I love how the Chicago Sun-Times makes it sound like a crime for a person to work the streets as a Chicago cop all his life and then after retiring...he continues to work for extra pay!
Why not do a fucking news story on how a million or so shitheads never work a day in their life in Chicago, get a free place to live, a nice free government monthly check, food stamps, free medical, free utilities, free cell phones, FREE FREE FREE for doing nothing other than breeding criminals, drinking, smoking dope and being a plight on the working people! OH - The Sun-Times couldn't do a news story on that! Oh No!
WRITE THESE SUN-TIMES DRIVERS TICKETS EVERY CHANCE YOU GET - NO BREAKS!
For 54 retired Chicago cops, retirement has meant leaving the police department but continuing to work as police officers — for the city of Chicago.
They now get paychecks from City Hall — on top of their city pensions. And they’re not breaking any laws.
The officers retired from the Chicago Police Department in the past 28 years. Now ranging in age from 51 to 86 years old, they’ve gone to work for a separate, not-well-known police force that’s part of the city’s Department of Aviation.
The Chicago Department of Aviation Police force has 272 unarmed officers — including the 54 Chicago Police retirees — who help patrol O’Hare Airport and Midway Airport. According to City Hall, their purpose is to “augment and support” the police department.
The double-dipping by the police retirees is legal because they’re getting their pensions from the Chicago Police pension fund, while their latest jobs are covered by a separate city pension plan.
The retired officers who now work for the aviation police cannot get a second city pension, according to Terrance Stefanski, executive director of the city Municipal Employees’ pension fund.
Most of the police retirees who’ve been hired by the aviation department are working part-time. But they’re still taking home an average of $81,470 a year from their city pensions and paychecks combined, records show.
Altogether, the double-dipping cops are getting $2.5 million a year in pension payments on top of the $1.9 million in salary they’re paid by the aviation department.
Even though the city of Chicago is strapped for cash, City Hall defends the police retirees’ double-dipping. The salaries of aviation police officers “are funded by airport revenues” and thus aren’t “a burden to local taxpayers,” says Karen Pride, a spokeswoman for the aviation department, an agency that has been cited by the city’s inspector general’s office as having paid millions of dollars in “excessive overtime” to its police force three years ago.
Pride says there might even be some savings to the city because the officers hired after retiring from the police department “are certified law-enforcement officers, thus eliminating the need and costs for basic law-enforcement training.”
Six of the officers joined the aviation department within a week of retiring from the Chicago Police Department, according to city records, which also show:
† Thirteen of the 54 who retired from one department and went to work for the other now are paid more than $100,000 a year from their salaries and pensions.
† John A. Guarnieri, 63, a retired police commander who began working for the aviation police in March, has the highest combined income of any of the retired Chicago cops now working for the aviation police. Guarnieri’s salary as an aviation police sergeant is $49,668 a year. His annual police pension is $84,062, giving him an annual income of $133,730.
† Thirty-one of the 54 police retirees work part-time for the aviation police, making a total of anywhere from $22,000 a year to $91,179, including salary and pension. As part-timers, they aren’t eligible for overtime.
† The city expects to pay its 272 aviation police officers $14.6 million this year. It has paid them $309,344 in overtime in the first five months of this year. Last year, the overtime tab for the aviation police was $850,000.
The city has cut back on aviation police overtime since city Inspector General Joseph Ferguson found “excessive overtime” totaling more than $2.2 million during a 12-month span in 2007 and 2008. Many aviation police officers, Ferguson found, had been working double shifts, often filling in for colleagues who’d called in sick. Ferguson’s audit also found that overtime wasn’t equally shared among the officers.
Separately, four African-American aviation police officers who aren’t Chicago Police retirees have filed a discrimination lawsuit in federal court that claims that they and other black officers have been shortchanged on overtime, work assignments and promotions. The city has paid two law firms $98,414 to fight the ongoing case.
Besides the Department of Aviation Police and the Chicago Police Department, the city also uses a private company, Universal Security Inc., to provide unarmed guards at O’Hare and Midway under a five-year, $31 million contract that began in 2007. There also are federal security forces at the airports, including officers from the Transportation Security Administration.
The city created the aviation police force in 1988 to patrol the airport’s perimeters, among other duties. Officials say they’ve never examined whether the city could save money by eliminating the aviation police and turning over their duties to Chicago Police.
