County Officials Refute Newsday’s Story on Sheriff Overtime

Hauppauge, NY – Suffolk County Sheriff Vincent DeMarco and County Executive Steve Levy cited as inaccurate a Newsday story claiming that Sheriff overtime has uncharacteristically spiked in the fourth quarter of 2008 due to the increased usage of Suffolk County Sheriffs to patrol the Long Island Expressway and Sunrise Highway.

Rather than comparing the last quarter of 2008 in overtime figures to the last quarter of 2007, Newsday utilized figures provided by Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association, which compared the third quarter of 2008 to the fourth quarter.

Both the Sheriff and the CountyExecutive had warned Newsday that such a comparison was a faulty way of providing the truth.

Said DeMarco, “Everyone knows that when you compare housing prices, you don’t compare August’s figures to December’s, due to seasonal factors and other intangibles. You must compare December of ‘07 to December of ‘08 to get a clear picture of what the trend is.”

Despite being told that the change from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008 in Sheriff overtime was less than $300,000, Newsday ignored the figure and, instead, used the PBA’s number, showing a $735,000 increase in overtime from the third quarter to the fourth.

“This is misleading,” said Levy, “because the fourth quarter will traditionally have much more of an overtime cost than the third quarter due to the need for extra holiday coverage and the fact that many workers cash out their overtime wages that they may have earned in earlier quarters.”

Levy stated, “The expansion of the Deputy Sheriffs’ role has been a tremendous success. The difference in overtime in the Sheriff’s division is a mere $300,000 from the fourth quarter of ’07 to the fourth quarter of ’08 yet, because of our redeployment of police officers to local patrols, police officer overtime has dropped by more than $500,000. That’s a net gain in anyone’s book. We must also add to that savings the fact that the county avoided the need to hire 80 new officers in an upcoming police class, saving us approximately $8 million over the year.

DeMarco stated, “I’ll take spending $300,000 more in Sheriff overtime to gain us $8.5 million in police savings any time.”

While some of these figures were noted in the Newsday story, the headline, which read “Sheriffs Overtime Spikes after LIE Switch,” gave a false impression of a huge spike in overtime and the story never compared Sheriff overtime from the last quarter of the two years.