DEAR EDITOR:

A couple of Friday’s ago, David Skolnick’s headline article addressed overtime usage of the Youngstown Police department. Last year, 15 officers in the department made over $50K in overtime pay and one officer worked over 2,700 hours of overtime which paid him over $150K. This number of overtime hours, plus regular hours, is equivalent to working over 13 hours per day, 7 days a week for an entire year. Try working those hours for a month and see how productive you are at your nonpublic safety job.

I don’t take issue with the dedication of our police officers, or the fact that they’ve made this extra money, I do have a problem with management that allows an individual to work more hours of overtime than regular time (2,080 hours) and allows this to happen year after year. Using overtime to excess is not a “public safety” solution to understaffing.

The police chief and mayor know that they have a staffing-level problem and hope that the “cadet program” will help solve it. In the interim, has the city sat down with the police union and tried to negotiate over what both sides should consider a public safety issue? Have the chief and mayor talked with the agencies and jurisdictions that hire our policemen away? Is money the only issue?

Perhaps Youngstown is due for a DOGE-type review, of at least, its police department.

JOE PARSONS

Youngstown