Escondido Abandons 10-Day Work Week of Police Officers

An unusual work schedule in which three-fourths of the Escondido Police Department’s patrolmen worked for 10 days straight, then had five days off will be scrapped May 1 after a year’s trial.

Senior officers said the work schedule was cumbersome from a payroll standpoint and that some officers complained of fatigue by the ninth or 10th consecutive day of work.

When the department instituted the 10-days-on, 5-days-off plan, it was the only one of its sort in California and perhaps unique in the country, according to officials in Sacramento.

About 60% of the officers on the so-called 10-5 schedule said they liked it, but their endorsement was only “lukewarm,” said Capt. Mike Stein, who heads the department’s patrol division.

Outweighing the personal preference for the schedule was the problem created by handling a 15-day work rotation while on a 14-day payroll calendar, Stein said. Besides, the plan failed to reduce the amount of overtime being logged by patrolmen, as had been hoped when the schedule was implemented, he said. In fact, he said, more overtime was worked on the 10-5 schedule.

The 10-5 plan accommodated three shifts. Patrol officers on the afternoon and graveyard shifts worked 10 days straight, and during their five days off, a third shift of officers working 10 days straight filled in for the other officers’ days off, working five days in the afternoon and five days graveyard.

The department’s day shift had continued to work on the traditional five-day work week during the trial period.

Most police departments in California work either a five-day work week or, as is the case with the San Diego Police Department and others, a 10-hour-a-day, 4-day work week.

The San Diego Police Department instituted its four-day work week in July, 1986, and will forward a report to the San Diego City Council in July evaluating the effectiveness of the schedule after its two-year trial, Cmdr. Bob Thorburn said.

Stein said a “large percentage” of patrol officers reported feeling fatigued toward the end of their 10 days of consecutive duty--especially since some then had to make court appearances on their days off, effectively lengthening their work schedule.

Despite the concern, there were no specific incidents of fatigue handicapping or affecting officers in the field, Stein added.

“It was worth trying,” Stein said of the scheduling experiment. “I was excited when we first decided to give it a try, but it was just a trial.”

The department’s patrol supervisors had been on a 10-5 schedule for about 10 years and will stay on it, he said. The success of their scheduling had been the impetus to try it on the rank-and-file officers on patrol, Stein said.

“But, in hindsight, what we realized was that the patrol supervisors don’t have to make court appearances, and they could count on five days off,” Stein said. “The guys on patrol, though, often ended up in court on their days off.”

Still, some officers said they were sad to see the schedule scrapped.

Officer Rick Hardy, a seven-year department veteran, said he looked forward to his five-day “weekends”--even if a day or two were nonetheless lost because of court appearances.

He and other officers noted that, on the traditional five-day work week, lesser-seniority officers frequently had to take their two days off on weekdays, when they were subpoenaed to testify in court on one of their cases.

“So there were times when I actually worked 12 days straight on the traditional schedule,” Hardy said. “On this (10-5) schedule, I knew I could always count on at least three or four days off to unwind.”

He also said officers enjoyed the sense of teamwork and camaraderie that developed among them, since they all had the same days on and off.

“There was a positive, bonding effect because we were always working with the same other patrol officers and supervisors. We got to know how we worked together,” Hardy said.

The department brass acknowledges the sense of bonding that occurred on the 10-5 shift and will try to duplicate it under the new schedule by establishing specific patrol squads that share similar work shifts, Stein said.

The Escondido Police Officers Assn. had not taken a formal position favoring one plan over the other, said its president, Detective Jim Maher.