Sacramento police overtime hit nearly $14 million last year. Should it be spent elsewhere?
The city of Sacramento paid $13.8 million in police overtime last year – $11 million more than it did in 2011, according to city data.
Public safety overtime pay isn’t a new issue. But the amount being paid in Sacramento to police officers has grown and is now a rallying cry for activists and community members urging the city to allocate that money to services designed to uplift disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Los Angeles and Seattle recently voted to drastically reduce police overtime in response to the “defund the police” movement. And Flojaune Cofer, chair of a citizens advisory committee tasked with providing guidance on how new sales tax dollars should be spent, said Sacramento should follow.
“I’m confused about how you both have the manpower to show up for peaceful protests in force but are short-staffed enough that you need to go over the overtime budget by millions of dollars,” Cofer said.
The police department, police officers’ union and Mayor Darrell Steinberg did not immediately return emails seeking comment.
The city spent about $2.1 million in overtime from the George Floyd protests in late May and early June alone.
Last year, the city paid consulting firm Management Partners $271,575 to create a report to help the City Council find ways to save money. Their 188-page report, released in March, highlighted the issue of police and fire overtime.
“The use of overtime in Sacramento has been growing substantially,” the report said. “For instance, overtime increased about 264 percent in the six years between (fiscal year) 2011-12 and (fiscal year) 2017-18.”
The report found overall overtime paid by the city had more than doubled from fiscal year 2011-2012, when it was about $14 million, to fiscal year 2017-2018, when it soared to more than $35 million. That included overtime for all departments, though police and fire made up 92 percent of the cost, the report said.
For police alone, overtime skyrocketed from $2.6 million in fiscal year 2011-2012 to $13.8 million in fiscal year 2019-2020, according to data The Sacramento Bee received from a California Public Records Act request.
“Uncontrolled overtime expenditures can devastate an organization’s efforts to balance spending with revenues,” the consultant’s report said. “Moreover, our experience is that excessive overtime has a particularly negative impact on the public safety workforce resulting in fatigue, on-duty injuries, and increased incidents of sick leave.”
Alarmed by the consulting report, Khalil Ferguson extensively questioned city officials about the overtime costs during a meeting of the Measure U Community Advisory Committee last month.
“I still don’t know where overtime costs come from,” Ferguson, a member of the committee, said Friday. “That money could be going elsewhere. It could be used to go to underserved communities.”
The fire department came in $2.9 million under budget in the 2018-19 fiscal year, said city spokesman Tim Swanson. The police department was $2.3 million over budget.
That’s because the police department and fire department have a “significant number” of positions that are currently vacant, but that funding still goes into their budgets and they can use it for other things, such as overtime, city Finance Director Dawn Holm told the Measure U committee Monday.
“At year end, we’re only looking at the bottom line, we’re not looking at overtime in isolation,” Holm said.
Cities rely on police overtime
Like many cities, Sacramento in recent years has relied on police overtime to make up for understaffing. The city still does not have as many officers as it had before the Great Recession, city officials often point out.
“It’s something we need to really look at it,” Councilman Larry Carr said of the overtime issues. “But as I understand it, much of it is a function of staffing. It’s hard to fill some of the open vacancies in the police department.”
In addition to cutting $97 million in overtime, Los Angeles recently approved a plan to only replace a small number of positions that become vacant. The mayor’s office has said response times will not worsen as a result.
Carr was skeptical that could work.
“If you can reduce the number of people who respond and at the same time not degrade service, that’s a nice Houdini trick,” Carr said.
In 2016, the latest year the data is available, the Sacramento Police Department employed 697 sworn employees, compared to 751 sworn positions that were budgeted -- 54 vacancies.
Some activists say having fewer officers on patrol and a reduced police presence would actually be a good thing.
Cofer said she was on a police ridealong where she observed eight officers respond to a call for a mentally ill homeless man, even though he was nonthreatening and unarmed.
In addition to overtime, Cofer, Ferguson and other activists have also been urging city officials to remove the $45.7 million in Measure U sales tax revenue, from the tax increases approved in both 2012 and 2018, going to police this year. The revenue from the 2018 sales tax increase was promoted by Steinberg and others as a way to invest in underserved neighborhoods, but when the coronavirus hit, city officials decided to allocate the money to core city services.
The council last month voted to hire an inspector general for police oversight and took a step toward ending police response to noncriminal calls, which Steinberg has said will shift money from the department within two years. However, the council has not yet removed police funding, activists point out.
Fire recommendations ignored
Three years ago, the city auditor released a scathing report about fire department overtime, including 18 recommendations.
As of May, the department had only fully implemented two of the recommendations and had only started or partially implemented five, according to a follow up report.
Some recommendations -- reducing staffing from four-person crews to three-person crews on select engines and allowing non-firefighters to work as paramedics and EMTs -- were dropped altogether by the department. Others were dropped in bargaining with the firefighter union.
When it comes to the new consultant report, the fire union said it would be open to adopting the recommended changes, including getting access to data tools that the police department uses for tracking and planning overtime.
Fire department officials told the consultant the department lacks the tools to adequately track and monitor overtime, the report said.
“Local 522 supports the recommendation of the report that using additional data sources and evaluation tools would be helpful for the Fire Department to create a dashboard, monitor and provide guidance regarding methods to manage overtime,” Sacramento Area Fire Fighters Local 522 President Chris Andrew said in a statement.
