The Durham Police Department employee who claimed more than an entire year’s worth of overtime pay has been fired:

A Durham police officer in the center of an overtime scandal that led to the retirement of a senior officer was fired Wednesday, city officials announced this morning.

Alesha Robinson-Taylor has been on administrative leave with pay since Sept. 30, when a city audit into her claims of overtime was released.

Another police employee, Deputy Chief B.J. Council, has submitted retirement papers as a result of her approval of the $62K in overtime pay. But what about those higher up in the inept management of the department. What price will they pay for their callous disregard for taxpayers’ money? None, apparently.

Any dolt with two brain cells to rub together should have known that a person making $52,665 and claiming $62,583 in extra income via overtime was engaged in some kind of scam. So, either the police department hierarchy actually doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together, or they didn’t really care that $62,583 (that’s about 25 homeowners’ property tax, by the way) was being stolen from taxpayers. My guess is the latter.

I say that as someone who once was instructed to watch overtime like a hawk when I was managing editor at The Herald-Sun. It was not a tough task. Each month I got a spread sheet showing how much overtime the newsroom had claimed, and those hours and dollar amounts were compared to my overtime budget. If we were over budget, we’d cut back. If we were under budget, then things were OK. If someone looked like they were padding their OT, they were shown the door.

Did the Durham Police Department have this simple oversight mechanism in place? From what’s been reported, they did. Chief Jose Lopez, Deputy Chief Council and others have said they saw the overtime claims in advance but approved them anyway, thinking some other person in the chain of command must have given the OT their blessing.

Let’s put on our thinking caps, here. If you were an honest employee and saw something obviously amiss, but you decided that it would be unwise to make an issue of it. what does that say about the culture of the organization in which you work? There are many things in this affair that should make our City Council, City Manager, City Attorney and maybe prosecutors, too, very interested in looking further into it. But I won’t hold my breath.

But here’s the kicker. Three people are now doing the job of Robinson-Taylor, as if the problem was that she was overworked. The PD has actually been rewarded for its incompetence!