Illinois State Police and secondary employment

No peace officer work at all

The prohibition is short and it removes the whole subject most of this section is about: secondary employment is not acceptable where it involves any sworn officer working as a ‘peace officer’, as that term is defined in the state criminal code.

Three agencies in this section now reach that same place by three different routes. Philadelphia bans private off-duty police work and bills employers for overtime instead. Orange County prohibits any work using the uniform, badge or authority of office. Illinois points at a statutory definition and lets it do the work.

The practical effect is the same: an Illinois trooper does not work details. What this directive governs is the second job — the trade, the business, the teaching, the rental property.

The rest of the unacceptable list is conventional but broad: anything violating law or department rules; anything creating an appearance of impropriety or reflecting unfavourably on the employee or the Department; conflicts of interest; anything whose physical or mental exhaustion impairs official duty; collecting delinquent or arrearage accounts; anything preventing the employee from being readily available for emergency response; and accepting or handling wagers — with a precisely drawn exception for selling lottery shares under the state lottery's authority.

Cannabis sits alongside alcohol: no sworn employee may be involved in the growth, sale, dispensing or service in any manner of cannabis, liquor or any alcoholic beverage. Illinois has legal recreational sale, so that is a live restriction rather than a formality — the same choice Cook County makes on the other side of the state.

Silence counts as approval

This is the provision found nowhere else in this section, and it is worth stating precisely.

Employees submit a request through the chain of command and will not engage in secondary employment until receiving approval — with one exception written into the same sentence: unless the employee has not received a timely answer, which the directive defines as five working days.

Everywhere else in this section, an unanswered request is simply an unapproved one. Alexandria, Overland Park, Newport News, Fairfax County, Cook County — all of them require affirmative permission before a shift is worked, and an officer who starts without it is in breach.

Illinois puts the cost of delay on the department instead. If the chain of command sits on a form for a week, the trooper may proceed.

Requests for anything beyond incidental work go from the immediate supervisor and the work unit commander to the Office of Labor Relations, which approves or disapproves on the Director's behalf and states the reasons on the form if it is denied. Any change in the conditions or terms of the employment means a new request, immediately.

Sixteen hours a month, cleared afterwards

There is a second tier for small jobs, and it inverts the usual order of events.

Incidental employment is work that by its nature is occasional and does not exceed 16 hours per month. It needs only the work unit commander's approval, not the Office of Labor Relations.

The employee contacts their supervisor or the command officer at the headquarters desk immediately, before working, with a brief description of the type of work, the location and the duration. The formal request form then goes in within four days following the employment.

So for small jobs the paperwork follows the work rather than preceding it — a notification beforehand, a form afterwards.

The obvious risk is named in the directive itself: supervisors must ensure employees are not using the exception on a regular basis to circumvent the ordinary guidelines. Sixteen hours a month, twelve months a year, would otherwise be a second job assembled out of exceptions.

Your rental property counts

The definition of secondary employment turns on whether a service is performed, and Illinois answers the property question in the opposite direction to the other Illinois agency in this section.

Financial investments in an enterprise that do not entail the performance of service and require no participation are excluded. But the directive then says expressly that secondary employment does include owning rental properties, or holding an interest in a corporation or partnership that owns rental properties.

Cook County, three hours up the road, lists owning or transferring real estate in which the member has a personal interest among the things that are not secondary employment — only acting as a broker, agent or salesperson counts.

Two agencies in one state, the same question, opposite answers. It is the same lesson the two Virginia departments teach about who an officer is while working a detail: the label is never the rule, and an officer reading a neighbouring agency's policy for guidance can be confidently wrong.

One more inclusion is unusual enough to catch people out: military reserve and National Guard service is secondary employment, and requires a request form on file. Compare St. Mary's County, where military service is expressly not secondary employment, and Honolulu, which treats it as its own category and caps it at five percent of any element.

Weapons, and the squad car exception

A sworn employee whose secondary employment requires a weapon must say so on the request form, state whether the weapon is department-owned or their own, and give its make, model and serial number.

Authorisation to use a department-owned firearm in secondary employment is valid only within the geographic boundaries of Illinois, and the employee must hold a valid state Firearm Owner's Identification Card to carry it. A department-issued conducted electrical weapon is not authorized at all.

Employees in military reserve or Guard units file the form but are exempt from the make, model and serial number requirement — a sensible carve-out, given whose armoury the weapon comes from.

Department equipment may not otherwise be used in secondary employment. There is one exception, and it is a distinctly state-police one: the rule does not apply to ISP-issued squad cars for officers permitted 24-hour use of them. Equipment that ISP makes available to local agencies may also be requested by the agency and used by ISP employees engaged in secondary employment.

Employees are also required to leave a contact number where they will actually be, if they work somewhere with a different telephone number from the one on the form.

You may not teach against your own department

The most distinctive restriction here protects the Department's own training work, and it is administered by the Academy rather than by human resources.

An employee who intends to instruct a course parallel or similar to an ISP course for personal gain must submit a résumé, a programme outline and a request form for each course. Those go first to the ISP Academy Commander, who decides whether the material is contrary to any ISP course or in direct competition with one, and whether it was created for the ISP using state resources.

Only if the Academy Commander approves does the request continue through the ordinary process.

Two supporting rules sit alongside it. Employees in positions determining ISP training efforts or comparable services for local agencies may not take secondary employment that parallels that responsibility. And employees may not compete with department services through secondary employment at all.

There is also a plain anti-avoidance clause, which few policies bother to write down: employees may not form partnerships or corporations for the purpose of circumventing the policy.

Sick time, strikes, and the twice-yearly check

The sick leave provision is the harshest in this section, and it is statutory rather than departmental.

While on service-connected sick time, employment in any manner — including incidental employment, and with or without monetary compensation — results in forfeiture of the continuing disability compensation from the moment that employment begins, under the state's Public Employee Disability Act.

Every other agency here answers this with a waiting period: Clayton County counts 24 hours from the start of the missed shift, Newport News from the end of it, UT System eight hours, Fairfax County the 24-hour period, St. Mary's County the whole day. Illinois does not impose a wait. It removes the benefit. And unpaid work counts.

On a Medical Duty Assignment, any secondary employment must conform to the restrictions in that assignment.

Labour disputes carry a nuance nobody else has. Secondary employment at the site of a dispute is prohibited for the duration of a strike or job action where sworn employees would be required to cross picket lines — but the Director may suspend that restriction where the strike involves a local public service entity. Cook County, by contrast, prohibits it outright and refers failure to notify to professional review.

Employees may also not be retained for the specific purpose of testifying against, or impeaching the testimony of, another criminal justice agency in a criminal proceeding.

The whole scheme is checked twice a year. Human resources keeps a comprehensive list of everyone who has filed a request, and supplies each division with its own list a month before the 1 April and 1 October reviews, at which supervisors verify whether anything has changed or been breached. Where outside work is harming performance, a supervisor submits a recommendation to terminate or reduce it, and the Director or the Office of Labor Relations decides.