New York, NY – 90 Precinct Officer Creates Overtime App

New York, NY – A Williamsburg beat cop frustrated by complex overtime rules taught himself computer programming to develop a smartphone app that does the tricky math automatically.

“It is just one of those things I saw a need for,” said Police Officer David Doxsee, who has been with the NYPD for four years and is assigned to the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg.

“I can’t tell you how many times I had a detail that involved overtime, and at the end of the night, I was scratching my head trying to figure how much overtime to put in.”

The app, called the Cop’s Overtime Calculator, is now the talk of cops assigned to extra duty around Zuccotti Park and other Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which so far have cost the NYPD more than $7 million in overtime in the past two months, sources said.

Depending on their rank, cops have regular shifts of eight hours and 35 minutes or eight hours and 57 minutes, with every minute worked beyond considered overtime.

“The math gets a little frustrating,” Doxsee said, adding that it’s common to see cops counting on their fingers at the station house when they fill out their overtime forms.

Since releasing the app, Doxsee has gotten about 1,500 downloads — mostly from New Yorkers but also from as far away as California and Britain, he said..