couldn't get off-duty jobs and more because of the on-call rules. Officers would be on-call for two weeks at a time during which they could not drink and needed to be able to respond to a location within 45 minutes. Once officers answered the call, they would collect pay.

But defense attorneys for the city argue that the city shouldn't have to pay for hours when officers weren't actually working. 

"The SWAT officers that bring this lawsuit all knew when they signed up for the job, what was expected from them," attorney Suzanne Michael said. "The question you're going to have to answer at the end of the trial, when they're on-call, 'Is their time so severely restricted that it's not their time at all?'"

Back in the early 2000s, Oldfather sued the city on behalf of firefighters who claimed they were not receiving fair overtime pay. The city ended up paying more than $34 million of back pay in that case. 

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