LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Metro Council President David James has introduced a resolution calling for an internal audit of the Louisville police department’s spending of overtime funds over the last two years.
The proposed resolution follows testimony earlier this month from Louisville Metro Police Chief Steve Conrad acknowledging there were “some abuses” by officers of $1.2 million in overtime funds the city gave police in December 2016 to boost patrols in high-crime areas.
Conrad said there is a criminal investigation ongoing into officers "that were accused of obtaining overtime they didn’t actually work.”
In November, a WDRB News story described how several officers worked up to 21-hour days, every day for weeks or months, including weekends, and racked up enormous amounts of overtime hours. At the time, Conrad said he was unaware of any overtime abuse.
"For the guy that's supposed to be in charge of the overtime to not know about problems with it until he sees it on the news, that causes me to be nervous about the controls we have on what is a tremendous amount of money," James said in an interview Wednesday.
LMPD spokeswoman Jessie Halladay said the department is "committed to transparency." Also, Halladay said the department is "currently working with Metro Audits to move forward with an audit on the overtime issue."
The resolution requests the city auditor to look at how the department used overtime funds from Dec. 2016 to August 2018, including:
- How the money was managed by police officials.
- How it was determined which officers would receive the funds and whether there was an examination of when the officers worked compared to when they were on vacation or not on duty
- What were the desired outcomes versus the actual outcomes?
- How division were commanders informed of which officers were working overtime.
The WDRB News investigation found officers worked weeks or months without taking a day off -- including weekends -- logging what experts say would be either suspicious or dangerously long hours. Yet the department has no internal policies meant to force officers to rest or avoid marathon shifts.
LMPD Officer Todd Roadhouse, for example, worked more than 200 hours during the first two weeks of January, including back-to-back 17-hour days. He followed that with a 21-hour day, according to his time slips. In all, his workload during that time yielded about 120 hours of overtime.
Roadhouse’s time slips, obtained under the Kentucky Open Records Act, show he worked 84 consecutive days from January 1 to March 25, logging, on average, about 12 hours a day.
The department spent nearly $800,000 of the $1.2 million in funding by the end of February.
In addition to the LMPD overtime, three of the five officers that made the most overtime money – Roadhouse and Officers Mark Final and Dennis Poteet – worked secondary jobs at the same time.
Final worked every day in February, including weekends, averaging about 12 hours a day, for the police department while also working a secondary job providing security at Male High School, according to records.
Pay records showed that some officers made up to five times as much in extra pay than they did in previous years. Specifically:
- Officer Roadhouse went from making $7,800 in overtime in 2013 to $29,600 last year and more than $45,000 so far in 2017.
- Officer Keltner jumped from making about $6,000 in overtime in both 2014 and 2015 to more than $40,000 in each of the past two years.
- Officer Michael Pawul made less than $7,000 in overtime in 2013 and more than $50,000 so far this year.
- And Sgt. Brian Stanfield jumped from $20,000 in overtime in 2014 to more than $48,000 in 2017.
Of the officers highlighted by WDRB News, at least three are no longer with the department. Brian Stanfield retired on Jan. 1. Unlike the others, Stanfield was already under investigation at the time, according to police records.
According to a letter initiating an investigation of Stanfield, he was accused of violating department policy by getting paid as a police officer while also working off-duty at UPS. After Stanfield retired, Conrad closed the investigation “by exception.”
According to a series of emails obtained under the Kentucky Open Records Act, Roadhouse never submitted a letter of retirement. On Feb. 21, 2018 a supervisor wrote “He turned everything in today and will not be back.”
This story will be updated.
Copyright 2018 WDRB Media. All Rights Reserved.
