A city audit released on Thursday found that the San Francisco Police Department more than doubled its overtime spending over the past five years, surging to more than $108 million in the 2022-2023 fiscal year.
The skyrocketing police overtime budget came as the result of potential abuse and a lack of internal controls, according to the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst’s audit, which was commissioned by the Board of Supervisors last year and analyzed five years of SFPD overtime.
The San Francisco Police Department “does not adequately control staff use of overtime or monitor and enforce established overtime limits,” read the audit, leading to a “poor internal control environment [that] increases the risk of overtime fraud or abuse.”
As a result, overtime costs have ballooned: In the 2018-2019 fiscal year, SFPD spent $53 million on overtime. By the 2022-2023 fiscal year, it was $108 million — a 105 percent increase.
SFPD overtime skyrocketed as staffing decreased
Overtime costs
Sworn-duty officers
$110M
2,000
$100M
1,800
$90M
1,600
$80M
1,400
$70M
1,200
$60M
1,000
$50M
800
$40M
600
$30M
400
$20M
200
$10M
2020
2021
2022
2019
2023
Overtime costs
Sworn-duty officers
2,000
$110M
$100M
1,800
$90M
1,600
$80M
1,400
$70M
1,200
$60M
1,000
$50M
800
$40M
600
$30M
400
$20M
200
$10M
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
Source: San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst. Note: Total overtime costs are aggregated by fiscal year. Chart by Kelly Waldron.
The San Francisco Police Department is one of the most well-financed departments in the city, at $840 million in the current fiscal year. In the last year audited by the city, SFPD’s overtime equaled 14 percent of its $762 million 2022-2023 budget.
Few police officers responsible for most overtime
A chief reason for the ballooning costs, the audit found, is that the department routinely flouts overtime limits: “SFPD sworn staff regularly exceeded established overtime limits each year between FY 2018-19 to FY 2022-23.” Officers can use up to 300 hours of overtime per year, and are paid out at 1.5 times their hourly rate.
The overtime outlay was also disproportionately driven by a small number of officers: “12 percent of sworn staff who worked overtime accounted for 32 percent of SFPD’s total overtime hours,” the audit read. “High users of overtime,” the report continued, “consistently work the equivalent of 80-hour work weeks every week of the year, in some cases for multiple years in a row.”
The audit found that 209 officers worked more than 1,040 hours of overtime in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, more than three times the ostensible limit.
The vast majority of the overtime came from special operations and backfill, the latter a term used when an officer must fill in for a colleague who is out on sick or injury leave.
Sick and injury leave increased 77 percent in the last five years, the audit found, and was rife with potential abuse: Officers frequently took sick leave to avoid specific days, like weekend duty. One sergeant, the audit found, “called out sick on 38 of the 52 Wednesdays” of the fiscal year, and “used sick leave every Wednesday” during a particular seven-month period.
Paid sick leave is accrued, and officers are allowed to bank a maximum of 1,040 hours, or 130 eight-hour days. The abuse of sick leave is known to the department: Police Chief Bill Scott in March sent a memo asking staff “to monitor Sick Leave use by members for patterns of abuse.”
The overall surge in overtime pay is directly related to poor controls over sick and injury leave, the audit found: When officers are out sick, “SFPD must rely more on backfill overtime to cover these absences.”
In a particularly troublesome trend, the audit found officers who were calling out sick on the same day they went to work private security. That costs the department by requiring backfill overtime for those officers.
Another finding: routine improprieties signing off on overtime. Police overtime requires both a supervisor and commanding officer signing off, but dozens of overtime cards were missing signatures or had the same person signing off twice. In several instances, “a lieutenant or sergeant approved their own overtime” in violation of department policy.
As for special operations, namely during anti-theft operations in Union Square and operations in the Tenderloin, the Budget and Legislative Analyst found that officer overtime did not noticeably increase public safety. “In both cases, we did not find a significant improvement in response times to 911 calls or trends in crime.”
Rather, the audit concluded, “Excessive overtime hours pose risks to public safety and officer health, may contribute to employee burnout and negatively affect morale, and may generate unnecessary financial costs for the City.”
Overtime related to short staffing, chief says
Scott, for his part, wrote in a response attached to the audit that the increase in overtime is due to short staffing: The police department had 1,589 sworn-duty officers as of June 2023, the latest month for which data was available. That’s a 15 percent decrease from a 10-year high of 1,871 officers in 2017.
“The increase in the use of overtime in the SFPD is directly tied to the current understaffing of the Department, which at last count was noted at a shortfall of at least 274 officers,” Scott wrote. “As staffing levels have dropped, overtime has increased at an inversely proportional rate.”
Scott wrote that, as the Budget and Legislative Analyst was conducting its audit, the department instituted some of the changes sought in the report. Namely, it established a centralized overtime unit and rolled out a dashboard identifying stations that ignored overtime limits.
The audit was requested by outgoing District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston last March, in response to the police department’s $55.6 million in extra overtime budget that year. The excess required the board to appropriate an additional $25 million to cover costs.
“I knew it was bad, but not this bad,” said Preston in a statement. “The violation of laws and contracts, the lack of oversight, and the abuse of overtime are alarming and require immediate intervention and oversight.”
Employees at the department responsible for ensuring people abide by the law are themselves breaking the law. Ironic? When we have a DA unwilling to prosecute even the most egregious offenses by police officers (murder), more mundane issues such as lying on timesheets are definitely going to get swept under the rug.
Honestly the most depressing local election result was seeing Brooke Jenkins, despite obviously failing the city and weaponizing the DA’s office against peaceful protesters, widen her lead.
And yet they still think they don’t have enough money …
could be their passive-aggressive way of getting it…
SFPD is nothing but an very expensive luxury emotional safety blanket for terrified older white people and a racket for armed sociopaths.
LOL! the police dpt is turning into Bart with overtime .Remember the janitor making 160K a year? Overtime for what? they are nowhere to be seen..they use to patrol, stop cars, distribute tickets, etc but lately it is hard to get them out of their police station, especially the one on 18th street . As one junior officer said, the higher ups are afraid of retaliation so they rather stay inside.
A friend of mine who ran a very successful annual street fair described to me how – year after year – the SFPD would not sign off on their permits unless they agreed to paying more officers to staff the event, despite the fact that they had no safety issues or problems. It was extortion and the winners were SFPD officers getting paid OT to stand around and do nothing,
I am generally pro-cop, but anyone who “consistently work the equivalent of 80-hour work weeks every week of the year, in some cases for multiple years in a row.” should be investigated. I’ve worked 80 hour weeks and there is no way to do it for more than a few weeks in a row. Even if you work 6 days a week, that’s 13.3 hours per day. Once you add in time for commuting, sleep, and personal hygiene, you hit 24 hours, and there are only 24 hours in a day.
Also, can we please tell SFPD that walking a beat means WALKING! It infuriates me every time I see 4-6 cops standing in a circle at the Bart Plaza or on Market Street or at Union Square doing NOTHING while illegal activity is half a block away. Last time I was in DC, I saw cops walking solo or in pairs and just doing laps on major streets. Every so often you’d see another one come by. It really created a sense of safety and criminals knew that another cop would be coming around the corner any minute so they were kept in check
If Lurie is smart and truly committed to eliminating corruption, cronyism and waste, then he will focus on the audit and results and make changes. If SFPD were a non profit, there would be consequences. Here is crystal clear proof if +5 years of double dipping and gaming the system. This is taxpayer money. San Franciscans deserve accountability and safety from our SFPD.
About $1000 per resident per year, then. Did you get $1000 worth of public safety from SFPD this year? Me neither. We could be educating children or improving muni service with this money.
What’s most disturbing is the incoming idiot mayor seems ignorant to the real problems in the police department. He will likely ask for the current police chief to resign but his resigning will change nothing if there’s no ask for accountability. Why should other city departments be required to reduce their spending 15% while the police department collects a check while doing the least. He ran on a change mandate let’s see if he can get things right. I won’t hold my breath as he’s aligned himself with communities who see law and order as the end all be all.
Nothing new over many, MANY years. Even back in Feinstein’s day, Police overtime was always a big issue.
“violation of laws and contracts, the lack of oversight, abuse of overtime” The SFPD? Never. Wasn’t there a police reform over the past 10 years? Didn’t the SFPD sign off on 272 bullet points from the “collaborative” technical review done by the DOJ and SFPD? So, ask Brooke Jenkins? It’s all good. Nothing to see here. Move on (but not before you raise the SFPD budget again and again. Thanks to God for Bill Scott. He lies with ease and grace, not like Hongisto, and others. What will be the city’s response? Give the cops more money. That will do it. Works every time.
The biggest question is what do they do all day? They aren’t writing citations, they aren’t responding to calls quickly, they aren’t solving crimes (other than murders). What are they doing with all this overtime?
Good for them. Sign up, work and get paid. On the order of supply and demand.
campers,
The cops intentionally keep short-staffed so’s they can reliably pay their Walnut Creek and Petaluma mortgages.
Been thataway for decades.
Will continue because only politician who would stand up to them was Dean Preston who voted against entire Budget twice in a row in protest.
I hear he’s still full of piss and vinegar and is considering a run for Governor of the friggin’ State.
Lurie’s top staff looks like cast from Mr. Rogers.
Put another log on the fire, honey,
Did Posey replace new Chief of Staff ?
lol
h.