A labor board upheld an arbiter’s 2009 decision that D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier’s “All Hands on Deck” initiative to flood the city streets with every available officer violated the officers’ contract. The ruling by the Public Employee Relations Board means that city taxpayers have been ordered to pay millions of dollars in overtime to roughly 3,800 officers who worked a series of three-day weekends in 2009.
Friday’s ruling might also mean a forced end to Lanier’s initiative that requires all Metropolitan Police Department officers to work three-day weekends several times a year. Police union chief Kristopher Baumann said the cost of paying overtime will end up being tens of millions of dollars. He plans to seek similar rulings for the years Lanier continued the AHOD initiative.
‘For what this is going to end up costing, we could have hired enough police officers to have the equivalent of ‘All Hands on Deck’ every day,” Baumann said Monday.
Lanier said the District is considering an appeal of the labor board’s decision, and she will continue the program. The chief has contended that AHOD has helped lower the District’s crime rate, and that she did not violate the terms of the collective bargaining agreement because the dates of the AHODs were announced months in advance.
“It is absurd to suggest that there is a problem with my announcing proactive, targeted dates for these initiatives months in advance,” Lanier said Monday.
According to Friday’s ruling, the District violated the terms of the collective bargaining agreement by changing the officers’ schedules without negotiating a new contract.
The District should have declared a crime emergency or made a determination in writing that the police department was “seriously handicapped” before changing days off for police officers without negotiation, the ruling said.
Rank-and-file offices have long complained that AHOD is more public relations than policing.
“The most expensive public relations campaign this city has ever had,” Baumann said Monday.
The dates chosen seem to be arbitrary, and Baumann said that the department has never provided crime statistics explaining why certain weekends are selected. Critics also say it deprives neighborhoods of police manpower during the week.
On Halloween 2007, which came midweek, there weren’t enough cops to answer the calls because many officers worked the AHOD the previous weekend. An overwhelmed police force that night had to deal with seven shootings, a homicide and an armed carjacking in Adams Morgan that resulted in a fatal police shooting.
The chief began assigning homicide detectives to foot patrols as part of AHOD but quit the shift after veteran detectives grumbled to The Examiner that the assignment was taking them off fresh murder cases.
Examiner staff writer Freeman Klopott contributed to this report.
