Death, taxes, police overtime-the three unalterable realities of life.

In Riverside, the cost for police overtime was up 9 percent in 2008 over the previous year. Taxpayers doled out $253,636 in overtime payments to police officers last year as the department battled staffing shortages and new rules regarding court appearances.

"December was one of the busiest months since I've been here," said Police Chief Thomas Weitzel, who officially took the reins of the department in January 2008 after serving several months as the acting chief.

Police in Riverside logged just under 500 hours of overtime in December, which was actually the fourth-highest number of monthly overtime hours the department recorded during 2008. In October, the department reported some 650 overtime hours, by far the most hours in any single month since the beginning of 2006.

Overtime costs were up in nine of the 12 months of 2008 compared to 2007, most of it related to extended court and shift coverage. While the village does get reimbursed for overtime that accrues as the result of grant-funded traffic enforcement, in 2008 that only accounted for $25,000 of total overtime costs.

While the upside of overtime, from the officers' perspective, is higher paychecks, there is a downside, Weitzel said.

"It affects operations and it can be a big morale problem," said Weitzel. "While officers can make a lot of overtime, they get burned out."

That's because in addition to the regular patrol shifts, Riverside officers log extra hours doing periodic traffic enforcement funded through a state grant, attending court and bond hearings and serving on the West Suburban Directed Gang Enforcement task force.

"And the detective position is just non-stop," Weitzel said of the village's lone investigator.

One of the reasons there is so much pressure on the detective is that the department has 17 officers. The department is considered fully staffed at 19, though Weitzel said he would prefer 21.

"We've not been at full staff since 2003," Weitzel said. In 2007, the department at one point had just 15 officers. Two officers that year resigned to take positions elsewhere and one retired. The previous summer, another officer left to become chief of police in a California town.

"When you're up to 19 you can sometimes pull an officer off the shift to help the detective, but when you're short, you can't pull them off because we're running minimum shifts," Weitzel said.

Lt. William Legg, who served as the department's detective for just over two years until he was promoted in 2008, said working as Riverside's detective "take a toll."

"It ages you," Legg said. "You are at the point for every single thing that goes on. You can never plan a family thing, because you never know when you'll get called back in. Take a vacation out of state? How can you do that?"

In 2007, Legg said he took his vacation at the end of the year but ended up logging 92 hours of work during that time.

With the department operating minimum shifts, Weitzel said he has to sometimes call officers in early if something big happens in town. When the Bank of America was robbed on Dec. 16, for example, the entire shift scheduled for 4 p.m. to midnight was called in to work at 9:30 a.m. to handle patrol duties because the day shift was deployed at the bank.

Sgt. Frank Pontrelli, a 12-year veteran of the department, said that officers working the day shift, which begins at 8 a.m. are called in to work early two to three days a week.

"You're constantly coming in at 4 a.m.," Pontrelli said.

Weitzel said his focus right now is on staffing, which means getting the force up to the 19 officers the village has budgeted for. Doing so won't eliminate the overtime crunch-in fact more officers making more arrests means more court appearances and opportunities for that kind of overtime, but it will ease the burden on shifts.

In 2007 "we were down a full shift, so guys aren't rotating shifts once a month, but every couple of weeks," Pontrelli said. "It physically wears on you."

But getting to full strength is not necessarily easy. First, the department has to create a patrolman's list from which to choose recruits (Riverside is at the end of its current list).

After testing candidates and doing background checks, the department has to find a spot for the recruit at the police academy. Following the three-month academy, the new officer in Riverside then spends three months in field training, riding with a veteran patrolman.

Even then there's no guarantee. After six months of academy and field training, Riverside's most recent prospective officer failed to measure up. The soonest a new officer might be available to hit the streets on his own is September, provided the department can find a recruit and get a placement in the March police academy.

"If we can't get an academy slot, it's another three months," Weitzel said. "The process is not quick."