Mayor Daniel Lurie is seeking $61 million in overtime funds for San Francisco police officers this fiscal year, despite findings in a city report that police overtime had surged to $108 million over a one-year period, partly as a result of abuse and poor oversight.
Lurie is also asking for $30 million for sheriff’s deputies to go toward “projected increases in overtime,” according to an ordinance that will go before the Board of Supervisors budget committee on March 27. That would bring the overtime budget for both law enforcement agencies to $92 million for the fiscal year, so far.
Next quarter, both agencies could ask for still more funds.
Supervisor Connie Chan, the head of the budget committee, said that when police brass come before the committee later this month, she expects to see progress on addressing the lack of oversight outlined in a report from the Budget and Legislative Analyst published in December.
“We always knew there would be some supplemental allocation for the overtime spending,” she said, mentioning police short-staffing and the “critical need” for officers. “But now, with this report that came out, what are the upcoming corrective actions that will be implemented to rein this back in?”
The police department has lately struggled to hire officers, and it has increasingly relied on overtime to maintain minimum staffing numbers.
But the city report also found abuse in the ranks, including officers flouting overtime limits. Some 209 officers worked more than 1,040 hours of overtime in a year, more than three times the limit. Those officers accounted for 12 percent of the force, but a third of the overtime hours worked.
Asked whether the police department had taken steps to rectify the abuses of overtime outlined in the report, Charles Lutvack, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, did not answer. But he did reiterate Lurie’s campaign pledge to prioritize law enforcement.
“The city faces an $876 million budget deficit, and our administration is going to tackle it head-on so we can get back to investing in San Francisco,” Lutvak wrote. “At the same time, public safety is Mayor Lurie’s top priority, and we will make sure people are and feel safe in every corner of our city.”
Most of the overtime funding, $86.6 million of it, comes from funds already granted to the police and sheriff’s departments. Those funds are being shifted around. But $5.5 million is new funding from the city’s general fund, which Lurie could use for other services.
Police officer pay varies, but officers earn a starting salary of $55.66 an hour, which can increase to $70.90 within seven years. Sergeants start at $82.36 an hour, lieutenants at $94.04, and captains at $118.84. Officers working overtime get paid time-and-a-half.
The San Francisco Police Department is one of the most well-financed in the city, with a current budget of $840 million. Besides enterprise departments like the airport, Public Utilities Commission or Municipal Transportation Agency, only the Department of Public Health and the Human Service Agency are larger.
The department said the overtime spending was an unfortunate consequence of short-staffing.
“We’re short 509 officers in SFPD,” said Evan Sernoffsky, the police department’s communications director. “So in order to maintain adequate policing services, we have to use overtime … That’s basically our Band-Aid until we can hire more cops.”
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 vast majority of police overtime dollars are spent to pay officers to fill in for another officer, a process that is called backfilling, according to a February presentation to the police commission. The presentation did not break down why officers are out, but “backfill” includes officers filling in when the department is short-staffed, for example, or covering for those who are out sick.
Officers are also abusing the system, however. “High users” of overtime, the report found, racked up 80 hours “every week of the year, in some cases for multiple years in a row.” Others abused sick leave, sometimes calling out sick and, that same day, working private security in the “10(b)” program, where officers work as security guards for private entities that reimburse the city. That, in turn, requires other officers to work overtime to cover their shifts.
Sometimes, overtime cards were missing the required sign-off; other times, lieutenants or sergeants approved their own overtime, a violation of department policy. When “special operations” are called, like policing the Tenderloin or addressing shoplifting in Union Square, overtime costs jump without a “significant improvement” in 911 response times or crime.
Police Chief Bill Scott, in a response to the report, wrote last year that the department was implementing most of the recommendations from the Budget and Legislative Analyst. Sernoffsky added that SFPD had issued a department-wide notice on “consequences” for overtime abuse, and has “put into place controls to ensure compliance with our policies.”
Lurie has already launched a special operation of his own that is likely to result in increased overtime costs. In early February, he announced a “hospitality task force” to cover some of the city’s tourism hot spots: Union Square, Yerba Buena Gardens, the San Francisco Centre, the Moscone Center, and the surrounding blocks. The task force would operate 24/7, and follows a campaign pledge to create a police district covering those areas.
It’s Breed 2.0. First Lurie helped silence the strongest voice for public accountability at the Police Commission. Now he’s eager to blow our tax dollars on well-documented abuses of police overtime.
Living in the Upper Haight, I regularly see a bunch of cops show up in four or five cruisers to roust some guy in a sleeping bag. And you know what? I’m no more safer. What a scam!
How is the freezing of city hiring, promotions, and role/department transfers going?
Ask your local librarians, to start.
SFPD gets as much overtime as they ask for, and now without much oversight.
Everyone else, no matter what their job roles and responsibilities, can just suck it up and hope they can make rent next month.
We are now living in a fresh new hell Trump 2.0 where instead of leading the “hashtag resistance,” the Mayor of San Francisco is beefing up the cops while the Governor of California launches a podcast centering MAGA figures, to roll out a new slate of anti-LGBTQ, anti-progressive positions. There is no one coming to save us.
Newsom’s flip flop tracks with the polling that shows that the gender theory elements of the trans political agenda (toilets, sports and puberty blockers) are wildly unpopular while in contrast, housing and job civil rights protections for all LGBTQ+ are quite popular.
Given that the unpopularity of those trans issues made a marginal contribution to electing Trump, now is not the time to double down on those losing political appeals.
Instead, after taking the major L, now is the time for TQ+ to figure out how and why trans appeals failed, and to figure out how to re-articulate the appeal to be less radioactive.
The problem here is that the victim mentality has been stoked amongst many trans people in Discord echo chambers, and many appear to take a martyr’s validation in getting whacked by the haters, the harder the whack the greater the sense of validation. This is where psychotherapy has replaced political strategy, all enforced by guilt trips, in the LGBT coalition. There is no corrective learning that happens in all successful political campaigns, just a rote doubling down again on failure.
What”s really interesting is that trans advocates got more worked up when warned that they were leading us off of a cliff, claiming such warnings were transphobic, than they do when they hit bottom after willfully leaping off of said cliff and encounter a raw transphobic backlash. The whippings will continue until morale improves.
Marcos,
Come to the head of the Class and get your always well deserved Blue Ribbon for the exchange.
There really are some wonderfully talented researchers and writers hanging around this place.
Or, as they used to say in my ole Clinton Peabody Projects in St. Louis …
“There ain’t anything like this place anywhere around this place so this must be the place.”
Sounds like something you could start a Tourist industry on.
And, maybe toss in legal drugs and sex and always, more Cow Bell.
go Niners !!
h.
Well, it makes sense. As social services continue to get slashed, and as working class people sink deeper into economic desperation, billionaires will need police to perform their primary function: keeping social order so that there’s no disruption of the ability of capitalist olilgarchs to hoover up all the wealth that workers create.
Campers,
Did I ever tell you about the time I was 8 years old and my sisters woke me up and said I needed to go out front under the …
I met Jimmy Hoffa who was 39 years old and looked up to my pop who was 7 years older and a preacher and union organizer on the Kroger docks in St. Louis.
Pop used to get beat up and we’d have to go to the country and stay with our Grandma Evans, the completely self contained farm with an outdoor toilet we hated and lots of guns which I loved.
Not anymore.
Get more action with a line of bs if it’s the right bs.
Just ask Putin.
go Niners !!
h.
I thought we were in a deficit?
HELL NO. This Mayor is Trumpian.
In SFPD-ese, “overtime” is a synonym for “extortion.”
Or maybe give it to Muni instead and we will actually get something for our money.
One more middle manager’s office.
Police and Fire overtime abuse is a time honored tradition in San Francisco, every bit as much as workers compensation scams are. I recall reading stories of these abuses in the 70’s and 80’s and how the Mayor or Board (or whoever) were gonna crack down on them. 50 years later…..still waiting.
Lurie is such a disappointment.
Lurie is Trump 2.0. He’d rather hang out with tech bros than public servants, he thinks rich people’s donations are going to save public transportation, and he turns a blind eye to fraud and abuse. This is REALLY going to be a long 4 years.
Whatever it’s worth, keep up the good work of over sighting the budgets—but just being the jaded outsider, as many of us are, his heart isn’t in the right place, he’ll prostitute his office without doubt
SFPD’s 284th Police Academy class started in 2024 with 50 recruits. It seems recruiting experienced officers from other areas will be necessary to fill the ranks. How long does it take the City to hire qualified candidates once they apply? Perhaps some OT is warranted for that effort.
No more overtime until fraud charges are laid on the officers involved in this scam by the DA – and they are fired.
Laurie: when it comes to feeding pigs, less is more. It’s true because some are more equal than others.
Maybe the down voter didn’t like my word choice. But maybe (unfortunately) the downvoter doesn’t believe that hiring freezes, budget slashing, belt tightening, sharing the pain, should apply to policing.
Certainly, many people always want to exempt policing from budget cuts because that “service” is “essential.” Lurie is one of them. For him, other city services aren’t essential. Because of that, budget cuts at all departments doesn’t mean what you think it means. Budget cuts at a certain department actually means a budget increase. That’s why we know, to quote Orwell again, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” It’s not my fault that Orwell used a pig to make that statement.
SFPD might or might not need what they get, but time after time we see that they can’t handle overtime correctly. Even if Lurie can successful explain why SFPD should be exempt from budget cuts, he will also need to explain why SFPD overtime is exempt from oversight and transparency.
ML can cite all of the supportive stats it wants (to the exclusion of stats that don’t support it’s always-one-sided social thesis), but that’s not going to satisfy the very high percentage of SF residents who are fed up with disorder and chaos at the hands overly ideological leadership. The ideologues got want they wanted: a decimated SFPD. But that’s not going to stop SF residents from wanting more police, except that now it’s a lot more expensive.
This is the mess that ML wanted. It’s a bit rich to be throwing a tantrum about it now. 🙄
For your edification……..MISSION LOCAL’s job and mission is to document and report on the “mess.” Without clear eyed, independent journalism , there is no accountability, oversight or transparency. For decades, the SFPD has proven they cannot self police or be trusted with our money.