Boston police overtime topped $100M for second straight year
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Boston Police Department overtime spending has nearly doubled in the last decade, topping $100 million for the first time in 2024 and staying there last year.
Why it matters: Critics say the sustained surge in police overtime goes beyond budget anomalies and shows structural problems in how the department is staffed and scheduled.
By the numbers: BPD overtime spending has grown 65% since 2015, an analysis of city records shows.
- Overtime spending was between $61 million and $67 million from 2015 to 2017.
- The number spiked to $77.9 million in 2018.
- The first year with more than $100 million spent on BPD overtime was 2024, at $103.2 million.
- Overtime spending fell slightly last year to $101.7 million.
The big picture: The costs concentrate on individual officers.
- Nearly 100 officers a year earn $100,000 or more in overtime alone.
- In 2025, Lt. Stanley Demesmin collected $236,961 in overtime and Capt. Timothy Connolly logged $228,924.
State of play: The department has shed 208 full-time-equivalent positions, a 7.2% decline, over the last five years.
- The lack of bodies forces districts to rely on mandatory overtime to meet minimum shift requirements.
The intrigue: The city charter says overtime can be used only as an emergency measure, but it's become standard operating procedure to use overtime to cover non-emergency shifts.
- Mayor Michelle Wu and her predecessors have come under fire for setting aside far too little funding for overtime in the city budget, only to blow past that amount once a budget is approved.
- The City Council wants to hold a hearing looking into how police overtime works in Boston.
What they're saying: Accurately budgeting for the real cost of police overtime would look like a massive increase to the BPD budget, and that would be hard to explain to residents, according to Wu.
- "It would be seen as a 20 to 30 percent increase in that budget, which is not palatable, and it's hard to get that nuance out," Wu told the Globe this month.
Between the lines: Hiring more officers to fill non-emergency shifts hasn't historically helped.
- A 2023 ACLU report found that higher staffing levels correlate with higher overtime costs.
- In 2010, BPD had 2,900 officers and spent $40 million on overtime. By 2020, it had more than 3,050 officers and spent $74 million on overtime.
