The executive director and co-founder of the Long Beach Reform Coalition (LBRC), Ian Patton, is questioning how a city police officer could legally collect nearly $300,000 in overtime pay on top of roughly $150,000 in base salary last year, making him the city’s highest-compensated employee.
In a letter to the Beachcomber, Patton said the numbers – documented by Transparent California’s 2023 and 2024 salary databases – “just seem completely nuts.” He pointed out that sustaining such pay levels would require an officer to work nearly 93 hours per week on average throughout the year.
“Using reasonable hypothetical figures to show how much an officer would have to work to generate triple pay with overtime, let’s say that pay for every 10-hour regular shift is worth say $700 to him. Then for every regular shift there would have to be, on average, an additional 13.3-hour OT shift, which would be worth an additional $1,400 (at the time and a half pay rate),” Patton wrote…