FLSA Compensation for At-Home K9 Care

All right. Well, we're going to get to today's show. It's just going to be a quick show talking about FLSA compensation, but it should be a good reminder. But before we get to that, I want to talk real quick from a couple of sponsors I have for the show. And you've been hearing me talk about Kevin Sheldahl with Canine Services. And Kevin, again, he's based out of New Mexico, does a lot of really good work down there in New Mexico, and he does seminars. So you can have Kevin come to you.

So if you want a seminar on just about anything to do with police dogs, from patrol to SWAT integration, any type of detection, including human remains detection. You can go down to New Mexico and visit Kevin or have him come to you and you can set up a seminar. So check out canineservices.com. It's k-9services.com. Kevin has been around forever, has a ton of knowledge and just a really solid, solid trainer and a good guy to be around.

So So we won't go wrong by contacting Kevin and maybe having him either do an audit of your unit or just come up and do some training with you. He's also available for expert witness services. So check out canineservices.com with Kevin Sheldahl. His phone number, if you want to give him a call, is 505-250-4576. So that's Kevin Sheldahl in New Mexico. Also, I want to talk about Ray Allen Manufacturing.

Everybody knows who Ray Allen is. they're a leading manufacturer for canine equipment and their products are just outstanding so one of the things that I like to do is just jump on their their web page and look at the what's new button and they've had a few changes at Ray Allen right now and the what's new button is going to get more and more important because they're they have a lot of stuff in the pipeline a lot of new products coming out and

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And with that, let's jump out to the show. Music.

This is the Police Canine Training Podcast with Jeff Meyer. Join us for each episode to get real-world advice from canine professionals who have experience on the street. Each episode will focus on up-to-date information that you can use on the street. Spend about 30 minutes with us each week as part of your training day. Our goal at Police Canine Training is to make every canine team be the best they can be. Music.

Welcome to the Please Canine Training Podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Meyer. Today, I'm going to talk about a familiar topic. I'm going to talk about FLSA compensation for at-home canine care. Obviously, I'm not an attorney and I'm not going to be giving you legal advice, but it's a subject that I've dealt with quite a bit when I've helped canine units start up or when I've done evals of canine units and just making sure they're following the best practices.

So I've seen a lot of different things happen over this at-home dog care. So I just thought I'd kind of refresh some people's mind to make sure, you know, you look and see where you're at in the whole scheme of things. So the bottom line is all police dog handlers need to be compensated for the at-home care of their dog. What's tough is there's a lot of legal opinions. There's been a lot of court cases and it's all over the map as to what you need to be compensated for.

So it'd be a lot easier if at some point, you know, the federal government would just say, here's the formula. This is what a police dog handler gets for at-home care. But we're not there. We've had a lot of different opinions, but we're not there. But if you want to skip to the good stuff, I'll tell you that basically, I'd say that the industry average is about 30 minutes per day every single day of the week.

And how that's compensated is all over of the map too. Some departments give you overtime. Some departments let you work a half hour less on your shift. Some departments will pay a different rate than your regular rate, which was a little more common back in the day, but now it's less common. Some departments pay half hour of overtime. It's all over the map what it is, but you need to be getting some sort of compensation for the at-home care and maintenance of your dog.

That part is a definite. There has to be some type of compensation exactly what that compensation is i can't really tell you but i can tell you that if you're one of the agencies who's who's getting nothing or if you're getting say. Four six even eight hours a month you're on the low end and you probably are no longer in compliance most agencies at the minimum again are getting around that 16 hours a month in some Either a combination of time and pay, time off, something for the at-home care.

And again, not a legal show, so you can kind of look into it. But the reason I wanted to talk about day is because this is an issue that can really screw up a police department's canine unit. And I can tell you a couple of different experiences I've had. I had one time an agency called me and it was the handlers and they wanted to retain me as an expert witness.

And the opinion they were looking for is they wanted me to be with the union on a grievance and explain to the chief that it was very important that the dogs went home with the handlers at night. And were, you know, part of all that situation of being at the handler's kennel at home, the handler taking care of the dog. which caused me to, it's a well-known agency and kind of a large canine unit. So right away, I was like, you know, how did, what happened?

And what it ha what happened is that they decided as a group of handlers, some attorney had contacted them and said, you're not in compliance with FLSA. I can get you in compliance and we can sue your department and you'll all get quite a bit of money. When a handler sues under FLSA for canine care and they win, it's usually triple damages, and it can be in the $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 range for compensation for not being compensated the first time correctly.

So if you're an agency, you either pay it now or you pay triple damages later. Well, this attorney that in this case I'm talking about had kind of waved a bunch of big numbers in front of a lot of handlers. It all sounded good to them Um, instead of going to their department and sitting down and talking to the department and saying, Hey, we're, we're a little light on canine care. We'd like to get in compliance. What can we do? They did none of that. They filed a lawsuit.

The chief got papers thrown onto his desk. First time he had heard about any problems was when he was notified that he was being sued by his canine handlers. Not a smart way to do it. They did do a settlement, and the handlers did indeed get some cash in their pocket, but the chief didn't want to, you know, he could lose that battle, but he wasn't going to lose the war. The chief looked into it, and he ended up taking a section of the city dog pound.

Securing it off with a separate door, and secured parking spots right outside the dog pound for police cars, and the handlers would drive their personal cars to the dog pound, go in get their dogs out of the the city run kennel their dogs were fed and taken care of by the people that ran the dog pound their dogs were sitting in kennels in the dog pound they would walk out put the dogs in their police car do their shift get there at the end of their shift and repeat that process every day

so they were now trying to fight just to get back to the point where they were had take-home cars and had their dogs with them at home and and for call-outs so So that's obviously an extreme example, but the point is, if you're not in compliance with FLSA, you know, your first step should be to go talk to your agency and sit down and explain, you know, that, you know, maybe at this point in time, I'm not unhappy, but some handler at some point in time is going to be unhappy and the agency

is going to be at risk for this. So usually these things can be solved with a conversation. And maybe if you have a union, get your union involved and it might be part of your collective bargaining process. That was the process that my agency went through was we were at eight hours for a long time, eight hours of comp time. And then through collective bargaining, they added into the contract, they changed it to eight hours of pay and eight hours of time every single month.

So we basically doubled on one of our contracts, which worked out really well for us. Point is, is that, you know, this is a, it's an important subject and you need to kind of research everything, figure out where you fall in line. And if you're not around that 30 minutes and it can be any different combination. So on my Facebook page, I asked the question, what people were getting compensated for, for FLSA.

And generally, again, when you read through all the comments, if you look at my Facebook page and see the question, you'll see that almost everybody is right around that 30 minutes, but it's just structured differently. Certainly quite a few handlers who work four 10-hour days only work four nine-hour days, and they get that extra hour off when they're working, and then maybe some type of compensation on their days off or vacation.

So again, it's kind of all over the map, but there should be some type of structured compensation. Another story when I started researching this, and this is a very common story, is I started researching it and I found a current lawsuit or a reasonably current lawsuit that's going on right now through a department. So I read through the lawsuit and then I googled the handler's name. And when I googled the handler's name, I went back. So the lawsuit is from August of 2023.

And basically the article is that That lawsuit is working its way through the courts right now, and it hasn't been resolved, but the handler is going to get a little bit of money, I'm sure, because of kind of the way they read it, the way it reads. But when I looked back and I Googled the handler's name, I found that in September of 2018, the agency they worked for was going to get rid of the K-9 unit.

And the media got involved and it basically, the headline was about, you know, through a meeting and the community and the authorities that ran the agency that he works for, city council, everybody got involved and they decided to keep the K-9 unit. So I can only imagine that back in 2018, when this handler thought, you know, man, I'm going to lose my K-9. I'm going to lose my great position.

I'm happy to do everything. I don't know and there's nothing in this article that represents that the handler did anything to.

Try to forego some of his canine compensation but my point is at that time the sandler was super happy he felt like he dodged a bullet because the canine unit was going to get dissolved and it didn't and i'm sure what his canine compensation was was not really an issue, fast forward you know eight years and now the handler is a different stage in his life different stage of his career who knows what's all happened and the

handler now has taken the department to court saying that he has not been properly compensated for FLSA canine. That story repeats itself a lot of times. People are super excited when they get their first dog and they're really happy that they're going to work a dog and they'll do just about anything to get the canine unit up and running.

And then later when, you know, something changes and they're leaving the unit or leaving the department, or maybe they don't perform properly and they end up getting kicked out of the the unit, you know, you're going to have a handler that's happy now that will always be a formal handler that maybe won't be as happy.

So if you're a supervisor, you have to really check your FLSA and make sure that you're in compliance because just because the handlers right now are happy doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be happy. So in researching this, you know, I found quite a few different things and I found a really cool thing. It's got some questions and answers. I'm just going to go over some of those.

So one of them is, you know, some people talk about this and they'll call this the Garcia decision or Garcia Act. So is this, is what I'm talking about, the Garcia Act? And basically it is. And that comes from a 1985 Supreme Court decision and it came out of San Antonio and it had nothing to do with canine handlers, but it held that FLSA applied to police officers basically. And that when they're doing stuff outside their work hours, as they need to be compensated.

And then the next question on this article here is how much time is the handler entitled to? And again, there's no industry standard. So that's a common question. And then at what rate is overtime being paid? Again, unfortunately, there's no industry standards. Lots of places are time and a half or many of them are straight time.

It might be less. some agencies have they pay extra money just for being canine handler and the way that i read most of these decisions that if you are a different rank because you're a canine handler that does not negate the fact that they have to pay you specific amount of money for taking care of your dog, So, again, maybe if you're assigned to the canon, you become a corporal, that doesn't mean that they don't have to also compensate you for the FLSA money.

And again, you know, this whole thing, this article I'm looking through, it's basically trying to solicit handlers to call this law firm and get them to sue their agency. I get why some handlers might want to do that. Maybe they're unhappy about different things or they think there's a lot of money.

But when you do that you know you're putting your agency's canine unit at risk it might be with something where they say yeah we're going to figure this out and then we won't have dogs anymore so you know the better way again sit down talk to your agency and try to work something out.

And one of the questions comes all the times is does the handler have to put in for that time does you have to schedule the time and tell the agency this is what time i'm feeding the dog this This is, here's a timesheet or whatever, not having to put in for the time, not having put in for the time, not asking for the time. None of that absolves the agency from still having to pay the handler.

So every agency that sends somebody home with a police dog knows that there's going to be some at-home care for that dog and that the agency has to pay for that in some manner. Again, I wish I could give you a hard answer. It's, they have to pay for it in some manner. So could an agency, one of the questions they put on here, could an agency just abolish the K-9 unit when you file a claim? It says here, because again, these are attorneys that are trying to solicit business, it says probably.

I can tell you that I've seen that happen firsthand. So the best way to fix FLSA problems is usually not a lawsuit. suit. It's not, I mean, they can't retaliate against you for doing it, but they could actually come back and say, you know, we can't afford to have a canine unit anymore. So one of the things that some people do too is, as I talked about this handler that was, he thought he was going to lose his canine unit.

I've seen it happen many times where officers say, you know, if I could just get a canine unit started, I'll get donations for the dog. I'll get donations for the dog, for the canine unit for the food, the vet, everything's going to be free. And I'm not going to ask for any FLSA time. You cannot waive your FLSA time. Uh, the agency has to pay you that time. It's not, it's not possible for you to waive it or the agency to ask you to waive it.

And if it was possible, think about what you're doing to the handlers in your department that have worked hard to build up that FLSA time. So I just heard recently about that where a department was going to add on a new position and handler who wanted that position, you know, there's other canines in the unit.

The handler who wanted that position had actually written a letter saying, I'll waive all my canine care just so I can also become a dog care or a dog handler, but I don't need any dog care. Now, realistically, how long is that going to last? That handler is going to be working a dog, looking around, seeing that dozens and dozens of other handlers are all being compensated. And he's the only one who's not because he wrote this letter.

Well, luckily, you can't do that. The agency knew it and said, nope, you can't. You know, if we're going to expand the program and add a dog, you have to be compensated. So if you're a supervisor or trainer, you're trying to expand a unit or something, when that suggestion gets made, it needs to be squashed right away. You cannot waive your FLSA compensation. So there's also, if you want to research it, if you research the Department of Labor, there's a whole letter.

And it's actually all the way back from 2006. And it's just basically an opinion letter. And it actually, in the opinion letter... Take some quotes out of a different opinion letter back from 1993. So back in August of 1993, opinion letter from the Department of Labor said that law enforcement canine handlers must be compensated by their employed agency for feeding, grooming, and otherwise caring for their assigned canine.

Your first question relates to whether or not the following language from the opinion still valid. So this is in 2006. And so back in 93, they said that in 2006, they validated it and they say, yes, we still take that opinion. The Department of Labor does. Unfortunately, this thing is two pages. It's a Department of Labor type of wording, and it never gives you the exact, you know, how many, you know, the question everyone wants to know is how much should I be paid?

That's going to be up to you and your agency. But again, make sure you're you're getting paid something, and around that 30 minutes. So if you're working in a department now and you're happy with everything and maybe you're a little light on it, why would you want to ruffle the feathers of your chief?

And it's because if you're happy with everything, you're the trainer, everything's going good, your job is to kind of make that unit better than when you found it, and it's to ensure that the unit keeps moving forward. So that's a time when you can go to the chief and say, hey, it doesn't have to be done today, but at some point we've got to sit down and talk about this canine care and start bumping it up a little bit to get into compliance so that we don't get in a lawsuit.

And maybe you can have some of these articles printed out and approach it as I'm just trying to protect the agency type thing, which you likely will be because most of us are not going to really get too worked up about an extra four hours of pay per month because we all have good enough jobs and happy enough with what we're doing. So again, it's how you approach and how you get to it.

So I found another article and it gives a lot of definitions under it. And it's basically, you know, what is the definition of work? What are you doing? How is the overtime compensated? There's so many different ways that you can approach it, and the language is all the same. And it just basically outlines again that you need to be compensated and that when handlers sue and they're successful, the damages are usually triple damages.

So Terry Fleck, who has passed on, but now Sheepdog Guardian has taken over that, he wrote a great article, and I think it's still probably posted on the Sheepdog Guardian website. site. And it talks about what are the three reasons. So this article, I remember when he wrote it, it was when I was still in the magazine, he wrote this for me. So it's been probably 15 years.

And he wrote, what are the three reasons that we're losing canine units out of departments all across the United States, or at least losing the unit or being reduced in size? And what he wrote back then was deployment issues, bad deployments, not deploying the dog properly, things that are leading to litigation, which is either bad publicity for the agency and or litigation, any of those types of things. So bad deployments and basically bad PR from using the dogs incorrectly.

The number two one, accidental bites. And these weren't any particular, these are the three ones that he was talking about back then. So accidental bites, a lot of times can be very detrimental. There's been, and that's not just civilians. Sometimes it's other officers get get bit and they take, you know, legal action against their own agency for a dog biting them. So, and then the number three, three, one on his list here out of the one, two, three is handler compensation.

So this is back quite a, quite a few years back. And really those three issues are still the same three issues that are hounding us today. And the article, again, it's, it's worth jumping on that sheepdog guardian and get the article and print it out.

He's got quite a few different court cases cited on here and you could use those again when you sit down and talk to your chief and just you know talk to the your senior command and try and get yourself into compliance, as opposed to it and he outlines the methods of compensation and a lot of them is again the handler's work day is adjusted so it's a few it's less hours or that the handler gets extra time a lot of times

it's time and a half for any hours that exceed 40 hours per week or some combination thereof. And again, it's all over the map. And over the last, you know, probably 10 years, there's a lot of agencies who have been part of those donning and doffing lawsuits, which happened to deal with a lot of things, including getting ready for work, putting your uniform on, taking your safety equipment on and off, being on call and all that.

So those are separate issues. And that donning and doffing didn't really deal that much with with canine compensation. It deals mostly with other things, but it's all related to a canine officer. So they are definitely... Together, you know, two separate issues, but they definitely go hand in hand. So again, this article from Terry Fleck, it's about 15 years old. And he wrote in here that he had at the time had pulled 12,000 officers.

And at the time, about 70% of the industry was in compliance with their at-home care. They knew about it and they were in compliance. I don't think that numbers change that much from the research I did before I did this podcast and talking to a lot of people. And I certainly didn't do 1,200, so my research isn't as good as Terry's was back then.

But I'm going to tell you that I did talk to a couple of handlers, and I had a few people even respond on my Facebook post that they were still getting nothing. So if you're getting nothing, that's obviously not good. And at some point, that agency is going to pay. So you need to start working on it if you're the agency command that's not paying your canine handlers.

And there's a two- or a three-year statute for these. So when, once a handler sues for this and they get triple damages, they might get three years worth of back pay that you should have paid them to begin with. And that can be a sizable check and it gets pretty costly to an agency. So, you know, again, the solution then is just to sit down, look at the industry standards around 30 minutes a day. And that's not a legal opinion. I'm just telling you from when you read everything and you...

Talk to a lot of handlers around 30 minutes a day is pretty much an industry standard. So if you're getting somewhere around that, you're probably in pretty good shape. If you're getting less than that, if it's drastically less than maybe you need to talk to your agency. So again, this is mostly just a quick FLSA reminder that you need to be compensated. There's other questions that come up a lot. It has to do with, you know, does my shift start when I'm in my driveway and turn my car on.

I'm responsible for calls. Those are all more policy decisions than FLSA decisions. So I've had other agencies and handlers contact me like on that very question. And there was a handler who actually lived, I was actually surprised they let him take his car home, but he lived about an hour and 20 minutes outside the city that he worked.

And he called and was was talking to me and he wanted to be able to start starting his shift when he turned the car on in his driveway and started driving to work because he said he was responsible for calls although he was an hour and 20 minutes away from even getting to his city line those are those kind of crazy lawsuits and arguments that will just make your command mad and you know they'll either come up with definite policies that then you have to live within the

city limits to to take a car home or something.

So, you know, think about what you're doing. And when you're, if you're in this situation, talk to your partners in your unit, see where they're at mindset wise, you know, and try and work things out. It's always better to sit down and try to work out a solution than involving attorneys and start suing your own agency over these things. I can't think of too many times where that's worked out really well. So, you know, look at your collective bargaining when it comes around, talk to your union.

Maybe you can make a part of your collective bargaining and include a new handler compensation guidelines for it, but make sure that somehow you're in compliance.

So I just want to do a quick show today just to kind of remind everybody about FLSA issues. Hopefully it, you know, it's a good reminder. I think most places are in, in compliance. And if you have questions, contact me. I might not be the person to answer them, but I do know where I can find really better answers. So, but if you're looking for concrete answers as to how much, how many days, all those things, they do not exist.

So you're not going to get them from me or anybody, but if you need me to point you to a few more people to ask some more questions, I'd be happy to do that. All right, well, that's going to wrap it up today. Hopefully just a quick reminder about FLSA is just a good idea. I have never done a show about FLSA even with my old show. So again, it's not legal advice here. It's just kind of a reminder.

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