WALSH: PROTESTS BEHIND OT COSTS
Uptick in rallies means more work for police
Escalating police overtime costs are the price of doing business in an era of political upheaval, Mayor Martin J. Walsh said.
“Our first priority is keeping the public safe. I mean, obviously, I’d love to see the overtime costs way down, but we have to keep the public safe and we can’t do anything about free speech. If people want to protest and rally, it’s our responsibility to keep them safe. We saw what happened in Charlottesville. We don’t want a situation like that to happen in Boston,” Walsh told the Herald yesterday.
Three people were killed, including a woman run down by a white supremacist and two Virginia state troopers who died in a helicopter crash, and nearly 20 other people injured in August at a Unite the Right rally at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville that spun out of control when white nationalists and counterprotesters clashed.
Walsh was responding to a Herald story Friday that city employees cashed in $106.9 million in overtime in 2017 — $7 million more than the previous year — predominantly because Boston drew a series of anti-Trump protest events such as the 2017 Women’s March and Immigration Rally, while conservatives staged the Free Speech Rally that attracted thousands of Trump opponents who tried to shut it down.
“We had the so-called Free Speech Rally on Boston Common. That took a lot of resources,” Walsh said. “We were coming off the heels of Charlottesville so we were a little more intense there. The following one was a little less, but we still had resources there. There seems to be a lot more rallies and protests. It’s today — people wanting to express themselves. We’ve always had them, but they’re a little more polarized today.”
The second-term mayor insisted his administration has cut back on OT in recent years. “It did go up a little bit this (fiscal) year. If you take away the big events, it’s probably average,” he said. “We watch it, monitor it, monthly almost, just to make sure that the police and fire and other overtime isn’t over the top. We get concerned, obviously, about paying out large amounts of money.”
The Herald reported that city workers pulled in nearly $1.6 billion in 2017 — an $11 million, or 1 percent, increase from the previous year. Walsh attributed “a lot of it” to contractually obligated retroactive checks.
Ten city employees made more than $300,000 compared to Walsh’s $175,000, while 500 tipped the pay scale at more than $200,000.