The City of Raleigh, North Carolina maintains two policies regarding standby duty. The first is Standard Procedure 300-7, which entitles all City employees to eight hours of pay per week while assigned to standby duty. Under 300-7, before being eligible for compensation, City police officers must receive city manager approval for standby pay and an assignment for duty by the chief of police. The other policy is Operating Instruction 1104-3, which simply notes that all sworn officers are subject to recall or standby duty and defers to other City policies with regard to compensation.
In March 2017, after an incident where an employee of the Evidence unit failed to respond to a callback, the City reviewed its standby policies and concluded that several units were not in compliance. Police command staff circulated an internal memo to police officers, reiterating the City’s findings, and noting that the department’s Evidence and Animal Control units were entitled to eight hours of pay per week while on standby duty. Officers working for the Selective Enforcement Unit (SEU) and Homicide Unit were required to work standby duty but did not receive compensation under 300-7. Unlike employees of the Evidence and Animal Control units, SEU and Homicide officers were not specifically approved for standby pay by the city manager, nor assigned standby duty by the chief of police.
Several SEU and Homicide officers filed grievances, arguing that the City violated 300-7 by denying them standby compensation. The grievances were consolidated and heard by the City Civil Service Commission, which denied them. The officers appealed, unsuccessfully, to the trial court, and again to the North Carolina court of appeals.
The appellate court agreed that the City did not violate 300-7 by denying standby pay to the SEU and Homicide officers. The Court rejected the officers’ argument that the two requirements of 300-7 were satisfied because (1) 1104-3 placed all officers on notice of the possibility of standby assignments; (2) 1104-3 was prepared by the chief of police; and (3) 1104-3 was approved by the city manager. The Court determined that 1104-3 did not specifically designate any officers for standby, but rather merely alerted officers to the possibility of such a designation. The City presented evidence that designation under 300-7 required a different process than what was required under 1104-3, including payroll training for supervisors dating back to 1995. The City also presented evidence that requests for standby pay for SEU officers had been denied in the past for noncompliance with 300-7.
The Court concluded that “the petitioners seem to believe that any completion of standby duty without compensation is a violation of 300-7. But this is not the case, and such violations would have occurred only if respondent withheld compensation after first designating petitioners. However, because petitioners’ units were never designated, and 1104-3 does not constitute designation, the City was not mandated to pay them.”
Albert v. City of Raleigh, No. COA23-241, 2023 WL 7320586 (N.C. Ct. App.).