Monday, November 15, 2004
Any appearance of bias has to be avoided, the mayor said.
CLEVELAND (AP) -- Mayor Jane Campbell, looking for an independent examination of allegations of overtime abuse by officers, has chosen two investigators to review the allegations.
The investigators, Jonathan Leiken, a former federal prosecutor, and Robert Alvord, a retired FBI agent, will examine overtime claims made by Internal Affairs detectives between 2000 and 2002 and review past investigations of overtime abuse.
The scope of the inquiry could expand, Campbell and other officials said.
The decision comes eight months after The Plain Dealer reported that some Internal Affairs detectives were collecting overtime for work that appeared to have been done during regular hours.
Police Chief Edward Lohn reported to Campbell's staff this month that no wrongdoing was found.
However, Campbell said, "It does not appear that it has been thoroughly investigated."
She said the new investigation must be independent to avoid any appearance of bias.
Controlling police overtime has long been a struggle in Cleveland.
"They gave it out like candy," Campbell said.
Improvements
But the mayor said dramatic improvements have been made to a system that was "badly broken."
In January, Lohn issued a department directive confronting what he referred to as a "culture of entitlement" regarding overtime. Supervisors would now be held accountable for the overtime used by their officers, he wrote.
So far this year, overtime is down 39 percent in the department.
Campbell said reform efforts and careful monitoring will reduce overtime costs to about $8.5 million this year -- well below budget. That's despite the strains of numerous presidential campaign visits that required extra security.
But in June, Timothy Miller, chief of the criminal division for the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office, complained to Lohn that the department was lagging in efforts to cut overtime for unnecessary police appearances in court.
Police reports continued to be submitted late and sometimes lacked the information prosecutors needed to resolve cases, Miller wrote to Lohn. Some officers still refused to provide the missing information unless they received a subpoena that would result in overtime pay.
"Despite our best efforts, the new policy prohibiting subpoenaing of police officers at pretrials has been a failure," the letter said.
The situation has improved since June, Miller said. But the department took nearly a year to install computers provided by the prosecutor's office to weed out unnecessary subpoenas.