A Houston police officer who racked up more than $170,000 in overtime writing tickets in 2024 has been transferred out of the traffic division, the Chronicle has learned through an open records request.
Around a week after testifying in court about a jaywalking ticket he wrote, Officer Matthew Davis was transferred to the patrol division after an eight-year stint as a traffic officer, the records show.
Officials with the Houston Police Department declined to comment about Davis’ transfer and he couldn’t be reached for comment. The Chronicle requested the reason for the transfer, but the agency didn’t provide it.
An August Chronicle investigation found Davis collected more in overtime than his base salary every year since at least 2020, and was previously disciplined for participating in an overtime scheme involving fabricated witness claims on traffic tickets.
“He doesn’t belong on traffic, because he was abusing the system in my opinion,” said Anthony Osso, a high-profile defense attorney who represented Daragh John Carter in court over the jaywalking ticket. “He stopped my client for exercising his First Amendment rights.”
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Davis has twice been disciplined for fraudulent overtime practices, including once in 2012 for a scheme with three other officers to use ticket writing to draw more overtime money.
Davis received a 30-day suspension in 2012 after investigators determined he participated in an overtime scheme with three other officers, in which they falsely cited each other as witnesses on tickets so they’d get called into court more frequently.
The four veteran officers collected nearly $1 million in combined overtime pay through the scheme between 2008 and 2012, according to a Chronicle article from September 2012.
Then, in 2013, department leaders handed down a 15-day suspension (later reduced to a five-day suspension on appeal) after allegations that Davis had been working a second job at the same time he was claiming overtime for his job as a police officer, according to his personnel file.
See here for more on abuse of overtime, and here for more on that weird jaywalking case. I’m glad something happened as a result of that story on HPD’s massive overtime budget. This is what I’m talking about when I say that if we really want efficiency and less “waste” in our city’s budget, we really need to apply the same tactics and techniques for identifying and eliminating said waste to the single biggest part of the budget, the public safety part of it. Unless we don’t actually want that, in which case we can keep on doing what we’re doing.
Also, too, how many times does this guy, or anyone like him, have to be disciplined for committing fraud against his employer before they fire him? I know it’s not that simple, this is all addressed in the collective bargaining agreement between the city and HPD. And hey, as someone who considers himself pro-labor, I don’t as a rule want to make it easier for employers to fire people. But you’ve got to draw a line somewhere.