Lexington Police and extra duty work

On a private duty job you are on duty

One sentence settles what most agencies leave to a liability section: members of the department working a private duty assignment are considered on duty. They are therefore bound by all department rules and directives, and are paid through the City of Lexington payroll or by the event organizer.

Read that against Virginia Beach, ninety minutes down the same state. There, officers working secondary employment are third-party security contractors acting on behalf of the private employer, expressly not working for the department.

Two Virginia police departments, both operating under the same state statute that lets localities permit off-duty police work, and they answer the identity question in opposite directions. Everything downstream follows from it — who directs the work, who carries the risk, whose rules apply when something happens in the car park.

It is worth saying that the small agency has taken the simpler position. If you are on duty, then the usual questions about coverage, authority and whose policy governs do not arise separately. They have already been answered.

There is no private rate

Because the officer is on duty, they are not negotiating a price with anybody.

Payment rates charged to vendors are set by the Chief of Police. Payment rates paid to employees are the overtime rate: supervisors at their calculated overtime rate, patrol officers and sergeants at the current overtime rate.

So the whole apparatus other agencies build around money simply is not there. UT System leaves the rate to a private negotiation between officer and employer. Columbus sets a floor by rank and asks to be told when anyone is paid above it. Plano puts a committee of five on reviewing rates annually. Lexington pays the overtime rate and bills the customer.

The department invoices the vendor, the account clerk enters the work order, the payroll clerk verifies the hours against the roster, and the money moves through the City.

Minimums, cancellations, and two officers where there is drink

A two-hour minimum applies to all non-construction private duty work, after which the job runs in half-hour increments. Construction work that an officer volunteers for carries a four-hour minimum.

A vendor may cancel without penalty up to two hours before the job starts. Miss that window and the officer who signed for it is entitled to two hours' pay, and the department bills the vendor for it. Compare Columbus, where the three-hour show-up fee is owed once the officer arrives, and Newport News, where the three-hour minimum is built into what the department charges.

Where alcohol is being served, any vendor hiring a security detail must hire at least two officers, and the department may require more. It is the same two-officer floor Columbus sets for bar work and Newport News applies to car parks — a recurring judgement across agencies of very different sizes that this is not a job to do alone.

Extra duty is signed up for through the department's scheduling messaging, must not conflict with regular assigned hours, and any change to hours, officer numbers or duties needs a supervisor's authorisation and written notice to the chain of command.

Sixteen in twenty-four, and eight hours between

Personnel may not work more than sixteen hours of regular duty, departmental overtime and private duty in any combination within any 24-hour period, except in an emergency.

And all personnel must have a minimum of a consecutive eight-hour rest period between scheduled assignments.

The sixteen-hour figure is the common one — Florida Highway Patrol and Virginia Beach both use it. The eight consecutive hours between assignments is stricter than Seattle's six in a rolling 24, and it applies between every pair of jobs rather than once a day.

An officer working any off-duty employment remains subject to emergency call-out and may be expected to leave the job.

The billing rules assume someone will try it

For a department of this size, the accounting controls are unusually explicit, and they are worth reading as a description of what goes wrong elsewhere.

No payment is processed until the officer has the private duty work order signed, with the printed name of the person in charge of the assignment, and has signed the overtime roster with the correct hours. All dates and hours on the work order and the roster must match, and both must reflect the hours actually worked.

Then the rule that gives the game away: at no time may an officer submit work orders or roster entries showing the same hours worked at two or more different jobs, whether departmental or private duty, because it results in improper billing, overpayment or double payment.

The policy works the example — a job for one vendor ends early, the officer starts another, and each is to be billed only for the hours actually worked at it. San Jose reached the same problem from the audit side, comparing city timecards against off-duty timecards. Lexington writes the prohibition into the billing procedure itself.

What you may not do off duty

Off-duty employment — work of no law enforcement nature, where police powers are not a condition of the job — is governed separately, and the prohibited list contains two entries found nowhere else in this section.

The first: employees may not participate in professional sporting events where there is a substantial risk of serious injury without prior written approval from their supervisor. It is the only policy here that treats the officer's own body as the asset being protected.

The second is stranger and rather revealing: employment which results in other qualified persons being deprived of rightful employment, and which results in a justified complaint — with the Department the sole judge. An officer taking work that a civilian would otherwise have had is a question the other twenty-six policies never raise.

The rest is more familiar but tightly drawn. No repossession, towing, process serving or bill collecting, or any work where police authority might be used to collect money or goods for private civil purposes. No work requiring access to police files or records as a condition of the job. No assisting case preparation for the defense in a criminal matter. No adult entertainment. No gambling of any kind, and the policy names bingo, raffles and casino nights rather than leaving it abstract. No owning or running a private investigation business, or a security business where the officer's position or access is used for gain.

Alcohol is prohibited where the employment is directly for an establishment that sells or dispenses it, and under no circumstances will a direct employer-employee relationship between a nightclub and an officer be authorized. The Chief may make an exception where the employer's main activity is not alcohol — athletic events, hotel operations — or where the employer is the Commonwealth and the state facility allows sale but not consumption on the premises.

Approval, and the agency next door

An officer seeking off-duty employment sends the Chief of Police a memo setting out the employer's name, address and contact details, the expected hours, the type of work and how long the employment is anticipated to last. It is attached to an approval form, submitted in triplicate: the original returns to the officer, one copy to the Chief's file, one to the personnel file. Approval must be in writing and must come before the work starts.

The Chief may refuse where the work would interfere with the officer's duties for the City or conflicts with the department's values, and may rescind an approval where the outside work is producing unsatisfactory performance — excessive tardiness is the example given.

One provision deserves separate notice. An officer may not perform police functions in uniform for a private employer beyond the city limits without the prior written approval of the outside police agency having jurisdiction.

Every other agency here that limits the geography does so on its own authority — Clayton County to the county, Newport News to the city, UT System to the counties where it polices. Lexington adds the step of asking the department whose ground it is. For an officer in a small city surrounded by other jurisdictions, that is the practical difference between a job you can take and one you cannot.