Detroit Mayor’s Bodyguards Collected $190,000 In Overtime Last Year

A Detroit police officer who works on the mayor’s security team put in for 1,060 hours of overtime in 2018, for which he was paid $44,212. Altogether, this individual received total compensation of $103,761 from the city that year.

To accumulate that much overtime pay, this officer would have had to average more than 20 hours of overtime every week. The officer also put in extra hours on special downtown events, including sporting and entertainment events.

The information comes from a Freedom of Information Act request seeking expense records related to the mayor’s protection detail. The city of Detroit doesn’t release the names of individual police officers when responding to FOIA requests.

Altogether, the 12 Detroit police officers assigned to Mayor Mike Duggan’s executive protection detail in 2018 racked up a total of 4,369 in overtime hours. That comes to an average of 364 overtime hours per officer.

According to documents provided by Detroit Law Department Supervising Assistant Corporation Counsel Jack Dietrich, “overtime is needed to cover vacations, holidays and other absences.”

Two of the officers assigned to the executive protection detail also “work overtime to cover honor guard,” or have been assigned to overtime shifts “to cover downtown service detail,” according to the documents. “Service detail” includes working at sporting events and other large city gatherings.

The city paid out a total of $146,675 in overtime to executive protection detail officers in 2017. In 2018, the amount jumped to $190,701.

Details regarding how the protection detail is structured and how officers are assigned to work overtime shifts are unclear.

Detroit Director of Media Relations John Roach and Deputy Communications Director Tim Carroll did not respond to questions asking why so much overtime is necessary and how protection detail officers are assigned to shifts outside their routine workdays.