From time to time, Pink Slip has opined about business malfeasance. I’ve always been particularly intrigued by stories about those with their hands in the till. The construction company accountant who pilfered enough to pay for Burt Bacharach to perform at her brother’s wedding. The kids hockey league treasurer who bought a fancy SUV and a ton of Pandora jewelry. And we, of course, just learn about the ones who get caught. I’m guessing that because so many don’t get caught, those who do get caught thought they’d get away with it. So they cadge the first bit of money, and no one seemed to notice. On to the next.
That construction company bookkeeper? She managed to take home nearly $7 million before she got found out. That’s a ton of not noticing. No wonder she thought it was safe to hire Burt Bacharach.
The latest caught-in-the-cookie jar scandal isn’t about the direct theft of company funds. It’s about the indirect theft of taxpayer money at the hands of dozens of Massachusetts state police.
There are roughly 2,300 state troopers in Massachusetts – plus or minus – and these days, with all the early retirements, it’s mostly minus. In 2017, their average salary was a bit under $150K, and as many as 300 state police officers hauled in over $200K.
Those salaries are shockingly large. This may be a slightly apples/oranges comparison (mean vs. median), but as far as I can tell, the average statie salary was more than double that earned by Boston cops. And those statie salaries were jacked up by lucrative overtime gigs.
Not that Boston cops don’t get their own overtime opportunities. Worksites around here require police officers rather than guys holding flags. And those police officers are paid a boatload more than flagmen.
But the Massachusetts State Police are something else, entirely. Some of those guys hauling in the really big bucks? Turns out, a lot of them were collecting a ton of overtime, but they weren’t exactly working those hours they were being paid for.
The other day, three staties were arrested in their homes by none other than the FBI. Indictments are expected shortly for another 10 overtime thieves, with more anticipated. And yet another just pleaded guilty, accepting a prison term of only 12-18 months and agreeing to co-operate with the investigation that’s so far got dozens of staties under a major cloud. A number of those under the cloud are retiring, hoping that, if worse comes to worst, they can keep their lucrative pensions even if they’ve been caught doing the overtime cheat.
Among the tricks that these rogue cops had up their sleeves were submitting “ghost” tickets that made it seem that they’d been working. Technology was what helped nab these guys. Radio transmissions were checked that indicated that the cars that were used during the overtime shifts were parked, say, in the staties’ driveways doing nuthin’, rather than patrolling the Mass Pike saving lives.
(I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those who gets caught is someone who lived near my sister in her old neighborhood. We used to laugh about how often we’d all spot a state police patrol car parked in front of a building at the corner of the street. Maybe the trooper was just “working” overtime.)
I hope they throw the book at all of these aholes. Here you’ve gotten yourself a job that’s pretty well paid to begin with, and that comes with something that’s gone dodo bird in the public sector: a pension. And it’s a pension that you can collect after just 20 years on the job.
Yes, I recognize that there are stresses associated with being a police officer of any stripe: working irregular hours, dealing on occasion with highly charged and often dangerous situations, having to carry a gun… Still, not a bad job.
And then you go and blow it by stealing. Enjoy your time in the stir, boys. As for your pensions? You can get out of it what you put in, with interest, even. But, sorry, I don’t want any of you sitting around getting a monthly check for doing nothing. You’ve already been doing plenty of that.
I’m sure that there are some fine people who are Massachusetts State Police officers. But there are plenty of them who swagger around in their jackboots, intimidating citizens, swinging their weight around. My one and only close encounter with a statie tells me that there’s at least one. And from what I hear from friends on their one and only close encounters with staties tells me that there are lot more. (I know that they can be swaggering goons in their own right, but when it comes to local police officers, all of my experiences have been just fine. BPD were wonderful to me when, decades ago, my apartment was broken into. More recently, my cart – full of groceries – lost a wheel in the Stop & Shop parking lot, and the police officer on duty offered to drive me home. On the other hand, one did yell at me when I was jaywalking, getting on his speaker and bellowing, “Lady, don’t you do that again.” Admittedly, it was a more riskier jaywalk than my norm.)
Anyway, here’s my statie story:
A decade ago, I was in a minor accident with a delivery van. As luck would have it, it was while turning off a road – Storrow Drive – patrolled by staties. While making my turn, the van veered into my lane creaming the side of my car. Enter the statie.
He took one look at the situation, one look at my Beetle, one look at the poor schnook driving the delivery van, and, well, I might as well have been waving a flag that said Anti-police Lesbians for Hillary. I started to speak, and he told me to be quiet. And not politely. He asked the van driver what had happened.He gave his side of the story, and when I started to give mine, the cop started yelling at me, telling me that if I was lucky, the company that owned the van didn’t sue me. Huh?
I started to go into self-defense mode, verbal edition, and then I took my own look at the situation. A big, burly guy in his Sam Browne belt and jackboots, just looking for some excuse not just to berate me, but to concoct some BS excuse to arrest me for disrespect or whatever he was going to come up with. I had visions of him throwing me up against the side of my car and cuffing me.
I put my claimin the hands of my insurance company and found out that the cop hadn’t bothered to file a report. I did call his barracks and told them what had happened, and they told me that I had been in the right: it was okay to make a left turn from the lane I was in, not okay for the van to veer into my lane, and not okay for the cop not to have filed a report. But I ended up not pursuing anything. I didn’t return a call from my insurance company when they were going to battle for me. I just went and paid the deductible. Too small potatoes to get into a fight over. And the van driver seemed to be a nice enough fellow, and I really didn’t want him to lose his job over a minor accident. I should have raised more of a stink over that cop – he was really bad news – but I took the coward’s way out.
Wish I’d gotten his name. Sure wouldn’t mind finding out that he’s one of the overtime bad guys.
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
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