City employee profile: John McGahan

 No comments  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

John McGahan | Police officer | Salary: $55,619, not counting overtime

McGahan has worked for the Lincoln Police Department for almost 16 years — he’s done the night shift on the Southeast Team, five years writing traffic tickets; the night shift and second shift on the Center Team (downtown), bike patrol for one year and then the busy Southwest Team.

He said the Southwest night shift was the most challenging, and while southeast Lincoln is considered a part of town, he notes that it’s had the most homicides.

“Anything can happen anywhere,” he said.

The things that happen have changed in the past 16 years, however.

“You never had prostitutes when I started,” he said. Now there are half a dozen working street prostitutes in Lincoln, he said.

McGahan is the field training officer coordinator, which means he’s responsible for new recruits’ training. About one-third of each graduating class won’t make it, he said. Often, the life of a police officer is not what recruits envisioned.

“It’s a tough job, and it’s very stressful,” he said.

In his 16 years, he said, he’s had a couple of “near misses.” His closest call came on a freezing night in January 2003, when he was called to an apartment building at 4 in the morning after a tenant reported hearing a gun being cocked in the hallway. As McGahan was walking up a stairway, he figured, “Well, I better get my gun out just in case.”

Two guys came running toward him and told him a guy upstairs had a gun. Despite their insistence that he high-tail it up there, he questioned them and asked for their identification. When they couldn’t produce IDs, he ordered them to put their hands up so he could pat them down. One took off, and he fought the other one all the way down the stairs. He found a loaded gun in the man’s waistband. Turned out he was a felon who had just robbed a man in the hallway and  previously had been involved in a shooting.

“I almost, probably, should’ve got shot,” McGahan said. “Fortunately it didn’t work out.”

He said officers have plenty of opportunities to earn extra money, from working overtime to such special events as basketball tournaments for which they’re paid by whoever hires them, not the police department. Officers who have to go to court outside their normal working hours get paid overtime, but it’s not usually a pleasant experience.

“You’re gonna get chewed on by the defense attorney no matter what you do,” he said.

Now that he’s working a desk job, he doesn’t earn as much extra pay as when he was on the street. He said it’s not unusual for police officers to earn about $5,000 a year in overtime. He enjoyed working as much as he could.

“When I worked the street, it wasn’t uncommon for me to get $15,000 in a year in overtime,” he said. “The trade-off is you don’t get much sleep, and you’re not around home a lot.”

He has a wife and two kids, ages 10 and 13.

“Fortunately, I’m still married,” he said. “And that’s not all that common (among officers).”

He said Lincoln police officers are unique because they are “generalist officers,” meaning if they get assigned a homicide case they’re involved in the investigation from start to finish. In other cities, street officers gather initial information, secure the scene and then turn it over to detectives. Here, a homicide case can result in 22-hour days for officers, he said. One week he had to handle two sexual assaults, a robbery and a kidnapping — all while continuing to take regular calls.

It can be overwhelming, he said.

“We’re just stretched so thin on the street that it makes it tough.”

Omaha police officers make more money than Lincoln’s and have better retirement benefits, he said, even though their street officers aren’t generalists. But he’s not complaining.

“I think we get paid pretty well,” McGahan said. “I suppose a lot would say we could always do better. I guess I didn’t get in it to get rich.”