Time for a review of WPS ‘special-duty’ work

Opinion

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This article was published 15/10/2024 (328 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s hard to argue that you’re overworked when you’re taking on sideline gigs as well as your full-time job.

And yet…

While Winnipeg Police Service’s management argues its officers are so overworked by regular police duties that 78 new officers need to be hired, many police officers were doing overtime of another kind.

In the period between May 2023 and June 2024, those officers took on more than 50,000 hours of special duty work — outside their regularly-scheduled shifts and official overtime. As the Free Press highlighted on Saturday, that’s equivalent to 6,393 eight-hour shifts.

Special duty work is overtime work that’s outside of the regular police sphere, typically doing anything from traffic duty for road races to helping deter retail theft by being a hired police presence at Winnipeg grocery stores.

WPS officers do special duty at Blue Bombers home games, and even can be hired to attend safe grads. It’s $128 an hour, plus GST, to hire a uniformed officer, and an officer has to be hired for a minimum of three hours. (It’s not clear how much of that $128 goes to the officers involved — a portion goes to the program’s operating costs.)

And it’s an interesting kind of hybrid moonlighting that puts money in the pockets of police officers for, generally, doing less stressful work than they face on the beat. And it’s all pensionable time.

It’s not an easy area of police work to dig into: while it’s a $7 million-a-year part of Winnipeg policing, municipal politicians aren’t keen to talk about it, saying they don’t comment on police ‘operational’ matters. It’s an interesting position since the city itself has hired special duty police officers for a minimum of $500,000 during the past year.

Asked if there are limits to how many hours officers can work in a single shift, the police service said restrictions are in accordance with operating guidelines that reflect the collective agreement. The police denied a request by the Free Press for those operating guidelines.

And while regular overtime is seen as having unreasonable effects on work-life balance for police officers, special duty overtime, apparently, does not.

“It is not special duty assignments alone that could result in increased levels of burnout,” said Cory Wiles, president of the Winnipeg Police Association, told the Free Press in an email. “I say that because most often the special duty assignments are on officers’ days off as opposed to the more immediate concern, the unwanted overtime at the tail end of an already lengthy shift.”

It’s hard not to question the use of officers to, say, monitor 10,000 police and firefighters for 781 hours during the World Police and Fire Games in Winnipeg last summer — something that cost approximately $100,000 and was paid by an “in kind” grant from the City of Winnipeg.

Also curious? That uniformed, trained police officers spent over 1,000 hours acting as traffic control for city traffic light crews — work that could be done for much less by hiring flag persons. Three of the top hirers of special duty officers, interestingly enough, were government bodies: Manitoba Justice used 3,300 hours; while the city used 2,300 hours for police officers to be present at the Millenium Library; and 1,000 hour for directing traffic.

Police work is hard work, and perhaps we will be criticized for begrudging officers a chance at a easy cash top-up.

But when police officers are exhausted by overtime at their jobs, but are just fine with even more overtime as a sideline gig?

Well, let’s just say that things don’t quite add up, and special duty work is overdue for a full cost and benefit review.

Especially if it’s a service that could be obtained somewhere else, for far, far less than $128 an hour.