Dozens of current and former Highway Patrol officers have been charged with racking up more than $226,000 in phony hours in an overtime fraud scheme, California’s attorney general said.
The charges announced Thursday stem from aBetween 2016 and mid-2018, 54 officers recorded hours of phony overtime while patrolling high-occupancy traffic lanes or providing protection to state transportation workers in construction zones, prosecutors said.
Highway patrol officials didn’t immediately respond Thursday afternoon to a call seeking comment on the charges. Charges were filed earlier this month and the officers were booked by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department this week, according to a statement from the attorney general’s office. "Trust is a critical part of successful law enforcement," Attorney General Rob Bonta said in the statement. "These defendants disregarded the law through their alleged actions and did so without thought of how their conduct would impact the California Highway Patrol or the community that trusted them to protect and serve."
The highway patrol said in early 2019 that it had temporarily relieved "dozens" of officers from duty while it investigated whether they had billed the state for hundreds of hours of suspected bogus overtime costing about $360,000, according to news accounts at the time. They said at the time that the abuse seemed to be isolated to officers covering the Los Angeles area and the agency had changed its overtime practices in response.
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