Rochester spent $15 million on police overtime last year, as officers logged significantly more hours to staff festivals, parades and other special events.
The $2 million year-over-year increase for the fiscal year ending June 30, came after the department had managed to reduce overtime the year before. It’s unclear how overtime is tracking through the first half of this fiscal year.
Staffing shortages that began during the COVID-19 pandemic often are cited by the administration as fueling overtime hours, including sometimes mandatory overtime to fill in the gaps in personnel. But in the 2025 fiscal year, staffing shortages remained a consistent 24% of overtime hours, while special event overtime rose by 14,389 man hours and accounted for more than 33% of hours worked.
For the past several years, WXXI News has tracked the historic rise in police overtime costs. During that time, staffing numbers dropped, crime spiked, and the opportunities to take overtime, paid at time-and-a-half, became plentiful.
Those figures hit a peak of $16 million in the 2023 fiscal year, although that number was partly due to a new labor contract with the Locust Club, which included backpay. The final cost dropped the next year before rising again.
Figures for the first half of the 2026 fiscal year were not immediately available.
Special event overtime differs from other categories of overtime due to senior members of the department having first dibs in collecting the hours. That agreement is laid out in the department’s official policies. That opens opportunity for officers to inflate their pay in the latter years of their career, in turn translating to an increased pension pay upon retirement. Pensions are calculated from the three highest years of consecutive earnings.
In 2022, Rochester hit a milestone as its first officer crossed the threshold of making $250,000 in a year. In the 2025 fiscal year, 15 officers exceeded that threshold. The top three highest paid members of the department made over $300,000 respectively.
For those top-paid officers, the vast majority of overtime was collected via special events or covering personnel shortages.
All of the top 10 highest paid officers on the force are past the 20-year mark for retirement eligibility.
In all, 27 officers clocked more than 1,000 hours of overtime in the 2025 fiscal year.
In a provided statement from the city of Rochester, the amount of special event overtime was attributed to the city’s continued recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. It also pointed to declining trends in violent and property crime as evidence of an effective tactic toward police payrolls.
“There are so many complexities around police overtime,” the statement reads. “Ultimately, the city’s top priority is keeping our community safe, and, as we shared in last week’s public safety press conference, our work continues to pay returns.”
A spokesperson from the city noted that many special event overtime hours are reimbursed by businesses or events which request police presence. That means those hours aren’t directly funded by city taxpayers.
But Rochester City Councilmember Mitch Gruber, chairman of the body’s finance committee, noted that doesn’t mean taxpayers are off the hook. Rather, the high overtime hours translate to heightened costs for retirement and pension funds long-term.
“The Evans administration has to sharpen their pencils and make some decisions,” Gruber said. “It may be that the cost for these kinds of services has to go up because of the incredibly high cost of pension and retiree costs, and the way that it is making our budget incredibly difficult in the coming years.
“It may be that we have to start saying no to some of these requests coming to us,” he continued. “It may be that there has to be renegotiation with the Locust Club to ensure that these kinds of special events are spread equally across both people who are coming up upon retirement and people who are at the beginning of their careers.”
Locust Club president Geoff Wiater did not return a request for comment.
There is little standing in the way of senior officers collecting as much overtime as possible during the latter years of their career.
“An officer is free to sign up for as much overtime as they want,” said Rochester police Capt. Greg Bello. “We can't tell somebody they've worked too much unless there's an issue that that identifies itself, that there’s a safety issue associated with them working.”
The question of the rising costs of police overtime is a subject under review by the Rochester Police Accountability Board. In a provided statement, Executive Director Lesli Myers-Small said the agency has raised questions of long-term financial stability.
“The recurring nature of these variances raises important questions about budgeting assumptions, deployment practices, and long-term fiscal sustainability,” the statement reads.
The data reviewed by the PAB is department-wide and did not look at officer-level data, which WXXI News obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request.
Bello said that although special event overtime has become the key driver of the past year’s expenditures, meeting the shortage of police officers is still critical. The department is currently budgeted for 728 officers. In the past fiscal year, it had 651 on payroll, not including those that were on medical or administrative leave, or have since retired. That's a drop of 12 officers from the previous year.
Despite that, Bello said that the department has not had to mandate overtime in the past fiscal year.
“We've been able to improve our operations enough where people are volunteering to stay, and it's not just the senior person that's taking the overtime over and over and over again,” Bello said.
The exception to that rule, he said, is special event overtime.
For Gruber, the city councilmember, the issue at hand is not solely a matter of dealing with a staffing shortage but rather ensuring the city’s long-term financial stability.
“At the end of the day, we cannot allow for pension and retiree costs to prevent us from providing services day to day, and that is the direction we're trending towards,” he said. “So, there has to be something significant done.”
