EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of The Pay Check, an in-depth look at every dollar earned by 24,000 law enforcement officers across New Jersey in 2019. Find the full database here: The Pay Check.

State Police Superintendent Patrick Callahan oversees New Jersey’s largest law enforcement agency, with 4,000 employees and a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

For responsibilities that span the breadth of the state, he earned $190,000 in 2019, pay that places him in the upper echelon of public officials in New Jersey.

Yet nearly 1,500 local cops and 115 state troopers actually made more money that year than Callahan. They did so largely under the radar of public scrutiny, in departments with as few as 11 officers.

Among them was a lieutenant in Clifton who pulled in nearly $200,000 in overtime, doubling his salary; a police chief in Bernards Township who added $105,000 to his pay by manning traffic details paid by utility companies; and a Teaneck officer who made $8,300 for hours he didn’t even work.

With little notice, police regularly add tens of thousands of dollars to their paychecks through overtime, off-duty jobs monitoring traffic and a raft of contractual perks, NJ Advance Media found during a two-year investigation into the true cost of policing in New Jersey.

Those extra earnings are in addition to the six-figure salary the average officer makes, which is among the highest in the nation and which already accounts for a significant portion of many towns’ annual budgets. But the full scale of police income has long been all but impossible to track, buried in payroll records that 463 local police departments keep separately.

Today, NJ Advance Media is publishing a first-of-its-kind database that captures every dollar earned by each of the state’s 21,000 local police officers and 2,900 state troopers, an effort that involved more than 700 public records requests and a team of reporters.

The Pay Check: Database | Glossary of Terms | How We Did It

Across New Jersey, the average officer made $123,239 in 2019, the most recent year before the disruption of the pandemic. That’s far higher than has previously been disclosed because the state only publishes data on officers’ base salaries — the earnings on which their pensions are based — understating law enforcement’s real price tag.

The review revealed an opaque system of pay that, in departments with lax oversight, permits the most enterprising officers to work exceedingly long hours with little upside to public safety. The investigation also showed potential abuses — officers who put in more hours than their department’s anti-fatigue policies allowed, and officers who were double paid for working extra shifts while already on the clock.

Statewide, 104 cops earned more than $250,000, 13 of whom exceeded $300,000.

Income was the greatest in high-cost North and Central Jersey — particularly in Bergen County, where a typical officer’s compensation reached $151,000. In the highest paid departments, average earnings topped $180,000, on par with a school superintendent.

Of those dollars, 20% came outside of an officer’s regular pay, usually through taxpayer-funded overtime and through off-duty details, in which third parties hire uniformed cops to provide services such as traffic control or security.

But in some departments, the gap was even more striking: In Emerson, officers on average added more than $74,000 to their salaries in 2019. In Plumsted, officers doubled their pay.

And for the highest earners, their sheer number of hours was often staggering: By loading up on extra shifts, there were cops who recorded workweeks of 100 hours or more, or who worked for weeks at a time without a day off. One officer was credited with working 24 hours straight on five occasions.

For this project, NJ Advance Media conducted 59 interviews, including with law enforcement officials, municipal managers, finance directors and experts on policing. It sought comment from dozens of others, including every police officer named in this article, as well as their police departments. If they responded, their comments were included.

The accounting — which captures $2.94 billion in spending — comes as New Jersey continues to try to rein in public-sector benefits that drain government coffers and spur the highest property taxes in the nation. Police now account for as much as 40% of some municipal budgets, which critics charge peels resources from other public needs.

“Somewhere down the line, these towns have to have the will to understand and see that you have to have a greater imagination about what public safety is,” said Jason Williams, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University. “Because otherwise they’re really just wasting the money.”

Patrick Colligan, the president of the New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association, said he makes no apologies for the money cops make. Officers miss Christmases, work midnights, notify relatives of loved ones’ deaths and risk their own lives to protect society, he said.

“I’ll say quite simply, you get what you pay for,” Colligan said. “If you want a mall cop driving around in a car, pay $20 an hour.”

Police unions and chiefs say police departments already have trouble recruiting enough officers and insist it would only be harder if compensation were cut.

“You can’t keep chipping away at the benefits and salary and get the best of the best,” said Chris Wagner of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police, a retired Denville police chief. “You just can’t.”

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Sometimes, it is the department’s own chief who is testing the limits.

In Bernards in Somerset County, Chief Michael Shimsky made $105,758 working off-duty road details. Shimsky logged 863½ hours on them in 2019 — the equivalent of 108 eight-hour workdays.

And that was on top of Shimsky’s $169,000 job overseeing a police force of more than three dozen officers.

Outside jobs are among the most lucrative ways for officers to jack up their earnings in a state known for its neverending construction. If you’ve seen a police cruiser parked alongside a utility project, you’ve seen an extra detail.

While the work is paid for by the contractor that hires the officer, it still impacts the public’s bottom line: Details typically involve companies such as PSE&G, Verizon and American Water, which pass the expense onto consumers through higher utility rates.

The side work can be a sizable portion of officers’ paychecks. Indeed, 25 officers in 12 police departments made more money working outside details in 2019 than they did at their day jobs.

Law enforcement officials say the presence of a cop at a construction site helps public safety, since drivers are more likely to obey the rules if police are there. They cast traffic details as a win for officers and taxpayers, because towns take a cut of the fees that contractors pay and officers can put in extra hours to buy a home, raise a family or put a kid through college.

As young cop, Emerson Police Chief Michael Mazzeo remembered, he worked as a roofer on days off to make ends meet. Extra details are no different, and reward officers who are willing to hustle, he said.

In his Bergen County department, the average officer’s total earnings were nearly $175,000, of which less than $101,000 came in salary. Of the extra income, $63,275 was from outside details. But even his busiest officers, Mazzeo maintained, still “performed admirably” in their regular duties.

“I’ve never heard complaints about them,” Mazzeo said. “They do a good job, so what’s wrong with that?”

Still, many police officials acknowledge traffic details are unglamorous, and often minimal. Critics say not all the work can be justified.

“We have dead ends closed, but they still have a cop there,” said Brian Higgins, a former Bergen County Police chief who is now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Others are more scathing.

“On these details, the officers really don’t do anything. They just sit there,” said Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina professor and former cop who has researched overtime and off-duty jobs. “So why are we paying those officers for just sitting there?”

Extra details are also largely unregulated, with each town setting the rates that contractors must pay — and wide variation in those fees. And companies have little choice but to foot the bills, since the towns require that when there is roadwork, there is an officer in place.

In Teaneck, officers at construction details are guaranteed at least four hours of pay, even if the contractor uses them for just one hour. If officers work more than four hours, the township’s ordinance guarantees them at least eight hours of pay.

At the $85 an hour set by the township, those minimums add up.

Teaneck Officer Constantinos Skoufas earned nearly $75,000 in 2019 through off-duty assignments. Of that, $8,293 were for hours Skoufas never worked but that contractors were still charged for, given the guarantees, municipal records show. And he was just one of 69 Teaneck officers who earned extra money through details that year.

Teaneck police Chief Glenn O’Reilly did not return requests for comment. Skoufas also did not respond.

In other departments, outside jobs are paid at each officer’s overtime rate — 1.5 times their hourly salary — which can add up when it is a high-ranking officer who is signing on.

That was the case with Shimsky in Bernards. He earned $120.43 an hour in the first half of 2019, and $123.44 in the second half on his off-duty jobs.

Shimsky said he lives in Bernards and works “all the time,” even without the traffic details. Shimsky said he does everything above board and gets angry when he reads about other departments where outside work has been abused.

“If my regular job were to suffer, I certainly wouldn’t do the other,” Shimsky said. “If that work is available to me, I will take advantage of it, and I have.”

Township records show that Shimsky largely did his side work on days in which he was on duty, recording details on more than four out of every 10 of his workdays in 2019. On 77 of those days, Shimsky worked details while putting in less than eight hours at his regular job, records show.

Shimsky said that even at a construction site, he remains the police chief and is available if the need arises. His department has a strict policy that prohibits officers from working more than 16 hours straight, and he never exceeded those limits, he said.

“There’s no shenanigans here at all,” Shimsky said.

Across the state, more than 150 police chiefs bolstered their salaries through extra detail work in 2019, including 29 other chiefs who earned $15,000 or more that way, according to NJ Advance Media’s analysis.

Some towns, including Bloomfield and Madison, bar their brass from taking the side work, saying it is inappropriate given their responsibilities and the high salaries they already earn. Colligan, the police officers’ union president, also called it inappropriate.

“Should chiefs be working outside details? No,” Colligan said. “They should be chiefs.”

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In some cases, extra pay for police has been tied to wrongdoing, with faked time sheets or no-show work.

In 2018, Jersey City temporarily halted its off-duty program after a federal investigation revealed widespread corruption. At least a dozen city police officers were convicted of enriching themselves, including former Police Chief Phil Zacche, who admitted accepting $24,000 for security work he did not perform.

But those prosecutions have seen mixed results, with fraud often hard to prove.

In Plainfield, Lt. James Abney and Sgt. Leslie Knight were charged in 2014 with filing false time sheets for overtime and off-duty work, netting them a combined $11,000. But Abney’s case was thrown out after his lawyers argued a convoluted and disorganized payroll system was to blame.

Abney was reinstated in 2019 and received backpay from his suspension. That made him the highest paid cop in New Jersey in NJ Advance Media’s analysis. His gross income in the year? More than $538,000.

He was later promoted from lieutenant to captain, retired from the department in 2021, and was sworn in as the civilian police director on Wednesday.

In an interview earlier this month, Abney said the payout doesn’t account for the hardship he endured as an officer accused of a crime. During his long suspension, the only job he could find paid just $30,000 to $40,000, he said — a pittance of what he made as a cop.

“I went for almost a year where I was unemployed and I didn’t make anything,” Abney said. “I survived because of family and friends and people who cared for me and knew that I was innocent.”

Knight’s case followed its own rocky path that ended in her conviction last month on theft and falsifying records charges. She went to trial in Superior Court after successfully appealing an earlier plea agreement in which she admitted to a lesser offense and agreed to forfeit her job.

She now faces sentencing in March.

Using the Open Public Records Act, NJ Advance Media obtained the timecard records of 14 officers who were among the highest extra earners in New Jersey. In two cases — in Clifton and in Irvington — the records put an officer in two places at once, credited with working shifts that appeared to run alongside each other.

The discrepancies were small — 2 1/2 hours in Clifton and about one hour in Irvington — and city officials blamed clerical mistakes that resulted in those officers being overpaid. Clifton said it planned to dock its officer’s pay to recoup that money.

The timecards also contained other examples of lax oversight, including officers who were recorded working extremely long days, sometimes in violation of their own department’s regulations.

An exhausted cop is a potentially dangerous one, which is why many departments cap the hours officers are allowed to work, often restricting them to 16 hours in a day.

“You’ve got a firearm on there. You might be asked to make a life-or-death decision,” said Audubon Police Chief Thomas Tassi, one of the longest-serving chiefs in the state. “We just think they should be made with a healthy, rested officer. That’s why we have rules on overtime. That’s why we control it.”

In Plumsted in Ocean County, K9 Officer Ryan Nani earned more than $166,500 in 2019, tripling his $56,000 salary thanks to extra details and overtime. That was through some eye-popping hours, though his department has 16-hour limits.

On Aug. 16, 2019, Nani had an out-of-town extra duty job that stretched from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., timecard records show. Immediately after, he started a 12-hour shift at the department that ended at 7 a.m. the next day.

That’s 24 hours in a row, and was one of five occasions in 2019 in which Nani was recorded working an entire 24-hour stretch. On four other days, Nani was credited with working 23 hours, and there were eight instances from 19 to 22 hours in a day.

Plumsted officials declined to comment. Nani did not respond to a request for comment.

Sometimes, long hours are unavoidable given the nature of police work, said Wagner, of the state police chiefs association. But it is incumbent upon departments to ensure their officers aren’t overworking and putting their earnings ahead of public safety, he said.

“There can be a point where it becomes too much,” Wagner acknowledged.

Research has shown that fatigue is a real danger. Tired officers are more prone to get into car accidents, to use force and to fail to de-escalate tense situations, at a time in which the public is demanding greater accountability for police.

Performance tends to “seriously decrease” after about the 12-hour mark, and even further after 16 hours, said Lois James, a professor at Washington State University who studies how fatigue impacts police and other high-stress jobs.

“Policing is a 100%-effort profession,” James said. “We demand officers that are functioning at their best. When we don’t have officers functioning at their best, we run into some huge problems.”

Yet across the state, more than 125 officers in 37 police departments quietly made six figures in addition to their regular pay, including 44 state troopers and local cops from Weehawken to Chatham Borough to Middletown.

Among them was Christopher Kelly Jr., a veteran lieutenant in Clifton who earned $190,477 in overtime in addition to his $183,000 salary.

Timecard records reveal Kelly worked a staggering 319 days that year — 100 days more than called for under the police contract. He took off just two days in both January and December. On three other months, he worked 28 days.

Clifton officials said Kelly, who has since retired, was guaranteed first crack at open shifts due to his seniority. That gave him “the most overtime opportunities,” City Manager Nick Villano said in a statement that did not address written questions by NJ Advance Media of whether that work was excessive.

Other departments praised their highest-earning officers’ work ethics, even as they acknowledged that those hours sometimes got out of hand.

In Irvington, Detective Sheraldine Frazier made $213,370 in 2019, nearly doubling her salary by picking up extra shifts. Another officer, Sgt. Albern Jean-Simon, took home $238,233, including more than $116,000 from extra details and overtime. A third, Michael Scottbey, made $269,867, including almost $160,000 in extra income.

All three had days in which they worked more hours than the department permits, with Jean-Simon recording 20 hours one day, Frazier 17½ hours and Scottbey nearly 17 hours.

But they won plaudits nonetheless from Irvington police officials, who said they are willing to step up when there is a need. Not only does that help the department fill its gaps, but it also spares their colleagues from being forced to come in unwillingly on their days off, officials said.

“Kudos to them that they are willing to work as much as they do, to be honest with you,” said Capt. Frank Piwowarczyk, an internal affairs investigator. “It’s hard work. It’s no free money here.”

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Bernards Lt. Eric Geleta also knows the value of hard work.

On top of his $144,000 salary, Geleta made $104,311 through extra details in 2019.

Those included overnight road projects, in which he said he worked a regular shift in the morning, slept in the afternoon to evening, then headed to the site that night.

Sometimes, he’d start the next day without going to bed again.

Geleta told NJ Advance Media that he has learned to juggle long hours over his 26-year career in law enforcement, and that he plans his day to ensure he is well rested.

“I will never strap a gun to my hip when I’m exhausted,” Geleta said.

But many experts say there is reason to be skeptical of those claims, and they point to other high-wire professions — from doctors to pilots to long-haul truckers — where hours are more strictly regulated.

Some officers “believe they can get no sleep and it’s fine and that it makes them Superman,” said Karen Amendola, the chief behavioral scientist of the National Police Foundation, a nonprofit that studies best practices by police. “That’s their own personal belief, but it is not accurate.”

In New Jersey, the Attorney General’s Office is empowered to set statewide standards for police, but it has not issued any relating to overwork. Spokesman Peter Aseltine said it is the responsibility of municipalities to manage overtime and extra details to ensure they aren’t being abused.

“Nonetheless, we are interested in reviewing The Star-Ledger’s findings and discussing them with law enforcement partners and other stakeholders to see what actions may be needed to address any issues that are identified,” Aseltine said in a statement.

With many aspects of police pay, changes do have to come at the local level, said Marc Pfeiffer, assistant director of Bloustein Local Government Research Center at Rutgers University. But with the sheer number of hours officers work, the state could set baseline caps that would likely carry a lot of public support, Pfeiffer said.

“I can say this probably without contradiction: It is not good for someone to work 100 hours a week,” Pfeiffer said. “When you are in your 95th hour, you probably aren’t in as good a shape as you were in your fifth hour.”

That’s if the public was aware of those hours, or the expense that comes with them.

Higgins, the former Bergen County Police chief now at John Jay College, said he doubts the average person realizes how much police earn when it all comes together.

He’ll hear people talk about an officer who made $100,000 as though it was unusual.

“I shake my head like, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about, buddy,’” Higgins said.

Reporters

Riley Yates is the lead data reporter for NJ.com and The Star-Ledger. He has spent most of his career covering criminal justice.

Katie Kausch is a reporter who covers crime, courts, and breaking news across New Jersey for NJ.com and The Star-Ledger.

Nick Devlin is a reporter on the data and investigations team for NJ.com.

NJ Advance Media reporter Kevin Shea and former reporters Alex Napoliello and Stephen Stirling contributed to this project.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Have a question or a comment about this project? Email the authors at [email protected].

UPDATE: This post was updated Jan. 21, 2022, to reflect James Abney’s swearing in Wednesday as Plainfield police director.