Do People Know Most LAPD Officers Work Three Days a Week?

The crypto guy who got leg-lengthening surgery, the mayor barely anyone remembers, and the officers who entered their hearts and stayed forever.

Lots of police officers work side jobs. Mostly in private security. I think most people are familiar with this dynamic. The vast majority of departments allow it and the oversight of this work is not particularly intense.

But sometimes these side quests can lead officers down strange paths!

Take this story that I first saw in the LA Times over the weekend about Adam Iza, the 24-year-old inventor of a “neural network for crypto” called Zort.

Adam Iza, after becoming rich, hired a bunch of active LA Sheriff’s Department deputies to moonlight as his personal security team and also — according to federal prosecutors — threaten, arrest and rob his enemies. Wow!

Anyone lucky enough to serve on this jury is going to crush at parties forever. Speaking of parties, Iza threw one at his house in Bel-Air that allegedly went so badly that he had his bodyguards, which included LASD deputies, hold the party planner at gunpoint while he stole the party planner’s phone and used it to send himself $25,000!

These active deputies also allegedly:

• Pulled over the party planner and arrested him for drug possession as Iza came by and chatted with them — then booked the party planner, took a picture of his mugshot and sent it to Iza as proof!

• Called in a tip to have Narcotics officers raid the party planner’s house!

• Sought and received a signed warrant from a judge to ping the cell phone location of a guy who Iza thought had stolen a laptop from him — then told Iza where the guy was!

• Conspired with Iza to have a deputy’s brother to assault and rob someone of a different laptop! (Or maybe the same laptop — there were too many and I lost track. When they do the film adaptation it should just be one laptop.)

And more! At least six deputies have been removed from duty so far over all this. Here’s Iza bragging about paying law enforcement officers to do felonies for him:

The background there is what makes Telegram an elite messaging app. Implicating yourself in federal crimes… but cute!!

I also liked this excerpt from the federal affidavit. This is how me and my friends talk:

Anyway, the crypto guy now says he needs to be released pretrial because he is about to die from a cosmetic leg-lengthening procedure. Something I learned from the article is that you need to get your leg-lengthening rods taken out within a year or you’ll develop “painful boils” and they will possibly kill you. Stop putting off that rod removal appointment!!

I got all this from the affidavit, the LA Times article, and this other article from crypto news site Cointelegraph. Please give both of the articles a nice big click.

Anyway, all this got me thinking: these deputies sure have a lot of time for their side hustle! Imagine how good my newsletter would be if I could really focus on it like that!

But then I remembered that the normal full-time work schedule for most LASD patrol officers is four days a week, ten hours a day. That means they have a long weekend every week, which gives you some extra time to spend with family, or moonlight as a henchman for Gen Z Al Capone Who Has Leg Rod Poisoning.

And all that got me wondering how many people know that the normal schedule for most LAPD officers… is three days a week.

That’s the standard full-time work schedule for patrol officers — three days a week, twelve hours a day. They call it 3/12. Detectives and admin officers work 4/10, but most of the force is on 3/12.

Here’s how it works, according to a deleted account on the r/police subreddit:

Pretty embarrassing for me if a lot of people do know about this, because I didn’t until I had worked at City Hall for over a year.

But given all of the discourse we’ve enjoyed together around generalized crime anxiety, police violence, response times, low staffing rates, and the billion-dollar officer salary increase that has brought the city to financial peril — all of which are relevant in some way to the three-day workweek — I do sincerely wonder why it hasn’t come up more often.

It turns out that LA had an entire mayoral race where the 3/12 schedule was a major issue — in this very millennium.

The foes clashed, Jerry! That headline is from May 3rd, 2001. James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa had made it to the general election for Mayor, and both had sought the endorsement of the LA Police Protective League (LAPPL), the union that represents rank-and-file LAPD officers.

The LAPPL had been pushing for a 3/12 schedule for years, and they know an opportunity when they see it. As part of the endorsement process, they asked both candidates to sign a pledge to implement 3/12 if they were elected.

Hahn signed it. Villaraigosa didn’t. Hahn got the police union endorsement. They paid for a bunch of ads against Villaraigosa. And:

Hahn had promised the LAPPL that he would put their new work schedule forward within 90 days of taking office. True to his word, he did it on Day 80 — eight days after 9/11.

The proposed new schedule met with pushback from just about every non-LAPPL corner, including within LAPD leadership.

Raquelle de la Rocha, president of the Police Commission that oversees LAPD policy, said that 3/12 was the most problematic of all the schedules LAPD had studied: “When officers work 12-hour shifts, fatigue sets in, which represents [a] severe public safety concern.” Hahn soon removed de la Rocha from the Police Commission — replacing her as president with a bright-eyed young mall developer named Rick Caruso, a few months away from cutting the ribbon at The Grove and a supporter of 3/12.

Bernard Parks, the Chief of Police at the time, also strongly opposed the change before and after Hahn’s election. After it was implemented he called it a “major failure.” Perhaps relatedly, the LAPPL also wanted Hahn to fire Chief Parks — and Hahn soon did, with Rick Caruso’s help.

The 3/12 schedule eventually came to the LA City Council. It passed 10 to 3, including support from a bright-eyed young Council President named Alex Padilla.

There was no operational argument for the 3/12 schedule except this: the officers really, really wanted it, and city leaders were desperate to recruit and retain more officers.

The department had a shortage of about 1,200 vacant officer positions below its authorized staffing level — roughly the same shortage it faces right now in 2024. Caruso supported 3/12 with that shortage in mind: “If other departments have this, are we losing good people that would otherwise stay with the LAPD?”

Alex Padilla gave the same reasoning: “I believe the flexible work schedule is integral to improving recruitment, retention and morale within the Police Department… Our department cannot stand the loss of police officers at the rate we’ve experienced in the last couple of years.”

But there were plenty of operational arguments against it. Those arguments are nicely summarized in LA Times coverage by Patrick McGreevy in 2006, when Bill Fujioka, the City Administrative Officer released a study of the new schedule.

The study found that:

In the same article, a West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department Captain who had tried the schedule before scrapping it said that officers on 3/12 would show up to work so tired that he would “have to send them to the bunk room for a couple of hours.”

But the study seems to have had zero impact. The 3/12 persisted, untouched. And the 2006 article makes it pretty clear why: the officers were loving it.

“More time to spend with family” was an oft-deployed argument for why 3/12 was good for morale (much more oft than Lake Havasu boat decompression). But the schedule also had another benefit, as laid out by an LA Times opinion contributor:

Which brings us back to where we started. Even though we don’t talk about it much anymore, LAPD patrol officers remain on the 3/12 schedule that James Hahn implemented on behalf of the police union — leaving them more days a week for a second job than they spend on their main job that pays almost six figures right out of the academy.

And moonlighting as private security is as popular as ever. LAPPL leadership has even gotten in on the action — Jamie McBride, an LAPPL director and frequent spokesman, actually owns his own private security company, as the Times recently covered:

McBride also moonlights from his moonlighting as an actor/technical advisor on cop shows and movies. Here he is with Michael Bay on the set of Ambulance (2022):

Anyway, I guess my question is this: did you know most LAPD officers work three days a week?