The San Francisco sheriff’s department has “nearly depleted” its overtime budget just two-thirds of the way through its fiscal year and is set to spend $19 million more than allocated, according to a controller’s report released Monday.
The department is projected to spend $60.2 million on overtime for the fiscal year 2025 to 2026 — 46 percent more than the $41.2 million the Board of Supervisors approved.
This comes as Mayor Daniel Lurie has asked for significant belt-tightening and is seeking hundreds of millions in cuts across city departments, including at least $57 million to the public health department. He has asked for $100 million in staffing cuts equal to about 500 positions.
For the sheriff’s department, “significant and immediate operational changes would be required to reduce overtime expenditures to remain within budget,” read the report. The controller wrote that any savings from leaving vacant positions unfilled and drawing from reserves “will be insufficient” to stay within budget.
The department, for its part, said in a statement it did not anticipate asking for supplemental money from the board but would instead reappropriate “existing savings” and “continued cost reductions and staffing adjustments” to cover the overtime.
That will induce more than a monetary cost, it said.
“These reductions and staffing adjustments,” department spokesperson Tara Moriarty said, “will affect response times to calls for service, slower and reduced access to the incarcerated population, and a decrease in services to the community.”
The sheriff’s and police departments routinely overspend their overtime budgets by tens of millions of dollars. The departments then ask the city to shore up their budgets to account for the overrun.
Last year, even tough-on-crime city supervisors blasted the San Francisco Police Department and sheriff’s department when they sought an additional $91 million from the board.
“I’m not proud of this vote,” said Supervisor Matt Dorsey at the time. Dorsey is the former police communications chief, and joined colleagues in a 9-2 vote to begrudgingly approve the extra $91 million. “I don’t think the city should ever be in a situation that requires this much overtime from our public safety agencies.”
The San Francisco sheriff’s department has blamed being understaffed for its overtime issues, saying current deputies are forced to work extra hours to backfill empty shifts. It has had years of declining staffing but that has been reversed recently, and the department now has 790 sworn deputies, according to a Feb. 23 memo from the sheriff sent to the mayor’s office.
“Overtime costs have been driven primarily by staffing shortages and a concurrent rise in our jail population,” said Moriarty, the sheriff’s spokesperson.
The ballooning overtime seems set to continue. Sheriff Paul Miyamoto in that Feb. 23 memo requested $18.4 million from the mayor’s office in extra overtime for the next two fiscal years, separate from the projected overspending this year. He said the extra budget would help maintain “minimum staffing” in jails, courts and in the field. Miyamoto also requested $42 million in additional personnel funding to “add staff positions” to the jail, citing an increasing jail population.
Incarcerated people within city jails, which have more people incarcerated than at any time since before the pandemic, say conditions have grown chaotic as a result. Several incarcerated people told Mission Local they are spending more time inside their cells because there are not enough deputies to facilitate free time.
Mayor Daniel Lurie in May issued an executive directive to bolster flagging staffing levels at both the sheriff’s and police departments. That order pointed to “an overreliance on costly and unsustainable overtime” and sought to reform the overtime system.
The Monday memo was penned by the San Francisco controller, who is the chief financial officer for the city. It was sent to Lurie and city supervisors as part of the controller’s regular fiscal oversight. It tracked overtime spending from July 1, 2025, the start of the city’s fiscal year, to Feb. 13, 2026.
The controller’s report said that “if the rate of expenditures continues to exceed the budget” at the sheriff’s department, his office would work with the department and the mayor to identify savings.
Those could include cuts to “equipment, capital projects, and facilities maintenance” but the report said that even those “are not sufficient to fund the shortfall and could materially impact operations.”
On Monday, the mayor’s office sent instructions to departments asking any with “significant overtime spending” to reduce it,” part of broader budget cuts.
This article has been updated to correct the percentage by which the sheriff’s department is projected to exceed its budget.
So, in other words, the cops are robbing us of our budget.
The problem seems obvious. Cops and sheriffs have to respond to crime and safety needs as they arise. They cannot control their workload due to the nature of their obligations.
And the lead time for hiring more LEOs is long, so overtime is inevitable. If that means service cuts in less critical areas, then so be it. The voters are clear that crime and safety are the top priorities.
You’re right about the political pressure. But contrast the proposed “inability to control their workload” with, say, health inspectors. We hire a certain number. If we hired more, they’d address more violations and we’d be safer. But we don’t. The “we’ll do what the budget allows” attitude is accepted for some types of safety….but not other.
Lurie just told department heads to expect to cut 500 positions from the budget.
Let’s assume an average complete compensation of $190,000/year (that includes pay and all benefits, for a very wide range of actual salaries.)
That means 100 of those 500 positions could be saved if the cops weren’t taking the money. They run a racket and they’ll get away with it.
Seeing as we have a closet Republican for a mayor, this all makes sense. Cut jobs and aid to the needy and shovel it to the oinkers.
The political careers (D.A. Jenkins, Mayor Lurie, Supvs.Engardio and Wong…) were made by arguing that the public works/public-health/criminal justice nuisance among the Tenderloin poor could be easily shifted to the responsibility of SFSD by simply arresting them and denying them release. SHAZAM clean streets, problem solved……..except now the Sheriff has deputies camping in trailers between shifts at our San Bruno facility, and a record number of abuse scandals, lockdowns and fights.
The moral of the story is that cops are crooks.
Al Walden we should just get rid of the cops sense you believe their crooks and see what happens to the city again. You saw a small taste of it under the past mayor.
The police and sheriffs are in charge of their own staffing, from recruiting to qualifying applicants to hiring to training. They own the staffing shortage. Perhaps someone else should run their staffing rather than keeping it internal
Any estimate how much of this is attributable to pension spiking?
Daniel —
I could be wrong, but I’d say zero percent. Overtime pay does not count toward your pensionable income.
Best,
JE
I wonder how many staff will be allocated to cover the new RESET situation on 6th St that the Sheriff said the department would be able to cover?