Metro

Phone it in, cops!

A Brooklyn beat cop frustrated by complex overtime rules taught himself computer programming to develop a smartphone app that does the tricky math automatically.

“It is just one of those things I saw a need for,” said Police Officer David Doxsee, who has been with the NYPD for four years and is assigned to the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg.

“I can’t tell you how many times I had a detail that involved overtime, and at the end of the night, I was scratching my head trying to figure how much overtime to put in.”

The app, called the Cop’s Overtime Calculator, is now the talk of cops assigned to extra duty around Zuccotti Park and other Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which so far have cost the NYPD more than $7 million in overtime in the past two months, sources said.

Depending on their rank, cops have regular shifts of eight hours and 35 minutes or eight hours and 57 minutes, with every minute worked beyond considered overtime.

Making things more confusing, officers also have the option to take their overtime as either extra pay or extra time off.

“The math gets a little frustrating,” Doxsee said, adding that it’s common to see cops counting on their fingers at the station house when they fill out their overtime forms.

Doxsee said that when he got his new Android phone over the summer, he assumed somebody would have already invented an overtime calculator app.

But “there was nothing like that anywhere,” he said.

So Doxsee, who had no computer training, said he started watching YouTube videos on programming to teach himself to code one.

“I looked at a couple of tutorials, and I got to work,” he said. “I picked it up pretty quick by only looking for things that I needed. I didn’t learn the entire coding language.”

He developed apps for Android and the iPhone in two weeks and put them up for sale in September for 99 cents, with him pocketing 69 cents for every download.

Not only does the app do the math, it also allows the cops to record their weekly and monthly OT totals — then divvy up whether they’ll take it as extra pay or time off.

Since releasing the app, Doxsee has gotten about 1,500 downloads — mostly from New Yorkers but also from as far away as California and Britain, he said.