Back on the 6th, I wrote that the lawyers were firing back at the cops in the “blame game� over how much OT some officers were racking up, claiming that they were the ones manipulating the system, not the lawyers. Well, it looks like the evidence is with the sharks lawyers on this one. A memo has surfaced from a senior officer, informing Chief “Acronym� Hurtt that officers are manipulating the system to get more OT. And it’s in such a simple way, I have to wonder why no one saw it coming. Or maybe if.

Officers, who get overtime when they testify in court outside their regular shifts, typically are assigned one day a week to attend Municipal Court, and the tickets they write are set for hearings on that day.

[Captain Michael] Luiz’s memo didn’t concern how many officers testify in trials. Rather, it raised an alarm about officers working with others they knew had different assigned court days so they could get more overtime. The memo described the system by which officers pair up with others assigned different court days.

“They then issue citations and place both officers’ names on each other’s citations as witnesses,” Luiz wrote. “This scheme allows officers to attend court everyday of the week.”

Was this costing the city money? You betcha.

“This practice, in my view, is costing the Department tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary court overtime expenses.”

And Captain Luiz ought to know. He is, er, make that was, in charge of the Traffic Enforcement Division of HPD.

The Luiz memo, sent to Hurtt in January 2005, is the first indication that a high-ranking police official had concerns . . . . City Controller Annise Parker, who is supervising a performance review of the department’s overtime policies…in recent weeks has focused the effort on the officers who were paid the highest amounts. The review isn’t finished, but she said it’s clear now to the auditors “that there is no effective control of overtime at the department.”

So how did HPD respond to this concern for the taxpayer’s wallet? About like you’d expect – they took his job away. Oh, he didn’t lose his job…. It’s just that someone else does it now.

The accident investigators, who deal with freeway collisions and other serious wrecks as well as routine traffic enforcement, have since moved to a new unit known as the Mobility Incident Management Division, outside Luiz’s command.

It was pretty gutsy of him to bring it up, considering that he had to know his memo wasn’t going to be received well.

Luiz, who was concerned about exceeding his overtime budget, also wrote that his predecessor had raised similar concerns but had been overruled by higher-ranking commanders.