Editor's note: This story has been updated to include the comments of Sgt. Michael Woody, the spokesman for the Detroit Police Department. Woody contacted Michigan Capitol Confidential after this story had been published.

A Detroit police lieutenant reported that he worked the equivalent of nearly 17.3 hours on all 365 days of the city’s most recent fiscal year, according to records obtained from the city.

The documents show that this individual claimed to have worked 6,332 hours over a 12-month period.

He was one of 529 employees who reported being on the job for more than 4,000 hours last year, equivalent to least 77 hours per week every week. Some in the department reported far more hours. Of those, 45 reported working 5,000-plus hours (equal to 13.7 hours per day, 365 days a year) and three reported 6,000-plus hours.

Sgt. Michael Woody, spokesman for the Detroit Police Department, said after this story had been published that the city has an antiquated way of tracking the amount of hours employees in the police department work. He said the "FY gross hours" worked wasn't "straight hours" but included overtime hours factored by a 1.5 multiplier. Woody said that 8 hours of overtime would translate to 12 hours of "gross hours" worked.

The Detroit News has reported that the city has been investigating claims of overtime abuse in its police department. This Michigan Capitol Confidential report is the first to provide aggregate and individual employee hours figures, which were obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Overtime pay allowed some officers to collect far more than the base salaries they earn under the city’s contract with the police union, with a few collecting six-figure incomes based on their reported hours.

Under the collective bargaining agreement, police lieutenants earned a base salary of between $66,626 and $68,598 last year. But overtime can add substantially more. The lieutenant who worked 6,332 hours last year collected $151,192 in gross pay.

Union contracts allow police employees to take a certain amount of their overtime credit in compensatory time, which can be “banked” and paid out later.

A police “ident technician” reported 6,140 hours on the job in 2014-15, and a sergeant reported 6,028 hours — both more than 16 hours a day on average. The sergeant’s gross pay for the year was $128,135.

City records also show that one police sergeant who reported 5,537 hours had a gross pay of $105,921 and another reported 5,657 hours for $111,286.

One police officer is reported to have worked 5,863 hours — 16 hours a day every day of the year — for $107,602. Base salaries for that position range from $29,352 to $47,914 depending on seniority.

City records do show some employees working a standard 40-hour a week schedule and reporting 2,080 hours for the fiscal year. For example, an assistant chief of police reported 2,080 hours for a salary of $118,991.

It’s not uncommon for officers in big city police departments like Detroit’s to accumulate a lot of overtime. Besides crime fighting, police also are assigned duty for special events like concerts and political rallies, plus professional sports games.

The city of Detroit has not responded to requests from Michigan Capitol Confidential to verify that the number of hours reported by the city in the FOIA were accurate. The city violated the state law by not responding to a FOIA request within 15 business days that asked for more details on the amount of overtime the city was billed by the police department. John Roach, the communications director for the Mayor Mike Duggan, acknowledged receipt of an email. Roach said he had contacted the city’s FOIA coordinator Ellen Ha and Sgt. Michael Woody, Public Information Officer, for the Detroit Police Department. Ha and Woody didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

Per student spending by public schools in the District of Columbia outstrips that of all 50 states. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2012, D.C. was annually spending a total of $25,038 per pupil.

Nevertheless, in 2013 Colorado-based Augenblick, Palaich and Associates – the firm recently chosen to produce an upcoming education funding “adequacy” study for the State of Michigan – released a report claiming that D.C. wasn’t spending enough.

APA’s Washington funding study concluded that to adequately educate students D.C. needs to increase the amount of funding it provides by 22.1 percent.

The study concluded: “Despite the current level of education funding, the UPSFF (D.C.’s Uniform Per Student Funding Formula) will need to be increased to ensure all schools have the resources they need to enable students to successfully meet D.C. academic performance standards. The UPSFF should also include additional funding to address the learning needs of students at risk of academic failure.”

Neal McCluskey, an education analyst with the CATO Institute, is skeptical. “The District of Columbia has the highest per-pupil spending in the nation by more than $4,000 over New York which spends the second most,” he said.“There is really not a whole lot of evidence to support the contention that the more that’s spent on education the better the results will be.”

When asked to comment on the D.C. study, APA Vice President Justin Silverstein said education funding studies involve a myriad of complexities and should not be evaluated superficially.

“You can’t accurately evaluate a study when you do not dig into its context and unless it [the evaluation] points out where resources are to be added and takes all the details into account,” Silverstein said. “These studies assess many aspects that are very complex and need to be taken in that context.”

The D.C. study was one of the 12 most-recently published education funding studies APA conducted for various states. All came to the same conclusion, that current funding is inadequate must be increased.

Michigan is paying the firm to produce a study that is supposed to define how much this state should spend to adequately educate students. During the December lame duck legislative session, Gov. Rick Snyder and legislative Republicans agreed to purchase the study as part of deal to get Democrats to support placing Proposal 1, the ill-fated attempt to secure road funding dollars, on the ballot.

In many states, "adequacy studies" are used as the basis for lawsuits and judicial rulings that require automatic tax increases for more spending. Last year, Michigan Board of Education President John Austin, a Democrat, said education adequacy studies are "a term the teachers unions and Democrats use to argue for more money."

The methodologies used for the D.C. study were dubbed the “Professional Judgment” methodology and the “Successful Schools” methodology. It appears that those same methodologies will be used for the upcoming Michigan study.

At 197 pages APA’s D.C. study is voluminous. On Page ES 14 of the study, under the heading of "Recommendations," the following were reported as key factors driving the need for additional funding:

• Characteristics of the student population. The District has a high proportion of students from low-income, severely disadvantaged, and non-English-speaking families. These students require additional instructional resources and student support services to be successful learners.
• High labor costs. The high cost of living in the city and metropolitan area and the predominance of a unionized workforce in DCPS means the District has a relatively high wage scale for educators.
• Education reform. The District of Columbia, along with many states across the nation, is taking steps to implement the Common Core State Standards for kindergarten through grade 12. This will require significant investments in new and upgraded curricula, instructional programs, assessment, and professional development. It will also require increased coordination across grade levels and schools.
• Commitment to equity between sectors. By law, the District must provide operating funds through the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, its primary local funding” to both DCPS and public charter schools. Meeting this obligation requires additional resources because of past differences in funding between the sectors.