Council OKs $3.7 Million to Pay Police for Overtime

Hoping to beef up police presence on Los Angeles streets, the City Council Tuesday authorized using $3.7 million to pay for temporary task forces in which officers will be paid overtime to battle gang-related drug dealers as well as prostitutes and traffic violators.

Los Angeles police officials said that with the windfall, they hope to field an extra 200 or more officers each day for 2 1/2 months--or as long as the money holds out.

Some officers are expected to begin earning overtime pay under the program as early as next week.

“The citizens of this city have, for a long time, been crying for a heavy dose of law enforcement, and we’re going to give it to them,” Assistant Chief Robert L. Vernon said.

Because of current budget restrictions, few police are paid for working overtime; nearly all are compensated with time off whenever they work more than eight hours in a day. The cumulative effect, police administrators say, often leaves the department’s ranks critically thin.

Last year, spurned by voters in recent ballot attempts to hire more officers, police administrators backed a proposal by Councilman Ernani Bernardi that would have frozen nearly 1,000 non-emergency city job vacancies and given the estimated $10 million savings to the Police Department for officers’ overtime pay.

However, City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie later rejected the proposal, saying that it would have disrupted the maintenance of municipal buildings and parks, and lessened the frequency of street sweeping, tree trimming and other public services.

Instead, Comrie recommended using $3.7 million in projected savings from 165 vacant police positions to pay additional overtime to those officers already employed. The money was allocated for salaries and pension benefits that the city would have paid had the vacant positions been filled in fiscal 1986.

On Tuesday, council members unanimously endorsed Comrie’s recommendation and also directed that he explore the possibility of finding the Police Department another $4.3 million from the existing and projected salary savings of job vacancies in other city agencies. The additional funds, if available, would continue the flow of police overtime pay through June 30, the end of the current fiscal year.

Meanwhile, at least two of the council members who endorsed Comrie’s funding plan--Bernardi and Joan Milke Flores--publicly questioned the propriety of using the extra money to deploy officers in task force-type operations.

“I’ve never been crazy about the task force (approach) . . . because as soon as the task force moves out, the crime moves back in,” Flores said.

However, Deputy Chief David D. Dotson insisted that adding officers uniformly in each of the department’s 18 geographic divisions would not be practical.

“A couple of extra officers on each shift would be absorbed rather quickly by the work load and we don’t think we’d get the best bang for our buck that way,” Dotson said after Tuesday’s council vote. “We’re not going to just put people in patrol cars.”

Assistant Chief Vernon said the department intends to use the overtime funds to create a task force of at least 30 narcotics specialists and gang experts that will zero in on increasingly organized gang members who deal drugs.

Money also will be given to other investigators and undercover officers working in groups to crack down on streetwalking prostitutes wherever they are found in concentration, particularly in the Sepulveda area and along Broadway in South-Central Los Angeles.

Additionally, teams of motorcycle officers will receive a share of the overtime funds to increase the number of citations issued to errant motorists and pedestrians, Vernon said.

Vernon would not say specifically where the teams of motorcycle officers and those combatting drug dealing would be deployed.