A federal jury on Feb. 23 returned a defense verdict in favor of several New York City police officers who were sued by a man who said he was wrongfully arrested for felony drug possession, foreclosing what the plaintiff's attorney had seen as an opportunity to bring alleged overtime abuses in the department to light.

But Gabriel Harvis, who represented plaintiff Hector Cordero in the case, said the so-called “collars for dollars” practice, in which officers make false arrests near the end of their shifts to clock extra overtime pay, has come up in other individual damages cases against the New York City Police Department and is an issue that is “ripe for further scrutiny.”

Cordero, a bodega worker in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, was arrested in October 2014 after Police Officer Hugo Hugasian said he observed Cordero hand off two small plastic bags containing a white substance to Matthew Ninos and enter J&C Mini Mart, where Cordero was working behind the counter.

Officers did not find any drugs on Cordero and the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office dropped charges against him five months later.

In Cordero's civil suit against the city, U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York ordered a bifurcated trial.

The first phase concerned the liability of Hugasian and other officers involved with Cordero's arrest. If the jury found that any of the defendants were liable, it would have triggered the second phase of the trial, which would have concerned Cordero's Monell claim against the department to address the broader overtime issue.

Hugasian has been written up for falsifying overtime and has been a defendant in false arrest suits filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, but Weinstein limited the types of questions that Harvis could ask Hugasian about overtime abuse.

“Did you do it? Yes or no,” Weinstein said during Harvis' examination of Hugasian. “If he says no, that is the end of it. If he says yes, that is the end of it. I am not getting into the discipline. I want this minimized. This is for phase two.”

Harvis said he did not think there was an error on the judge's part, but said he may have been more successful if the trial were consolidated.

“We didn't have a complete free hand to argue the policy,” Harvis said. Baree Fett of Harvis & Fett also appeared for Cordero in the case.

In Cordero's civil case, the city maintained that there was probable cause to arrest Cordero and Assistant Corporation Counsel Philip DePaul, who appeared for the city in the case, said during opening arguments that Cordero's attorneys were bringing up the overtime issue to distract from that fact.

“In response to the court's specific question, the jury resoundingly rejected the plaintiff's claim that he was arrested to generate police overtime,” said Law Department spokesman Nicholas Paolucci in an email. Assistant Corporation Counsel Brian Francolla also appeared for the city in the case.

The NYPD has come under fire over accusations of overtime abuse in the past; it was addressed in 1994 by a committee formed to investigate corruption in the department, chaired by the late Milton Mollen, who once served as presiding justice of the Appellate Division, Second Department.

“'Collars-for-dollars is a practice widely known to officers, police supervisors and prosecutors alike,” the Mollen committee's report stated.

Twenty years later, Joseph Reznick, the NYPD's internal affairs chief, issued a memo to the department stating that some recent arrests appeared to fit the description of “collars for dollars.”

“Don't test me. Most arrests lacked quality and the end result was the same [no intelligence],” Reznick said in the memo, which was obtained by the New York Daily News.