Phoenix Police and off-duty work

The hour cap was bargained away

Section 3-14 of the agreement between the City and the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association contains one sentence that has no equivalent anywhere else in this section: the Police Chief agrees to eliminate the limitation on the number of off-duty work hours permitted.

It is worth being clear about what that is. Baltimore stacks four ceilings on top of each other. Georgia caps a workweek at 64 hours. New Castle County stops at 24. Columbus never published a number in the first place. Phoenix had a limit, and then removed it by agreement — which means it cannot quietly come back, because it would have to be bargained back.

What replaces it is a judgement, and the agreement says so in the next breath: the Department reserves the right to take appropriate action if a member's wellness, welfare or performance is adversely affected. There is no number to check yourself against. The test is whether the work is showing, and it is applied after the fact.

For an officer that cuts both ways. Nobody is going to refuse a fourth detail in a week on the arithmetic. But nobody is going to tell you in advance that the fifth one was too many, either.

What the agreement settles, and what it leaves to the department

The agreement does not set out how off-duty work is approved, what is prohibited, or how details are assigned. It says instead that off-duty employment is governed by the rules and regulations of the Phoenix Police Department — the operations orders.

It then does something that matters more than it first appears. Should the Department contemplate any change to those rules during the term of the agreement, it must meet and consult with the Association in the Labor-Management Committee before implementing it.

So the substantive rules sit outside the agreement, but they cannot be rewritten unilaterally while it is in force. That is a different arrangement from an agency whose policy manual is simply issued by the chief, and it is the reason the removal of the hour cap has weight.

What we could not read

Phoenix publishes its operations orders through a policy portal, and the orders we were able to reach confirm that off-duty work in a police capacity is dealt with there — firearms carried while working off duty, and equipment an off-duty employer must supply when a hazard develops at a job.

We could not reach the operations order on off-duty employment itself. So the approval route, the prohibited categories and the coordinator arrangements are not on this page, and we are not going to guess at them from the pieces that surfaced elsewhere.

What follows is what the agreement itself settles. If you work for Phoenix and can point us at the order, we will read it and add it.

The referral list

The Department agrees to maintain a list of members who are interested in off-duty work, and to use it when making job referrals.

There is one condition attached, and it is the only approval step the agreement itself imposes: a member goes on the list only once they have prior approval from their immediate supervisor to engage in off-duty employment.

It is a lighter arrangement than the dedicated offices elsewhere. New Orleans runs every detail through a city office and forbids officers to arrange their own. Columbus posts jobs first-come, first-served through an electronic system. Phoenix keeps a list of who is interested and refers work to it.

When the city is the employer

An officer who works off duty in a police function for a City-sponsored event or project, and is paid through City payroll, is compensated at time and one-half their regular rate.

That is a real distinction and it is worth holding on to. This is not a private detail rate negotiated with a customer — it is the overtime rate, paid by the City, for work that happens to fall outside the roster.

Orlando draws the same line for a different purpose: where the city pays, the city also covers the officer for workers' compensation and indemnity. Philadelphia goes further again and pays officers overtime for all such work, having banned private off-duty policing outright. The common thread is that who signs the cheque decides a great deal.

Rest between shifts

There is a minimum of 15 hours off between shifts, and 13 hours for a member working a four-day, ten-hour schedule.

If that is not possible, the member receives overtime at their regular rate for every full hour worked inside the protected window. It is a penalty on the department rather than a prohibition on the officer, which is a different mechanism from Seattle's six consecutive hours of rest or Georgia's six-hour gap before going back on duty.

Members assigned to a specialty bureau may sign an individual waiver of the provision, and a signed waiver runs for the fiscal year.

This is the rule that quietly governs how much off-duty work fits into a week, now that the hour cap is gone. The window between two shifts is fixed; whatever the officer does inside it is their own business, but the window itself does not move.

Your days off carry a price

Phoenix puts a cost on changing a member's schedule, and it is unusually explicit.

The department gives a minimum of seven days' written notice before changing duty hours or N days. Less than that, and the change is either rescheduled to restore the notice period, or the member is paid premium pay for it.

On a five-day, eight-hour schedule that is two hours' pay for a change of duty hours, four hours for one N day moved, and twenty hours for two. On a four-day, ten-hour schedule it is two and a half hours, five hours for one N day, ten for two and twenty for three.

The pattern is deliberate: moving a single day off is an inconvenience, moving the whole set is an upheaval, and the price steps up accordingly. A member who requests their own schedule change gets no premium pay, because it was not imposed on them.

Patrol squads with beat responsibility work the four-day, ten-hour schedule. Everyone else works five eight-hour shifts with two N days either side.