Saint Paul Police and off-duty employment

The application, and the email that authorises it

An off-duty employment application has to be completed before any off-duty work, and a separate one goes in for each employer and each address — two sites for the same company means two applications.

The officer signs it, their immediate supervisor approves it, and it then goes to the inspection unit. The job is not authorized until the officer receives an approval email back from that unit. Nothing rests on the supervisor's signature alone.

There is a short-notice route: where the application steps are not finished, a commander or above can approve the work by email before it happens, and that approval is forwarded to the inspection unit supervisor. The application still has to be submitted afterwards.

Officers who are paid to schedule other officers' off-duty work need an application too — the scheduling is itself off-duty employment.

Twenty dollars a job, taken out of your pay

Officers are not required to use a department vehicle. If they choose to, they submit an off-duty vehicle request through the timekeeping system for inclusion on their timecard, and submitting it is an acknowledgement that $20 will be deducted from their payroll.

The form goes in for every off-duty job where a department vehicle is used, whatever its length, and before the vehicle is used rather than after. It covers marked, unmarked, specialty and take-home vehicles alike, and applies to every rank that works off duty. A separate payroll deduction authorisation is completed once a year.

That is a different design from anywhere else we have read. Washington State Patrol charges the trooper the state mileage rate plus $5 an hour. Aurora bills a fleet fee to the employer. King County makes the employer pay except at two stadiums, where the member self-reports and is invoiced. Saint Paul skips the billing entirely and takes a fixed sum straight out of the paycheck.

The rest of the vehicle rules are tight. Squad use needs the senior or unit commander's approval, documented on the application; the on-duty supervisor is told when a squad is taken; the unit's sign-out protocol applies; and squads from a district's primary operational fleet may only be used when secondary squads are not available. No squad car may be used in an off-duty patrol function.

No other department equipment is used at all unless a contract has been negotiated with the office of the chief — the exceptions being what is needed to be in the uniform of the day, and radios.

Leave buys hours: 24 a week, 64 on vacation

The ceiling is 24 hours of off-duty employment a week, whether working for someone else or self-employed. Department-authorized overtime is not counted against it, so a week heavy with overtime does not eat the allowance.

Then the provision that makes this page worth reading: officers may exchange vacation, holiday or compensatory time for off-duty hours, and doing so lifts the 24-hour ceiling by the amount substituted. The order works it out — take a full week of leave, and you may work 64 hours off duty that week.

Aurora reaches a similar place from the other direction, letting a member work as many extra secondary hours as the leave took them below 40. Overland Park allows vacation and personal leave for this but bars comp time. Philadelphia prohibits using leave to work a detail outright. Saint Paul is the clearest of them: a straight trade, with the total stated.

Thirty minutes, and no shift changes

At least 30 minutes must separate on-duty hours from off-duty hours. And supervisors may not grant a change of shift to accommodate an officer's off-duty work.

The order carries its own worked example. An officer rostered 0900 to 1700 who wants to start at 0700 so as to take an off-duty job beginning at 1530 is in breach — unless they start at their normal time and use personal time off to leave early, or the supervisor can articulate a departmental need for the earlier start and authorises it beforehand.

It is the same instinct as King County's ban on splitting a shift and Virginia Beach's half-hour between jobs, but aimed at the roster rather than the day: the schedule is not to be bent around the second job.

Rank travels with you

The rank structure stays intact off duty, and Saint Paul spells out what that means.

A scheduler may not schedule a supervisor within their own chain of command. Commanders may work in a staff capacity only for accounts they supervise or manage, or that another commander manages, and are prohibited from working for or being scheduled by anyone of lower rank. Where several officers work one event, department rank and structure govern.

And at the top it stops altogether: the chief, assistant chiefs and deputy chiefs cannot work off duty at all. Several agencies require senior approval above a certain rank; this is the only one we have read that closes the door on its own command staff.

Span of control is set by numbers. An officer managing a site where five to ten officers work at once must be at least a sergeant; ten or more, at least a commander. Any special event needs a commander. And if a site uses on-duty officers for site-related duties, the managing off-duty officer must be a sergeant at minimum.

Special events, and the chief's power to take it back

An event becomes an official off-duty special event if any of three things is true: it is expected to draw a thousand people or more, ten or more officers will be working it at once, or the chief says so.

That triggers real planning. The managing officer submits an operational plan on a set template to the district senior commander at least a month before, the senior commander reviews and approves it before it goes to the chief's office, and it names the event's city permits or records that they have been applied for. Any other off-duty job falling inside the event's footprint has to be approved by that event's commander and folded into the plan.

The provision worth remembering is the last one. The chief may declare any event an on-duty overtime event and assign an incident commander to run it, where that is in the best interests of the city, the department or the workforce. The work does not stop — it changes hands, from a private arrangement into departmental overtime.

Several agencies interpose the department between officer and customer as a standing rule. Saint Paul keeps it as a power to be used on any particular event, after the fact if need be.

The scheduler's calendar

Any sworn member who is the contact and manager of an off-duty site submits a calendar to the inspection unit every month — and so does any scheduler from outside the department.

The consequence of not doing it falls on the officers, not the scheduler: if no calendar is submitted, everyone working that account is denied the privilege of working there.

The calendar must carry the managing officer's name and phone number, the month and year, the site name and address, the day of the month, the hours including start and end times, and the name of each officer working. It goes in before the first day of the working month, with a supplemental calendar at the end of the month if anyone changed.

It is required wherever the arrangement is casual or permanent, runs for an extended period, or where officers apply once and then work multiple shifts — which is exactly the case where a site could otherwise become invisible to the department.

Logging on with dispatch

Every officer working an off-duty job notifies the county emergency communications center before starting, by phone where possible, giving their employee number, the job site location (or the employer's business address if the job moves), the employer's name, the squad number if one is used, and the hours of work.

Dispatch then generates a case number for the off-duty job, assigns a radio call number, and logs the officer into the dispatch system. At the end of the job the officer reports end of tour, the case number is closed and the officer is logged off.

So an off-duty shift here exists as a dispatch record with its own number from beginning to end. Compare King County, where the officer clears a numeric code with the communications center on finishing, and Alexandria, where the officer marks in service with a detail-specific call sign.

If an arrest happens, the on-duty squad that transports and books the prisoner writes the original report and the off-duty officer writes the supplemental. An officer putting themselves back on the payroll because of an arrest files the overtime under its own code, so the department can count off-duty arrests separately from ordinary overtime.

When you may not work

Off-duty work is barred while on administrative-only duty, sick leave, paid parental leave, light duty or injured-on-duty status, during mandatory leave after a critical incident, and where a physician has restricted the officer's duties. Also while attending the recruit academy, before completing probation (except at events the chief approves), and — in the capacity of a police officer — while suspended, on administrative leave, on executive loan or on a leave of absence.

Then the rule found nowhere else in this section. An employee who uses more than 100 hours of sick leave in a calendar year is prohibited from off-duty employment, with family medical leave, an HR accommodation, the birth of a child and major medical reasons all excluded from the count.

Every other sick-leave rule we have read is a window measured in hours around a missed shift — 24 hours from the start of it at Clayton County, 24 from the end at Newport News, eight at UT System, the bargaining agreement's own definition of a workday at King County. Saint Paul instead counts the whole year and sets a total. An officer who has been genuinely unwell in January can lose off-duty work in October.

The list ends where most do: interference with alert performance of police duties, and other just or reasonable cause as determined by a supervisor, command officer or the chief.

Where you may not work

Licensed on-sale liquor establishments are out, and so is the entire property to which the license was issued — not just the bar itself. The exceptions are events at public facilities holding special licences, and hotels and motels, though not the liquor establishments inside them.

The clause that closes the usual gap: officers may not work for a third party that is paid to supply security to a licensed establishment either. Putting an agency in the middle does not make the job permissible. Exemptions come only from the chief and are reviewed every year.

Also prohibited: taxicab services; union assemblies where union business is being conducted; teenage dances not sponsored by a recognised youth organisation; any establishment where a labor dispute is occurring; anything tending to lower the dignity of the police service or where a conflict of interest is seen to exist; and any film or commercial production inside the city without the chief's prior authorisation. Paid professional sports and athletics need the chief or an assistant chief, as does police work for any other law enforcement agency.

Off-duty work as a police officer outside Saint Paul needs the chief or an assistant chief, and no uniform may be worn outside the city at all. Compare Lexington in Virginia, which asks the agency whose jurisdiction it is for written permission; Saint Paul keeps the decision in-house and removes the uniform instead.

Uniform, and who carries the risk

Officers work off duty in the designated uniform class of the day — no raid gear, no utility uniform — whatever their normal assignment. Body armour is required, personal appearance standards apply as on duty, and off-duty officers are subject to inspection. Approved plainclothes work means business or business-casual attire. In summer a long-sleeved shirt and tie may be worn between 2200 and 0800.

On liability the order is one sentence and leaves nothing ambiguous: it rests with the off-duty officer and the off-duty employer, not with the City of Saint Paul.

That is the same answer Cook County gives, and close to Aurora's — which authorises the patrol uniform and a city car, then tells members to arrange their own insurance because the City may not defend them. It is the opposite of Lexington, where a private-duty officer is considered on duty throughout.

Breaking these rules can cost off-duty privileges, including scheduling privileges, short or long term, on top of any discipline.