Kansas City Police and secondary employment

Your work day starts before your shift does

Most agencies count hours against a calendar day, or against a rolling window that opens when you start work. Kansas City opens the window before you start, and moves it depending on which shift plan you are on.

For members on an eight-hour plan, a work day is the 24-hour period beginning eight hours before the scheduled tour of duty. On a ten-hour plan, seven hours before. On an eleven-hour plan, six hours before.

Inside that window, a sworn member may schedule a maximum of 16 hours combining on-duty work and secondary employment. Exception time does not count against it, and only the Chief may authorise more.

The design is deliberate and it is the most schedule-aware definition in this section. The window is sized so that the hours immediately before a tour are policed as tightly as the tour itself — you cannot work a long detail the evening before an early shift and call it a different day. And because a longer tour leaves less room either side, the run-up shrinks as the shift lengthens.

Compare Fairfax County, whose 24-hour frame is a sliding scale that begins when any work starts and will not reset without eight consecutive hours off. Both solve the same problem — the midnight boundary that lets an officer work sixteen hours across two calendar days — and they solve it differently.

Alongside it sits a plainly worded duty rather than a number: members will be awake and alert throughout their secondary employment and will prepare by having adequate rest and sleep beforehand.

Staffing is set by the size of the crowd

Nearly every agency in this section that addresses staffing does it by ratio of officers to supervisors. Kansas City publishes a table scaled to attendance, which we have not seen anywhere else.

The recommended minimum staffing levels are one member per 2,000–3,000 attendees for reserved seating at a family-oriented event with no alcohol; one per 1,000–1,500 for sporting events with alcohol sales, and the same for family-oriented reserved seating where alcohol is sold; one per 500–1,250 for reserved seating at adult venues with alcohol; one per 500–750 for open-air venues with alcohol; and one per 150–500 for night clubs and other adult entertainment venues.

Those are on top of an initial core staffing of one to three officers depending on the venue.

Read down the list and it is a risk assessment written as arithmetic. A family event with no drink needs one officer for every few thousand people. A nightclub may need one for every hundred and fifty. The Employment Unit Commander retains discretion to alter any of it for a specific event or for anything else affecting the safety of members and patrons.

Taverns: fifty percent, three officers, outside only

A tavern or nightclub is defined by revenue, borrowed from the city's own zoning code: an establishment primarily engaged in serving alcoholic liquor for consumption on the premises, which must derive more than 50% of its annual gross sales from alcoholic beverages. A rental event space is expressly not automatically a tavern — that is decided case by case.

It is a cleaner test than most. San Antonio arrives at the same problem from the kitchen, treating a restaurant as a bar for the hours when only the bar is open. Kansas City settles it on the accounts.

Where a venue does qualify, the rules are strict. A minimum of three law enforcement members must work it, and if that minimum is not met nobody works it without the Employment Unit Commander's approval. That is the highest floor in this section — Columbus, Newport News, Lexington, San Antonio and Aurora all set two.

Members work the exterior only: entry and exit points, parking lots, on-street parking and other outside areas the establishment designates. They are forbidden to work the interior unless responding inside for legitimate law enforcement reasons, and forbidden to be employed in any capacity contrary to that of a law enforcement officer — bouncer, doorman, or any similar agent of the establishment. Class A or Class B uniform at all times.

The house-rules line is drawn in the general provisions and drawn well: the legal authority of a sworn member working secondary employment is limited to the enforcement of federal law, state statutes and municipal ordinances, and members will not use police authority to enforce a private employer's policies and regulations.

Approval that never expires

One short paragraph puts Kansas City on its own. Approval status for members and employers is valid from year to year, and must be resubmitted only in the event of suspension or revocation.

Every other agency in this section runs a renewal clock, and between them they use nine different dates: the hire-date anniversary at Seattle, the birth month at New Orleans, 1 January at Baltimore and Orange County, 1 February at San Antonio, 1 March and 1 April at Alexandria, 31 August at UT System, 1 December at Cook County, 31 December at Overland Park and Louisiana, and a five-year cycle for Overland Park's non-security work.

Kansas City has none. Approval persists until something goes wrong.

What replaces the renewal is continuous verification through the software. Every assignment — pool jobs, self-initiated work paid or unpaid, and self-employment — is entered into the Secondary Employment Platform by a coordinator. Members close out assignments within seven calendar days, and may not apply for a new pool assignment until previous ones are closed. Sworn members designate their immediate supervisor in the platform, with seven days to redesignate after a transfer. And supervisors verify each member's previous month before the 15th, with a verification email going up the chain of command.

Commanders may at their discretion ask a member for a copy of their schedule, contact the employer to verify the application, or contact the employer to verify the member's work record. Failing to report for an assignment without proper notification is treated as an unauthorised leave of absence.

Canceling inside fourteen days

The cancellation rules are written as software behavior, which makes them unusually concrete.

A member canceling a pre-scheduled job within 14 days of it must first contact the job coordinator. Only if they cannot reach them may they self-cancel.

Clicking cancel does not release you. Outside the 14 days, a confirmation window appears and the assignment drops off the schedule with an email to both member and coordinator. Inside the 14 days, a warning appears, the member must choose a reason from a menu and write an explanation, and the job stays on their schedule as a pending request until the coordinator resolves it.

Every self-cancellation requires a comment, and the policy adds a line worth noticing: the details of a personal illness will not be noted. The member has to explain, but not disclose.

And there is a rule closing the obvious workaround: members who close assignments at zero hours worked to bypass the cancellation process or avoid telling the coordinator may be disciplined.

What the department may not look up about your employer

Several agencies here investigate employers. Baltimore runs a background investigation on the employer and its owners. UT System publishes a character test the employer must pass. Kansas City does the check too — and then, unusually, limits the tools.

Before an employer is approved, the Secondary Employment Section will at minimum run a state law enforcement computer transaction on the individual employer or principal business owner, and search the state courts record system. The Secondary Employment Supervisor may also require the employer to obtain their own criminal history background check from the state highway patrol.

Then the limit: a criminal history check through the Interstate Identification Index, or a QH transaction, is prohibited for the sole purpose of secondary employment.

So the national criminal history system is off limits for vetting somebody who merely wants to hire an officer for an evening. It is a small provision, and it is the only place in this section where a policy tells the department what it may not find out.

Members are separately forbidden to work, directly or indirectly, for anyone convicted of a felony under the federal firearms statute — there is a dedicated legal bulletin on it — for any employer engaged in unlawful activity, for any gambling establishment including any part of its property such as the car park or hotel, and for any establishment promoting or allowing nudity or semi-nudity, again including the whole property.

Marijuana, and the license you may not hold

Missouri has legal recreational cannabis, and Kansas City's response is the broadest in this section — it reaches past employment into ownership and licensing.

Members may not work at or for any marijuana or illegal controlled substance related business, pharmacies excepted. They may not own, operate, consult, or provide services — including security or consulting — to any business related to cultivating, dispensing, manufacturing, storing, transporting or testing marijuana. And they may not procure or hold a license or permit for the purpose of profit to do any of those things.

Cook County bars security work at cannabis premises. Seattle prohibits marijuana businesses. Kansas City closes the consultancy and the license as well, so there is no route in through ownership.

Alcohol is handled the same way. Members cannot apply for or obtain a city or state liquor control card for the purpose of owning a tavern or nightclub, or of dispensing or selling drink in one — though non-sworn members may hold one for a business that is not a tavern or nightclub.

Nobody may own, operate or manage a private security company, and members may not work for an immediate relative who does. That term is defined expansively, reaching domestic partners, in-laws, and anyone whose close association is the equivalent of a family relationship — the policy's own examples being a long-term friendship, a legal guardian, a conservator, or someone holding power of attorney.

When on-duty officers arrive

One sentence settles a conflict most policies leave to work itself out. Where both on-duty officers and secondary employment officers are involved in a single incident, the on-duty officers have the final authority to determine how the situation is handled and what arrests, if any, are made. In a critical incident, the chain of command applies.

Members working in a law enforcement capacity write the necessary police reports themselves, whatever their rank, and those reports are processed through the ordinary system. At the start of a shift the member contacts the dispatcher for the division they are working in, gives their start and end times and the location, receives a secondary employment radio number and monitors the traffic.

If a member is assaulted on a law enforcement detail, the on-duty investigative sergeant is notified; a second member assigned to the same job completes the reports, or an on-duty member responds to do it if there is no second member; and the duty commander is notified if the member is injured.

Injury benefits are decided case by case on a single question: whether the member was operating within the scope of the secondary employment. If they were, they look to the secondary employer. If their activities were exclusively for the benefit of the Department and outside the scope of that employment, they receive what any member injured on duty would.

Two smaller rules round it out, and both are rare enough to note. Law enforcement secondary employment stays inside the city limits, and while working it a member may not be accompanied by personal pets, nor by any person not involved in the official duties. Coordinators must be active sworn members — retirees and reserves already coordinating are grandfathered but may take no new jobs — and may take only an hourly fee for coordinating, never a commission.