Some Honolulu police still working overtime hours that increase their pay by $100,000 a year
Three years after a city audit revealed rampant overtime at the Honolulu Police Department allowed some officers to increase their pay by more than $100,000, the number of officers filing more than 1,000 hours of overtime a year has increased by almost 500%.
More than 40 Honolulu police officers logged enough overtime last year to double their base salaries, according to HPD records obtained by Civil Beat.
Sgt. Darren Cachola, who retired last month after a turbulent two decades on the force, collected more than 2,400 overtime hours in his last year on the job. Cachola supervised DUI checkpoints that are now subject to a lawsuit claiming HPD officers arrested drivers with no alcohol in their systems.
Officers running these checkpoints had a “one and done” policy, allowing them to shut down a checkpoint after making a single arrest and head home but still be paid for their full shift, according to the lawsuit.
HPD has opened an inquiry into Cachola’s extreme overtime hours, which interim Chief Rade Vanic said raises questions about what he was doing during those hours, who approved them and whether there had been sufficient attempts to see if anyone else was available.
Newly released data shows Cachola logged the third-highest number of overtime hours in the last fiscal year. The data also shows 125 officers logged more than 1,000 extra hours during the same period — an enormous increase from 2021, when less than two dozen officers clocked in that level of extra work.
The officer with the most overtime, Eric Reis, tripled his annual paycheck with more than 2,780 hours of overtime in a single year working as an officer in the Central Receiving Division, which is responsible for processing and detaining people who have been arrested. That’s equivalent to clocking an additional roughly 50 hours every single week, on top of his normal 40 hours.
Vanic is expected to address overtime Wednesday at the next meeting of the Honolulu Police Commission, which oversees HPD.
Ken Silva, the commission chair, said people should earn overtime, provided it’s in accordance with department rules. Those rules, he said, should ensure that extra pay is spread equally across teams.
“There’s times when overtime is going to be necessary and that people that work the hours should get paid for them, according to the rules of their agency,” he said. “But if it’s done arbitrarily and it can be modified in a more equitable way then it should be.”
The police commission had not yet asked HPD about Cachola’s extra hours or what the department is doing to safeguard against employees spiking their pensions with excessive overtime, said Silva, who plans to raise the question at the commission’s next meeting.
It’s unlikely the commission will step in, however. Silva said it’s up to HPD to make sure policies are sufficient to prevent misuse of overtime and people are following the rules.
Staffing Issues
The department relies on overtime, in part, to manage its significant number of vacancies, which has increased by 60% since 2020.
Excessive overtime isn’t new to HPD. In 2020, Civil Beat obtained records that showed more than two dozen officers were doubling their salaries with overtime hours. The 2022 audit found the top 10 earners had collected $4 million in overtime over five years, with one officer making an additional $123,000 on average each year on top of their salary.
As vacancies have gone up, so too has overtime.
“When used strategically, overtime is a true force multiplier, allowing us to put more officers on patrol, increase enforcement to combat violent criminals, and expand our ability to investigate crimes,” Nick Schlapak, president of the police union, said in a statement Sunday. “HPD is down over 460 officers, which means we must either cut services, leave neighborhood beats unfilled, or use overtime to increase the number of officers keeping the island safe.”
Parts of the island struggling the most with staffing also saw the most overtime, according to HPD records. It’s particularly stark in District 8, which encompasses ‘Ewa to Ka‘ena Point. The area has been dealing with a rise in violent crime, but it’s also the most understaffed district with more than 60 vacancies for uniformed officers as of July. HPD recently announced new recruits will be sent to the Westside.
Last year, former HPD Chief Joe Logan pledged a major surge in policing on the Westside, a push that led to a significant increase in traffic citations. Shortly after the surge was announced, patrols in the area were staffed at 100%. But that was mostly achieved with existing officers working overtime.
Officers on the Westside collected more than 115,000 hours of overtime from July 2024 to June 2025. That surpassed any other division of HPD, including the largest patrol area, District 4, where officers worked more than 94,000 overtime hours.
The average officer in District 8 clocked more than 450 hours of overtime last year, according to HPD data. Some earned significantly more than that. Cpl. Christopher Bugarin and Sgt. Tito Perkins each recorded more than 2,000 hours of overtime in between July 2024 and June 2025, putting them in the top 10 across the entire police force.
Bugarin was accused in 2011 of falsifying reports that he was present at a DUI stop when he actually wasn’t in a bid to get more overtime pay. He was charged with falsifying a government record, but the case was later dropped because the court ruled his right to a speedy trial had been violated.
Other divisions have felt the staffing crunch too, resulting in high amounts of overtime. The Central Receiving Division, which handles booking people when they get arrested, has been understaffed and officers have been required to pick up mandatory extra shifts.
The top two overtime earners from last fiscal year were both in this division – Eric Reis and Reynolds Kim. Each earned more than 2,700 hours of overtime. Reis was suspended for 10 days in 2022 for using unreasonable force when he and several other officers forced a detainee onto a bench and tried to take the detainee’s clothes.
As HPD grapples with more than 450 vacancies across the force, Silva said the commission is interested in assessing whether the lack of manpower is driving up overtime hours and how that’s affecting morale and burnout.
High amounts of overtime don’t just impact the individual officers or the department. It has implications for officers’ pensions.
State pensions are calculated using employees’ top three salary years. To address the number of officers spiking their pensions by working excessive overtime in the last years of their employment, the state changed the law in 2012 to exclude overtime from pension calculations. But that only applied to people hired after the law was passed. For officers like Cachola who joined the force prior to 2012, overtime still counts. So he could be making more than $200,000 a year for the rest of his retirement.
In total, HPD’s overtime drove up city pension costs by up to $6 million over five years, according to the 2022 audit.
Oversight Of Overtime
It’s rare that officers face repercussions for abuse of overtime. At least six officers have been disciplined since 2011 for falsifying overtime records, improperly authorizing extra hours or working more than the weekly overtime limits, according to Civil Beat’s Honolulu Police Misconduct Database.
Interim Chief Vanic said that an individual officer racking up a high number of overtime hours isn’t in itself an indicator that they’re abusing the system.
“Am I going to investigate just because it’s a high amount of numbers? No. I would definitely look at, ‘OK, why?’” he said. “Why is that amount of overtime necessary for one individual?
But the 2022 audit pointed to larger problems with HPD’s ineffective management of overtime and led to calls for the department to improve its policies. The department’s policies and procedures for managing overtime were inconsistently interpreted and applied, the audit said, specifically when it came to limits on hours.
After the audit came out, HPD standardized overtime policies across patrol districts, Vanic said. The department also transitioned to a digital system that made it easier for supervisors to see who is earning significant overtime, and they plan on rolling out a new overtime allotment system later this year that would determine which officers have worked the least overtime so they can be prioritized for hours.
HPD also weighed putting a cap on the number of overtime hours officers can work, but that never happened.
HPD’s use of overtime is eligible for a follow-up audit, but the auditor’s office doesn’t plan to take it up this year, according to Jordan Alonzo, administrative officer with the city auditor’s office. It may happen next year.
Silva said overtime policies should be equitable.
“Instead of having only one person that’s getting all of that overtime, is there a way to equitably split that up among a bunch of folks?” he said. “The work still gets done, but it’s not just one person that is reaping the benefit.”
Silva said it’s not up to the commission to make sure the overtime system is operating fairly.
Concerns about excessive overtime and pension spiking haven’t come up at the police commission in the four years that he has served, according to Silva. However, the commission often won’t take up an issue until the department or an outside entity like the state Employees’ Retirement System raises concerns, he said.
“It hasn’t been brought up as an issue for us,” Silva said. “If it doesn’t come to our attention, then typically it means it’s not a problem.”
The commission is intended to be the oversight body for HPD that reviews the department’s budgets and plans, evaluates its leadership and issues recommendations. Liam Chinn, the coalition facilitator at the Reimagining Public Safety in Hawaii Coalition, said the commission isn’t proactive and it lacks a formal process to make sure the department follows through on any recommendations to improve its policies on things like pension spiking and overtime.
“This has contributed to failures in holding HPD accountable for excessive overtime costs,” he said.
Chinn would like to see the commission do more to take on issues like this.
“While the commission has no direct disciplinary authority over officers,” he said, “its limited use of oversight tools such as budget scrutiny or the chief evaluations has allowed excessive overtime to persist without any real checks.”
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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.