Police Chief David Bowman announced today he’s changing how the department will run, by assigning police administrators to work Saturdays among other personnel changes.
Bowman, back on the job as the police chief for more than a month after being acquitted of criminal charges against him, said re-scheduling manpower will provide more "flexibility."
"We can’t have everybody working Monday through Friday, nine to five in administration," Bowman said. "It’s nothing personal, we’re just distributing manpower as equally as possible."
The changes, approved by interim City Manager Robert Casey according to Bowman, are the first official initiatives he has taken since returning.
Administrators Sgt. Anthony Cureton and Lt. Lawrence Suffern will work alternate Saturdays, keeping the chief’s office open to the public, Bowman said. The officers will not be paid overtime to work the weekends, according to Bowman. During the regular workweek, Bowman and Deputy Chief Arthur O’Keefe work in the Chief’s office at varied times throughout the day, Bowman said.
And in the traffic division, one or more patrolmen will be working evenings.
Police sources said another change would take effect in the next week. Bowman confirmed that for up to the next three months, an Englewood officer will be working strictly with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office in a special investigative operation. Bowman requested that the officer’s name be withheld due to security reasons.
Bowman confirmed that Detective Emma Jackson, back on the job since early March but without an assignment, is now the Police Department’s domestic violence coordinator. Jackson will also be working in the Police Department’s main Detective Bureau, under the direction of her supervisor, Detective Capt. Steven Sabo, Bowman said.
"She could be doing cases, computers, it’s up to him," he said.
Jackson’s base salary is more than $111,000, payroll records show.
The initiatives were made by Bowman days after Casey announced that overtime funds in the Police Department would be strictly limited this year.
For the past week, investigators from the Detective Bureau have been taking courses at the Bergen County Police Academy. In some cases, officers come back to work after class to work on ongoing cases.
The workload is made up by paying officers overtime.
The cost is unavoidable, a police source said, because there isn’t enough men working on the force.
Overtime is used to pay detectives who continue to work criminal cases until the cases are solved. It’s also used to maintain a requirement in the police union’s contract that dictates there must be seven patrolmen working each shift, Bowman said.
But interim City Manager Robert Casey said this week that he is holding the department administrators accountable for any excessive overtime, by not adding $200,000 to $400,000 in extra money to the department’s budget.
Last year, the Police Department spent roughly $1.6 million in overtime. This year, Casey is only budgeting for $1.475 million.
Casey said on average, "each officer gets 40 percent more overtime than their salary."
Bowman said overtime is hard to control but he’ll try.
"You have to do the best you can to curtail it, unless city hall comes out with a strict order," he said.
"I can’t tell people they can’t go to Superior Court and that’s automatically overtime."
