Hartford police complained for years about being underpaid. Starting pay is just $34,554 - lower than in many nearby suburbs. Patrol officers' base pay tops out after five years at $56,095.
So it was startling news when The Hartford Courant reported that the median income for the city's police officers actually was $75,000 last year, with 20 percent of the force's 377 officers making at least $90,000. Abundant overtime pay and a contract that allows police to work double shifts every day helped three dozen rank-and-file cops earn more than $100,000. The top-earning cop was a patrolman: Joseph Smith grossed $143,405, with overtime making up $86,215 of his total pay.
The findings, published on May 25 in an article by Matt Burgard, our city police reporter, and me surprised not only Hartford residents, but also police administrators and union officials. The Hartford Police Department did not monitor overtime earnings by individual officers, only by units.
"Is this right?" the police chief asked, when shown a printout of the top overtime earners. Then he turned to an aide and said, "Who the hell is Joseph Smith?"
We uncovered the high salaries by analyzing data that all municipal beat reporters should have on their computer desktops: a city worker payroll list, broken down by department, base pay and overtime.
I requested the data earlier this year with no particular story in mind. At a minimum, I figured the payroll would be helpful in checking names and salaries on deadline.
Obtaining the city payroll data was easy, and analyzing it was simple even for a reporter using an Excel spreadsheet for the first time.
Laying groundwork
Before requesting the data under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act, I consulted with the city's information technology director and asked questions. How did the city maintain the records? What would it take to copy the entire payroll file to a CD-ROM? I had made a point of getting to know the director months earlier, asking him to give me a tour of the recently merged city-school board information technology system. By the time I filed my FOI request by e-mail, I knew that producing a copy of the payroll on a CD-ROM was a matter of a few keystrokes for one of his staffers.
Similar requests by The Courant have not always gone so smoothly.
A few years ago, the Connecticut State Police tried to charge Jack Dolan, our resident computer-assisted reporting guru, a heart-stopping sum for a copy of its criminal convictions database. The state police figured copies of individual records cost $25 and there were 815,000 records in the database. So they multiplied $25 by 815,000.
The bill came out to more than $20.3 million. Try burying that in an expense report.
The newspaper instead opted for a lawsuit, resolved last year by the Connecticut Supreme Court. As a result, it is well-established law in Connecticut that public agencies can charge only reasonable fees for copying electronic records.
The city of Hartford gave me a copy of its payroll data at no charge.
With brief tutoring by Dolan, I started playing with the city data.
The city provided the data on an Excel spreadsheet at my request. I quickly realized, however, the data was incomplete. The city had provided me every employee's salary, not the actual pay. Missing were overtime and longevity payments, small bonuses paid for years of service.
I amended my FOI request to include all payments to employees, including longevity payments and overtime. This time the I.T. director gave me the bad news: Marrying overtime records with the payroll would require staff time for which he would have to charge me. We agreed on a price not to exceed $100 - a bargain for 6,700 payroll records.
The payroll records listed each employee in alphabetical order with six other columns of data: department, regular pay, overtime, longevity pay, other pay and gross pay.
Sorting by salary, I created a list of the city and school employees in descending order of gross pay. The list showed rank-and-file cops making more money than the city manager, police chief and other department heads. To find all the top overtime earners, I sorted again by overtime.
More reporting
We put the analysis into a broader context by reporting more. Opportunities for overtime had been increasing every year as the department's force had been allowed to shrink. The police contract encouraged officers to take overtime when offered, especially as they neared retirement. Police pensions in Hartford are based on an officer's "final average income," taken from the best three of the last five years before retirement.
Patrolman Smith declined to talk to us, though we were able to answer the chief's question: "Who the hell is Joseph Smith?" It turned out that Smith had achieved a measure of notoriety under a previous administration. He was accused of loafing on the job and stealing city time. He was reinstated after a jury acquitted him in 1999.
Officer Plummer Carroll, who finished just behind Smith with $80,606 in overtime, was happy to talk about his industrious ways. He took all the overtime offered to run up his pension calculation. He estimated that he averaged about 80 hours a week, with a high of 110 hours, over three years.
"I missed out on a lot of beautiful things: holidays, weekends," Carroll said.
His reward: an annual pension of $74,093-nearly $20,000 more than his base pay of $56,095.
ficers making at least $90,000. Abundant overtime pay and a contract that allows police to work double shifts every day helped three dozen rank-and-file cops earn more than $100,000. The top-earning cop was a patrolman: Joseph Smith grossed $143,405, with overtime making up $86,215 of his total pay.
The findings, published on May 25 in an article by Matt Burgard, our city police reporter, and me surprised not only Hartford residents, but also police administrators and union officials. The Hartford Police Department did not monitor overtime earnings by individual officers, only by units.
"Is this right?" the police chief asked, when shown a printout of the top overtime earners. Then he turned to an aide and said, "Who the hell is Joseph Smith?"
We uncovered the high salaries by analyzing data that all municipal beat reporters should have on their computer desktops: a city worker payroll list, broken down by department, base pay and overtime.
I requested the data earlier this year with no particular story in mind. At a minimum, I figured the payroll would be helpful in checking names and salaries on deadline.
Obtaining the city payroll data was easy, and analyzing it was simple even for a reporter using an Excel spreadsheet for the first time.
Laying groundwork
Before requesting the data under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act, I consulted with the city's information technology director and asked questions. How did the city maintain the records? What would it take to copy the entire payroll file to a CD-ROM? I had made a point of getting to know the director months earlier, asking him to give me a tour of the recently merged city-school board information technology system. By the time I filed my FOI request by e-mail, I knew that producing a copy of the payroll on a CD-ROM was a matter of a few keystrokes for one of his staffers.
Similar requests by The Courant have not always gone so smoothly.
A few years ago, the Connecticut State Police tried to charge Jack Dolan, our resident computer-assisted reporting guru, a heart-stopping sum for a copy of its criminal convictions database. The state police figured copies of individual records cost $25 and there were 815,000 records in the database. So they multiplied $25 by 815,000.
The bill came out to more than $20.3 million. Try burying that in an expense report.
The newspaper instead opted for a lawsuit, resolved last year by the Connecticut Supreme Court. As a result, it is well-established law in Connecticut that public agencies can charge only reasonable fees for copying electronic records.
The city of Hartford gave me a copy of its payroll data at no charge.
With brief tutoring by Dolan, I started playing with the city data.
The city provided the data on an Excel spreadsheet at my request. I quickly realized, however, the data was incomplete. The city had provided me every employee's salary, not the actual pay. Missing were overtime and longevity payments, small bonuses paid for years of service.
I amended my FOI request to include all payments to employees, including longevity payments and overtime. This time the I.T. director gave me the bad news: Marrying overtime records with the payroll would require staff time for which he would have to charge me. We agreed on a price not to exceed $100 - a bargain for 6,700 payroll records.
The payroll records listed each employee in alphabetical order with six other columns of data: department, regular pay, overtime, longevity pay, other pay and gross pay.
Sorting by salary, I created a list of the city and school employees in descending order of gross pay. The list showed rank-and-file cops making more money than the city manager, police chief and other department heads. To find all the top overtime earners, I sorted again by overtime.
More reporting
We put the analysis into a broader context by reporting more. Opportunities for overtime had been increasing every year as the department's force had been allowed to shrink. The police contract encouraged officers to take overtime when offered, especially as they neared retirement. Police pensions in Hartford are based on an officer's "final average income," taken from the best three of the last five years before retirement.
Patrolman Smith declined to talk to us, though we were able to answer the chief's question: "Who the hell is Joseph Smith?" It turned out that Smith had achieved a measure of notoriety under a previous administration. He was accused of loafing on the job and stealing city time. He was reinstated after a jury acquitted him in 1999.
Officer Plummer Carroll, who finished just behind Smith with $80,606 in overtime, was happy to talk about his industrious ways. He took all the overtime offered to run up his pension calculation. He estimated that he averaged about 80 hours a week, with a high of 110 hours, over three years.
"I missed out on a lot of beautiful things: holidays, weekends," Carroll said.
His reward: an annual pension of $74,093-nearly $20,000 more than his base pay of $56,095.
Contact Mark Pazniokas by e-mail at impazniokas@courant.com