In a year when Oakland is cutting library hours and freezing hires, one police lieutenant collected nearly half a million dollars in overtime pay. Public records show that Timothy Dolan of the Oakland Police Department took home roughly $493,000 in overtime in 2024 on top of his regular salary, making him the department’s top earner.
For residents watching parks go unmaintained and basic services trimmed, that figure lands with a thud.
Oakland police overtime spending and the city budget
His paycheck is eye-catching, but it is only one data point in a much larger pattern. For the fiscal year that ended in June 2024, the department spent more than $57 million on overtime, more than twice what the City Council approved.
Over the same period, city leaders scrambled to close a $265 million deficit through cuts across multiple departments. In practical terms, that means other services lose out so overtime can keep the lights on at the police station.
Officer overtime hours and public safety concerns
Dolan’s own workload shows how far things have drifted. According to city records reviewed by reporters, he logged more than 3,300 hours of overtime in 2024 on top of about 2,000 hours of regular duty, the equivalent of more than two and a half full time jobs.
On one July day he billed 23 hours, then reported shifts of 16 and 15 hours on the days that followed. What does it mean for public safety when an armed officer is on the clock almost around the clock?
Police union contract and overtime pay in Oakland
Overtime is paid at roughly one and a half times base salary under the police union contract, which makes those extra hours especially lucrative for senior officers. In 2024, 169 officers made more than $100,000 in overtime alone and 27 of them earned more than $200,000. Dolan sat at the top of that list. For taxpayers juggling rent, the electric bill and rising grocery prices, it is hard to square those numbers with talk of shared sacrifice.
Oakland Police Officers Association and staffing shortages
Police union leaders argue that this is the unavoidable cost of keeping the city covered. Sgt Huy Nguyen, who leads the Oakland Police Officers Association, has said that officers do not volunteer for grueling schedules simply out of greed and that high crime, city expectations and staffing shortages force the department to lean on overtime.
He put it plainly in one interview, saying “People do not want to work overtime, people want to go to work and they want to go home.” Anyone who has worked back to back double shifts can relate to that.
Police overtime trends and crime data in Oakland
Yet a coalition of city unions that studied police overtime over the past decade found something awkward for that narrative.
Even in years when the sworn force grew, overtime spending kept climbing. In some years overtime went up while reported crime went down. So staffing levels and crime trends, while important, do not fully explain why the overtime line in the budget keeps bursting at the seams.
Oakland City Auditor findings and overtime oversight
Auditors have been raising red flags about this for nearly a decade. A 2015 report from the Oakland City Auditor found that police overtime costs had jumped by about 80% in four years and that nearly one third of overtime authorization forms were missing.
A 2019 performance audit and a 2022 follow up repeated many of the same warnings and listed twenty one steps the department should take to control costs, from drafting realistic overtime budgets to enforcing limits on how many days in a row officers work.
Years later, many of those recommendations remain only partially implemented.
Scheduling system and overtime tracking problems
One of the most telling details is almost mundane. The auditor and later reporting by The Oaklandside found that much of the department’s scheduling and overtime tracking still relies on paper forms rather than a modern integrated system.
City officials talked about rolling out a new digital scheduler that would plug into the payroll system and give managers better data on who was working which hours.
Then the project was quietly scrapped because of what the city called a contractual issue, with no clear replacement plan. In an era when most workers can see their shifts on a phone app, Oakland’s most expensive hours are still tracked in a way that makes real oversight difficult.
Worker fatigue and risks for law enforcement
The consequences go beyond wasted money. Sleep scientists have shown that long work weeks and chronic fatigue dull judgment and slow reflexes, which is worrying in any job and particularly dangerous when the tired worker is carrying a gun and driving a patrol car through city traffic.
Earlier city audits found that police policies about rest periods and limits on consecutive work days existed on paper, yet auditors could not verify that those safeguards were actually enforced. Dolan’s schedule, with stretches of nineteen days in a row, suggests those limits remain more theory than practice.
Community impact and public services in Oakland
Community advocates like Cat Brooks see a larger trade off. Brooks, who leads the Anti Police-Terror Project, has warned that every dollar poured into unchecked overtime is a dollar that does not reach youth programs, housing support or mental health teams that might prevent crime in the first place.
Her question lingers for many residents stuck in traffic by potholes or staring at closed signs on recreation centers “What happens to the rest of our community members who need social services, who need departments to be open?”
Police overtime reform and accountability
At the end of the day, Oakland’s overtime story is really about whether a modern city can see clearly where its public money goes and what it gets in return. Technology alone will not fix that, but a police department that still struggles to track its own hours and document its most expensive work is asking residents to take too much on trust.
The report was published by the Oakland City Auditor.
