Human Resource Blog

Police Officers Hours

	Compensation
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A small town in Oklahoma has three full time police officers. All are hourly employees, who receive no real benifit package from the town. The Town Board has a policy manual wrote in 1991 that says employees will get comp time at the rate of 1.5 hours of comp time per hour of overtime.
Upon hiring employees, the Town Board verbally offers comp time in lieu of overtime. Officer are also on call to take calls when no one is scheduled to work. Officers usually put in 40-50 hours of overtime a month, over and above the 40-hour work week. The officers question what are the labor laws for police officers concerning hours. Ands can the Chief of Police who takes on calls and works the street as an officer and administrator receive comp time? Would it be better to be a salaried employee for these conditions?

Oklahoma has no overtime law, so this is a matter of federal law. Generally police officers are covered by the FLSA. However, it contains a specific exception for employees of departments with fewer than 5 full-time workers. So, the police officers in this question may not be entitled to overtime pay at all.

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act permits government agencies to grant comp time in lieu of paying overtime. You don’t say whether or not the police officers are permitted to use their comp time. Under the FLSA, an employee’s request for comp time must be granted in a reasonable time. Employees are permitted to accumulate up to 480 hours of comp time, and must be paid for them when the officers are terminated. If the employees are not being permitted to use their comp time, they must be paid for the hours worked, although they may not be entitled to time-and-a-half for overtime.

It’s not clear what benefit there would be to being on salary in this situation. Salaried employees are not entitled to comp time, because they are not entitled to overtime. So the police chief can be required to work overtime on the street, without any additional compensation, over and above his usual salary. Nor is he entitled to time off, to compensate for the overtime.

Specific FLSA regulations regarding this matter can be found at: http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/whdfs8.pdf. Because this is such a complex situation, you would be better off contacting the US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, for a specific ruling on your case.