Houston Police Officer Makes More Than Mayor: Houston DWI Task Force Agents Are Making Loads With Overtime

When a person is arrested for DWI, the majority of the time, a sobriety or field test is conducted at the site of the arrest in order to determine whether the person is intoxicated.  In smaller towns and cities, the majority of the officers on duty are trained to perform these tests.  This is different, however, for a city the size of Houston, where there time to train officers is lacking.  The Houston Police Department, therefore, has a special task force just for DWI arrests.  If an officer who is untrained to perform the sobriety or field test pulls a person over that he suspects is intoxicated, a call will go through to the DWI Task Force and one of the trained officers will come to conduct the tests.  The DWI Task Force officers work four days per week, Wednesday through Saturday from 9pm until 7am - the peak days and times for finding drunk drivers.  The problem lies when the people implicated of driving while intoxicated go to trial.  In smaller cities, the arresting officer is often the one who conducted the sobriety test and therefore can testify alone as to his or her findings when the arrest took place.  In Houston, however, both the arresting officer and the task force officer are often present because the arresting officer can only give testimony to why he pulled the suspect over, information the task force officer does not have first hand.  The task force officer can only give testimony to how the sobriety test or field test was conducted and the results because the arresting officer is not qualified to give that type of assessment.  

Any time an officer testifies in court they are being paid overtime.  In small cities or towns, only one officer is getting overtime for each Texas DWI case, but in cities like Houston, it becomes two or more officers per DWI case tried.  Additionally, since the DWI Task Force is small in comparison to the number of officers in the Houston Police Department, it is a select few that are continually on the trial dockets.  Some of these task force officers work overtime in the courts on their days off as well.  Critics of the system worry that many of the overtime hours are an unnecessary expense which have done nothing but increased mental and physical exhaustion and decrease effectiveness in these few officers, forgetting to put safety first where perhaps caution is most important.  

There are some that are concerned Officer Lindsey may be submitting inaccurate overtime pay requests - he was suspended for 15 days in 1990 for this exact reason and was paid more that $85,000 in overtime in 2004.  While this has not been subject to an investigation as of yet, there is a system of checks and balances that does exist within the department to ensure it does not occur.  Officers in the Houston Police Department are prohibited from working more than 16 hours in a 24 hour period, or more than 80 hours a week, without approval from the shift supervisor.  The shift supervisor is in charge of assessing each officer's fitness for duty at the beginning of each shift.  

Suggestions regarding how to lower overtime pay have been pouring in since the story first hit newsstands - suggestions ranges from adding more officers, to the task force to certifying every officer to perform sobriety and field tests, to having an audit run by the supervisor to ensure each officer's citations are not falsified in any way.  To date, none of the suggestions have replaced the existing methods, but Police Chief in Houston, Harold Hurtt, promised corrective action will be taken if it is discovered any foul play was involved in earning overtime pay.