Fingerprint Scanner to Track On-the-job Time
Following reports of overtime fraud, the Baltimore Police Dept. will make officers scan their fingerprints at the start and end of shifts to prove they’ve worked the hours claimed.
According to a report by Kevin Rector in The Baltimore Sun, the new policy will be implemented in hopes the department can reduce ongoing overtime spending of nearly a million dollars a week.
T.J. Smith said some officers found a gap in the system and took full advantage of it. “That’s not fair to the city, and it’s not fair to the men and women in this agency who do their job honorably every day.”
Smith said the department is in the early phases of implementing the new biometric technology. The agency has purchased some hardware, but they do not have an estimate for when officers will begin using it or how much the system will cost.
He said adoption of the biometric system is not about a lack of trust in officers and supervisors to tell the truth on their time sheets, but “instilling a layer of trust in the community that we are doing something” about the vulnerability of the current paper-based overtime and payroll system to fraud.
“We’re not just going to say, ‘Oh, well,’ and everybody crosses their fingers and hopes we do better in the future,” Smith said. “We’re taking steps to make sure we do better.”
According to multiple current and former commanders in the department, the underlying hope is that the technology will not only halt outright corruption, but curtail a longstanding culture within the department in which frontline supervisors — lieutenants and sergeants — use unearned overtime and other unapproved paid time off as an “internal currency” for motivating and rewarding proactive policing.
In the Gun Trace Task Force case, officers are accused of, and some have admitted to, outright overtime fraud. Some officers claimed overtime pay while on vacation or while gambling at a local casino.
Several commanders who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the department said the actions of the gun unit were criminal and in no way reflected common practices, but the practice of frontline supervisors using “slash days” — or “g days,” when a gun seizure is being rewarded — is more “widespread,” despite not being sanctioned by top leadership.
But prosecutors, defense attorneys, and witnesses called in the case also have discussed officers being given informal days off, called “slash days,” as a reward for good work. Former Detective Maurice Ward, one of six officers who have pleaded guilty in the case, testified that unearned overtime pay was used in the department to motivate officers.
Supervisors, they said, are desperate for ways to keep officers motivated in a city where morale-crushing crime is rampant. They said the practice goes back years.
“You would hear squads say, ‘Yeah, we got five guns last week, so we got five g days,” one former commander said. “Some districts were well known for it. Some supervisors were well known for it.”
“It’s a well-known, not-talked-about secret,” said another former commander. He said he saw slash days used to motivate officers, to reward them, and to get them to work undesirable details. “I don’t think that the overwhelming majority of supervisors who are doing it think that they are doing anything wrong. They think that they are looking out for guys who are working hard.”
Another commander, who said he supports the introduction of biometric systems, said the culture of the department has allowed some supervisors and officers to begin thinking that they are owed something extra simply for doing their jobs.
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