Dallas approves new system to manage police officers’ off-duty work

Six years after an internal audit found the Dallas Police Department needed a better way to track off-duty hours worked by officers, the city plans to pay for a new system to manage and track the jobs.

The Dallas City Council on Wednesday unanimously approved a three-year, more than $815,000 contract with RollKall Technologies, a management scheduling software company that caters to law enforcement agencies. The Dallas Police Department getting a new automated system to track off-duty employment was one of the top recommendations of a 2018 city audit that criticized the agency’s lack of oversight of the program and found some officers were working extra jobs for more hours than their police work.

Off-duty jobs can include security work at large events, concerts, private businesses, parades and other events.

Kristin Lowman, a DPD spokeswoman, said the new third-party system is expected to streamline and simplify how off-duty job assignments are managed for officers, vendors and businesses.

“This includes job announcements, scheduling, invoicing and payment, compliance with department policies, and easy audibility of jobs,” Lowman told The Dallas Morning News on Wednesday. “The department is now planning the rollout of the platform, along with education and training for officers, vendors, and the public on the new technology.”

The police department estimated that officers work more than 135,000 secondary jobs outside of their normal police duties every year. The agency said that equals roughly more than 714,000 of extra work hours.

According to the 2018 audit, the benefits of an off-duty employment program include helping deter crime, supplementing police officers’ pay, and allowing for some reimbursement for the police department if assignments require the use of police uniforms, equipment or vehicles.

But the auditor’s office found the department didn’t follow its own rules when it came to overseeing requests and approval and tracking of off-duty jobs. The department couldn’t tell whether or not officers were working more hours than allowed, working at approved times and locations, or violating any other DPD regulations, the audit said. The police department at the time limited officers’ total work hours to 16 hours a day and 112 hours per week. The daily cap hasn’t changed since then, but the weekly limit is now 80 hours per week, according to the department’s general orders.

The audit also found that DPD’s automated system, called the Intelligent Workforce Management System, doesn’t include the actual off-duty hours officers worked, tell supervisors when work requests are pending approval, or allow supervisors to confirm whether officers aren’t working too many hours.

“It is virtually impossible to do accurate accounting and controls with the current IWM software that is utilized by the department until new software can be purchased and integrated,” said an October 2018 letter to the auditor’s office signed by then-acting police chief David Hughes and then-assistant city manager Jon Fortune agreeing to more than a dozen recommendations for improvements.

The department still uses the Intelligent Workforce Management System for requests and approval for off-duty police jobs, Lowman said.