Minneapolis City Council committee approves study to examine fees for police officers' off-duty work
MINNEAPOLIS — A Minneapolis City Council committee on Monday approved conducting a study that would examine how city resources are expended when police officers work off-duty for private businesses and would explore implementing a fee for that work to recoup some of the costs.
Councilmember Robin Wonsley argued that Minneapolis residents pay for the vehicle use, gas and uniform upkeep when an officer works overtime for a private company.
"City public works workers can't take city trucks and go fill pot holes after hours and get paid in cash for doing that, but that's exactly what we're doing with MPD," she said during a meeting Monday.
The Minneapolis Police Department's overtime policy was scrutinized in the 2023 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, which argued that the system "undermines supervision." Patrol officers are able to control whether supervisors get off-duty employment opportunities, which disincentivizes them from holding officers accountable.
While private security pays significantly more than department overtime — at rates between $150 and $175 an hour sometimes in cash — the city "gets nothing" while MPD allows officers to use its squad cars and gas, the report states.
Wonsley noted that the off-duty fee of $19 an hour for the use of a squad car would align with the city's vehicle operation expense rate, and is one of the costs the city could recoup by implementing such fees. Other cities in Minnesota and across the nation have fees associated with off-duty work, according to a report presented to the city council this summer.
Charging fees would not fix an "unregulated" and "what's become a dangerous off-duty system," Wonsley said, but would be a strong starting place to ensure taxpayers aren't subsidizing Minneapolis police when they're "working off-duty just for personal gain."
During the meeting, Councilmember Linea Palmisano said she didn't really "mind the concept behind these items," though argued it was simply "nibbling around the edges."
The city is required to allow Minneapolis police to do off-duty work due to a court case from the 1990s, but Palmisano pushed for bringing the entire off-duty work system in-house, which would require going back to court.
"We've been saying for years that we need to get back to the off-duty work after COVID," Palmisano said, mentioning a 2019 audit which examined police off-duty work. One of the issues outlined in the audit found that marked squad car usage was not consistently approved or tracked by precinct supervisors, which is required by department policy.