Despite any writings to the contrary, my belief is that the majority of the sworn personnel will probably leave at the first opportunity, if not sooner. For example, the NYPD retirement currently calls for a retirement with half-pay pension after 20 years of service. Vesting out allows the uniformed member to retire after only 15 years of service with a reduced pension. In
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both cases, the pension payments start on the twentieth anniversary of joining the department.
The reason for many uniformed members remaining over 20 years is that many might not match the pay on the outside, as well as the benefits enjoyed by the membership (unlimited sick time, 5 weeks annual vacation, and tax-free pensions in the case of serious line-of-duty injury). For others, the police culture is the reason to stay with the job.
In general, any person with a marketable skill may seek employment on the outside. The overwhelming reason for this is twofold: pension consider- ations as well as the immediacy of a higher paycheck in the private sector.
I. Advancement and Rewarding
In the event that the workplace is dictated by civil service regulations, it is inevitable that the very system that helps avoid job inequities and abuses will tend to work against performing a particular job.
Because civil servants do not receive annual bonuses based on perfor- mance, the mechanism for people to advance in pay scale is either to recog- nize service time contractually, receive special-duty pay grade, obtain a designated rank, or seek a promotion in civil service rank.
Aging out refers to any pay increase accorded to those employees who have attained a certain level of years on the job. Generally, this is a nominal amount of money that most people would consider nice, but not a deciding factor by any means in remaining in that job.
Many agencies offer a skills pay increase if the skill is required as part of the job. One example would be the ability to pay someone a premium for fluency in a language if that person is called on to use that skill. Unfortunately, many unions will not pursue this avenue during negotiations.
Designated rank is awarded, and with it comes an increase in pay. The rank is not protected by civil service law: In essence, the member serves at the pleasure of the commissioner or chief of the department. The rank is
banded within the range of a base civil service rank. In the NYPD, the base rank of police officer had various designated ranks associated with it: police officer special assignment (possibly defunct), detective specialist, detective 3rd, detective 2nd, and detective 1st. The grades for detective increase in pay from 3rd to 1st, and the specialist is a noninvestigative title. Likewise, there are designated ranks for sergeant as well as lieutenant. For the ranks of captain and above, the base civil service rank is captain, with all others being desig- nated as ranks. Obviously, there are many more rules; for the sake of this chapter we will not explore them.
The limitation of awarding a designated rank will cap the amount of money that personnel may receive in salary. Other considerations, while allowing the employee to earn more over the year, will actually increase the
The Digital Investigative Unit: Staffing, Training, and Issues 45 number of tours of duty to be performed, as well as potentially impact the employee negatively in other ways.
1. Unavailability of Personnel and the Interchangeable Man
The nature of any job may make personnel unavailable for prolonged periods of time. Unfortunately, it is a fact of life on the job, and managers must deal with it. Some of the reasons might be:
• Medical leave for being sick • Transfer to another assignment
• Promotion
• Suspension or other limitation of duty • Details or special services
In general, you may still be carrying the person on the roll call; however, as far as the administration is concerned, your manpower is based on the total roster count.
Part and parcel with the job is the attitude (both by the officer and administration) that the average officer, by and large, is capable of being productive across a wide and disparate range of work environments. My opinion is that administration perpetuates this myth — they grew through the same culture.
In fact, normally dropping an officer cold into a new environment can work out, and most officers perform well when assigned new tasks as long as they are given the parameters and expectations of that task.
Although it might seem obvious that a person lacking computer skills should not be in a unit in which these skills are required, from firsthand experience I can attest to the fact that many assignments are made simply because a department needed a body, and the administration had a body to give you. (The often unsaid reason might be “we have no other place to put him.”)
The normal assignment for people of this category might be clerical in nature, because they are often on extended medical limitations or bounced from patrol or investigative duties.
The other problem is that for civil service reasons (and department policy) you may be prohibited from utilizing that person in an investigative capacity, either due to the limited nature of their current status or to problems with utilizing someone in tasks not within the scope of their civil service title. If you are the administrator who has assigned this person to the unit, it might not be a favor from several perspectives: (a) The person may be incapable of handling mission-critical tasks; (b) the person may be unable to conduct routine tasks; and (c) the administrative decision to assign a possible problem
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child not only fails to alleviate the unit’s everyday concerns but in fact exac- erbates them.
If you are not privy to police culture and responsibility, here is a simple example: As a supervisor on a parade detail, you are issued 10 “bodies” for the duration of the parade. Each of these people has come to the parade on their own, in uniform, and the first time you have ever laid eyes on them is at the site. One of these people is not in the uniform of the day, or otherwise has decided to adorn his uniform. This renders him no longer uniform with the others. Someone higher than you in rank decides on a vicarious lesson, and issues a rip to the offender, and then one to you for failing to supervise. Although this is a stretch, unfortunately it does happen, and serves to illus- trate the notion of strict liability vis-à-vis the responsibility of the police manager. If you extrapolate this scenario to assigning a person with dimin- ished capabilities, although you might incur agency repercussions, the worth of that person is in question if you were to take a benefits-to-liability ratio. The process of helping out the cybercrime unit with the addition of nontechnical, untrained, unusable bodies other than for menial work is not necessarily beneficial. Combined with the fact that such people might have been placed there because nobody else could use them, or that they’ve gotten into trouble elsewhere, their presence is detrimental.
Routinely the interchangeable-man factor rears its ugly head in the other direction. For example, each September the United Nations requires that many diplomat-trained officers (typically detectives or supervisors) are assigned to that temporary duty. That person is essentially lost to the unit for that duration of time. Any other work to be done by this person cannot be performed while this person is loaned out. This becomes an issue for the following reasons:
• Your manpower count remains the same, even though your manpower is reduced in reality.
• These assignments are done on a fair basis (spread out over com- mands) in order not to impact any one command inordinately. • This member may accrue overtime in the outside assignment. • Any replacement body is not truly a replacement unless the member
loaned only performs menial tasks and not mission-critical ones. • Tasks assigned to this member may languish awaiting his or her
return, or if time-sensitive in nature, may have to be assigned to other members who, in turn, have their own time-sensitive tasks piling up. If you were to examine a Gantt chart based on these circumstances, you would quickly see the effects of detail assignments. The bodies-to-work ratio must be maintained so that overtime is allocated to those members having to pick up the slack. The payment of cash overtime results in administrative
The Digital Investigative Unit: Staffing, Training, and Issues 47 oversight headaches, in which the commander (as well as his commander, and his commander and so on up the chain of command) is required to justify the expenditure of cash overtime and then explain how this will not occur in the future. This is definitely a sticky topic because such overtime may be used as a productivity measure of both the unit and the leader.