A 2024 University of Pennsylvania Law Review study of a decade of Philadelphia court records found that police officers, not just defendants, routinely miss their own subpoenaed court dates. Officers failed to appear in 31 percent of cases where they were subpoenaed, compared with 19 percent for the defendants they were testifying against, with no comparable consequence waiting on the other side when an officer doesn’t show. We've written about that asymmetry in more detail in an earlier post.
This post looks at the other half of that same story: what happens and what it costs when officers do show up. The pattern that emerges, jurisdiction after jurisdiction, is not really about behavior. It is about design. In most departments, what an officer is paid for a court appearance has almost nothing to do with what actually happens once they arrive. A twenty-minute hearing and a hearing canceled that same morning can trigger the identical guaranteed payout, because the pay is set by the scheduled appearance, not by what the appearance turns out to require. That is not an incentive anyone built on purpose. It is what happens when three separate institutions, the court that sets the docket, the department that sets the officer’s shift roster, and the prosecutor’s office that actually issues the subpoena, each run their own calendar with no channel connecting the three, and a flat overtime minimum is left to absorb whatever collision results.
A Guarantee With No Relationship to the Hearing
Boston’s police contracts make the mechanism unusually visible because the city has published the numbers. Under the agreement that governed the department for years, an officer called to testify was guaranteed at least four hours of overtime pay for a court appearance, regardless of how long it lasted. The guarantee still applied even if the hearing was canceled, as long as the cancellation came less than 72 hours before the scheduled date. In fiscal year 2022, that guarantee cost the department eight million dollars in court overtime alone.
Philadelphia's police directives describe the same structure from the other direction. Officers are entitled to a four-hour minimum for a court appearance on a scheduled day off, but a separate directive explicitly withholds that minimum when a new subpoena arrives with less than 48 hours' notice on a day the officer is already scheduled to work. The exception exists because the department has recognized that the guarantee, if left unmanaged, becomes its own cost driver.
The Audit Is Always the Lagging Indicator
Every dollar figure like this comes from an audit, meaning the cost was identified after it was already spent. San Jose’s city auditor reported in April 2026 that police overtime totaled 72 million dollars over the prior year, a 53 percent increase over five years, with overtime now consuming 13 percent of the department’s budget. That figure covers all overtime, not court time specifically. The same audit noted that a 2021 recommendation to analyze shift schedules remained unimplemented, though that recommendation was aimed at general patrol staffing, not court appearances. In Ulster County, New York, the county comptroller reported in July 2026 that the Sheriff’s Office was the largest driver of a rise in county overtime hours since 2022.
Chicago’s Office of Inspector General found something similar, though the underlying data is older. Auditing 2014 and 2015, OIG found that regular-duty overtime, the category that explicitly includes an officer attending court after an on-duty arrest alongside several other activities, made up 56.3 percent of every overtime dollar CPD paid out. That audit is a decade old, but the city issued a new executive order capping police overtime spending in December 2025, a sign that the underlying problem never fully went away.
None of these figures, on their own, prove that better scheduling would have prevented the spending, since aggregate overtime covers far more than court appearances, and none of those audits sought to explain why the money was spent. Only one jurisdiction we found actually did that work: Albuquerque, where the city’s Office of Internal Audit examined overtime tied to DWI cases and found that Metro Court’s scheduling methodology routinely put officers in more than one courtroom at once, for different cases, on the same day. A related city audit went further, noting that court staff scheduled officers whenever the calendar had an opening, with no rule limiting how many cases one officer could be booked into, and that judges called dockets in an order that has nothing to do with which officer is in the building or how long they have already been waiting. The audit ties that pattern directly to dismissed DWI cases where the officer did not appear. A follow-up city audit named the gap outright: the prosecutor’s office, the one actually issuing the subpoena that puts an officer in that courtroom in the first place, was never identified as a stakeholder in how any of this gets scheduled. Three separate offices touch every one of these court dates, and the city's own auditors could not find where those three were supposed to meet.
That is the leading indicator Albuquerque’s auditors found underneath the cost: not an officer choosing not to show up, but a docket built without reference to where that officer was already required to be. Whether the same mechanism explains the larger dollar figures in Boston, Chicago, San Jose, or Ulster County is a reasonable guess. None of those audits ruled it out, but none of them confirmed it either.
The National Center for State Courts put a dollar figure on a different piece of the same courthouse in a December 2025 report on missed appearances. NCSC calculated that operating an average state courthouse costs roughly $39.99 per minute during business hours, a figure meant to make the cost of any wasted minute concrete. That report studied litigants and general caseflow, not officers, so it does not confirm anything about the mechanism Albuquerque’s auditors found. What it does provide is a useful, independently calculated number for pricing out what a single scheduling collision costs in court time alone, on top of whatever an officer’s own department separately pays in overtime.
Narrowing the Payout Is Not the Same as Coordinating the Calendar
Where jurisdictions have acted, they have almost always narrowed the guarantee’s scope rather than closing the coordination gap beneath it. Boston's most recent police contracts cut the cancellation notice window from 72 hours to 24, meaning a case canceled with a day’s notice no longer triggers the four-hour minimum. Philadelphia’s 48-hour exception works the same way, narrowing the circumstances under which the guarantee applies. Both changes reduce exposure. Neither gives the court, the department, and the prosecutor's office a shared view of the calendar before a conflict occurs. The guarantee still exists. It is just smaller and harder to trigger, which is a real improvement and also a description of a patch, not a fix.
The Vendors Have the Same Evidence Problem the Cities Do
A handful of scheduling and notification platforms exist specifically to close this gap, several of them citing deployments across cities and counties and advertising overtime reductions from smarter subpoena and shift coordination. None of the savings figures we found, from any of them, appear to have been independently audited or peer reviewed. eCourtDate, which built the notification platform behind this blog and also state programs in multiple states, checked itself against that same standard and found the identical gap: real deployments, no independent third-party evaluation of the officer side specifically. That’s not a caveat we’re adding reluctantly. It’s the actual reason this piece exists: nobody in this space, eCourtDate included, currently has data that would let a city compare these platforms on results instead of marketing claims. That gap is worth naming plainly. Closing it is a different, much bigger claim, and this piece isn’t making it.
What Would Actually Change the Number
Reducing the size of a guaranteed minimum treats a symptom. Structurally, the court setting the date, the department setting the officer’s shift, and the prosecutor issuing the subpoena are three separate institutions running three separate calendars. Albuquerque’s audits are the clearest documented case of what happens when that structure produces a collision: it is caught by an auditor months or years after it already cost money, instead of by anyone checking the calendar before the subpoena went out. A leading indicator would look different: a subpoena that cannot be issued without first checking an officer’s existing court commitments, which means the prosecutor’s system, the department’s roster, and the court’s docket all read from the same information. We could not find a jurisdiction that publishes evidence of doing this today.
That absence raises a more basic question beneath all of this: whether any court system can currently see officer non-appearance clearly enough to manage it. None of the audits cited above actually track that number. Until one does, a calendar mismatch like the one Albuquerque’s auditors found will keep getting caught the same way it always has, after the fact, by whoever eventually goes looking for it. Whether that coordination, a subpoena system that checks a shared calendar before it goes out, actually exists anywhere is itself an open question nobody we found has answered. That gap is worth researching properly, and eCourtDate would like to be part of doing it.
https://ecourtdate.com/research-program/
Sources
About Greg Shugart
Director of Government Relations
Greg Shugart brings over 30 years of public sector experience to the eCourtDate team, with a background in court administration, criminal justice reform, and government operations. He previously served as Criminal Courts Administrator for Tarrant County, Texas, where he led statewide-recognized initiatives in pretrial modernization, court communications, and system efficiency. Greg now contributes to eCourtDate’s strategy and partnerships, helping agencies implement technology that improves access, compliance, and trust in the justice system.