Quantum Cop

The police budget of approximately $400 million annually for the city of Boston is the largest expenditure for the city after education and represents approximately 10% of the city’s annual operating budget. Police overtime is guaranteed whether budgeted or not and regularly exceeds the budgeted amount. On average, 20% of the police budget goes to overtime. Many city officials would like to spend this money on more strategic investments and managing this significant unexpected annual expense, which has caused great uncertainty for the city. This project seeks to understand if there may be inherent inefficiencies in the system for managing overtime and the potential misuse of the overtime benefit by select police officers. There are three types of overtime: special events, detail, and court overtime. Many detailed rules in the police contract determine what officers are paid; for example, if an officer works for 15 minutes on a court overtime assignment, they are paid for 4 hours. Another rule states that they cannot collect overtime pay (1.5 times their hourly base rate) while working scheduled shifts or completing other overtime shifts. There are concerns that this may happen, and your project will investigate this possibility. You will aggregate overtime data collected from 2020 - 2022 for members of the Boston Police Department (data from 2023 may be added later in the semester) and merge these data with policing data represented by the Field Interrogation Observations (FIO) data set. FIOs are representations of every police interaction with a civilian. All of these records contain dates and times of day, which will allow you to identify potential overlapping shifts. For example, if an officer has a recorded FIO during a time when they were supposed to be working an overtime shift, this would be an indicator of noncompliance with department rules.