Orange County Sheriff and secondary employment

The badge does not come with you

One sentence decides almost everything else: all types of secondary employment which in any way require the use of the Sheriff-Coroner's uniform, badge, or authority of office are prohibited.

That places Orange County at one end of a spectrum this section maps across thirty-odd agencies. Most of them spend page after page managing uniformed off-duty work — who approves it, what it pays, who insures it, what happens when an arrest is made. Orange County removes the category.

Philadelphia reaches the same conclusion and is the nearest comparison: it prohibits private off-duty police work altogether and pays officers overtime when a private event needs policing. San Jose banned alcohol-led venues outright and replaced them with an on-duty downtown detail. Orange County goes further than either, because the prohibition is not limited to particular venues or particular kinds of customer — it is any work at all that draws on the office.

What is left is ordinary outside employment: a business, a trade, a second job that has nothing to do with being a deputy. That still needs prior notice and prior approval, and this policy governs it.

Not even for free

The prohibition goes one step beyond what any other agency here writes down.

Members are barred from providing security services, on a voluntary or compensated basis, to any organisation, entity or individual, unless those services are part of their departmental duties.

The word doing the work is voluntary. Elsewhere in this section, unpaid work is treated as the easy case: UT System applies its limitations to voluntary work but requires no application; Honolulu lets officers work for a security firm but not donate time to one; Overland Park requires the same form for volunteering in uniform, with a warning that insurance may not cover it.

Orange County closes it. A deputy cannot stand at a charity event as security for nothing, because the problem the policy is addressing is not the money.

The department contracts instead

Removing private detail work does not remove the demand for it, and the policy says where that demand goes.

Contract services may be provided to public and private agencies at the direction and control of the Department, and approved contract services are expressly not secondary employment.

So the work still happens — the deputy is simply working for the Sheriff at the Sheriff's direction, on the Department's terms, rather than for a customer on the customer's. It is the same move Philadelphia makes by billing the organisation and paying overtime, and the same one UT System makes by interposing the university as the employer at fraternity events.

Two other things are carved out of the definition. Teaching at the Sheriff's Academy and authorized traffic school work are not secondary employment. And in the opposite direction, serving as a paid or unpaid reserve for another agency is: it requires a written secondary employment request like any other outside job.

Twenty hours

The ceilings are among the tightest in this section, and there are two of them.

No more than 16 hours of combined primary and secondary employment on any workday, and no more than 20 hours of secondary employment per week without the Division Commander's approval.

Twenty a week sits below almost everything else here. New Castle County and Los Angeles County both stop at 24. Overland Park allows 30. Clayton County allows 30. Orlando and Florida Highway Patrol run to 72 combined. Aurora permits 24 and lets leave buy more.

Requests are made on a prescribed form to the Professional Services Command, carrying the division commander's approval or denial, and are checked for conflict of interest before going to the Assistant Sheriff of Professional Services for a decision. Renewal is every January. A change or termination is reported promptly.

A refusal may be appealed in writing to the Assistant Sheriff of Professional Services, who reviews it and decides. It is a modest right — the appeal goes back to the same office that approved the request — but it is more than Texas's university system offers, where there is no appeal at all.

Neither the defense, nor anyone suing a public body

The expert witness rule is drawn wider here than anywhere else in this section.

Members may not act as a consultant for a defense attorney in any criminal proceeding, or in civil suits against any public entity.

That second limb is the broad one. UT System bars expert work for plaintiffs suing a law enforcement officer or agency, and for criminal defendants. Columbus permits paid expert work in non-criminal cases that do not involve the City and are not adverse to another law enforcement agency. Orange County's bar reaches any public entity — a school district, a transit authority, a water district, a neighbouring city — whether or not law enforcement is involved at all.

Any other consultant work is permitted, subject to the ordinary approval route.

The conflict list underneath it is conventional in shape but broad in reach: no service of legal process; nothing that would bring the Department or the member into disrespect or degrade the dignity of law enforcement; nothing assisting any individual in a criminal proceeding; nothing connected with private investigation, a bail bond agency, a private patrol agency or debt collection; nothing connected with the towing or storage of vehicles or the operation of ambulances; nothing where the member's official position might serve private interests; nothing that would require or cause the use or disclosure of police records; and nothing connected with a tavern or the transport, distribution or sale of intoxicating drink except where the law allows it.

One entry is about industrial relations rather than conflict: members may not work in a business or occupation where they are on strike or locked out by the employer, and will not engage in picketing.

Two limits that come from statute

The last two restrictions are not the Sheriff's at all. They come from California's government code, and the policy cites it.

County members may not be financially interested in any contract awarded by the county. And members of the Department may not bid in any property sale conducted by the Department.

It is a useful reminder of something that runs through this whole section: a good deal of what looks like departmental preference is statute underneath. Los Angeles County opens its policy with the state code provision barring incompatible employment. Georgia puts its off-duty rules in the state administrative code. Clayton County cites the criminal statute that makes unapproved police work an offence. Virginia's localities act under an enabling section that lets them permit off-duty police work at all.

An officer arguing with their own department about an outside job is often arguing with the legislature, and it is worth knowing which.