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.
Davis is a liar and a thief. He should be prosecuted and incarcerated for the hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars he has taken by fraudulent means. At the very least, he should be on the Brady list and unable to testify in court.
I’ve seen him in court a number of times and contrary to the assessment made above, the judges, prosecutors, and defense attorney’s find him to be a hard working officer. One of the traffic ticket defense lawyers spoke in his defense that the basis for HPD declaring his previous efforts as a scheme was that he was writing tickets with other officers as a safety measure and because the city refused to purchase enough of the laser gun devices.
The attorney pointed out that if other officers were present during the traffic stops of their clients, the attorneys had a legal right to know and be able to call each as a witness. The city took a different approach, claiming safety was not an issue despite statistics to the contrary and their own traffic enforcement division having entire squads write tickets together, all expected to be listed as witnesses for the tickets they partook in writing as a team. As a side reference, the city illegally ordered such officers to refrain from talking to defense lawyers unless specifically given permission by city prosecutors, the move widely acknowledged as a means of pressuring guilty pleas for monetary purposes.
The city couldn’t and didn’t provide a single instance of any such tickets written by this officer for a violation that was conjured up or otherwise fraudulent. It did admit that his productivity was off the charts and far exceeded all but a handful of the 5200 officers in HPD. His union representative offered that he wrote tens of thousands of perfectly valid tickets in the time frame and Tony’s take on the more recent jaywalking ticket aside, as it was explained, his client was indeed jaywalking while exercising those rights. The double dipping claim was reduced because his lawyer showed how regularly officers left their official duties to work side details, including high ranking officials, who might clock in a few minutes early after being officially relieved from their regular shifts.
At worst, he gamed their system and the failures of his immediate supervisors and managers allowed him to cash in. That made at least a few of them jealous so they aggressively pursued cases against him rather than make the needed changes to reduce overtime spending. Whether officially or not, HPD has a lengthy history of demanding large numbers of tickets in order for their officers to qualify for more overtime, they just wanted their cake and to eat it too.
@Kuff….. Anyway to get this Officer back on ticket-writing-patrol and have him set up shop in the school zones on North Main (I-45 to 610) betweeen 6:30am – 5pm (even it involves more OT on his paycheck) ? Has to be the worst stretch of public road in terms of folks routinely running 45mph+ between blinking yellow lights before/after class is in session.