In a broke city, it seems forbidden to question Sacramento Police spending | Opinion
If a city’s budget is a statement of its priorities, then Sacramento’s priority is being unable to say “no” to the police — even at the cost of every other service the city provides.
Sacramento gives its police department hundreds of millions of dollars every year, a number that only continues to grow with each new budget season, regardless of shortfalls or crunches. Meanwhile, city essentials like parks, public works and even City Hall itself are voluntarily cinching their belts in the face of a $44 million deficit for the next fiscal year.
Is the police department such a sacred cow that it is sacrilegious to even question it?
On Tuesday, the Sacramento City Council heard from nearly every department about what it can offer to alleviate the budget deficit, but the largest piece of the pie — the police — has remained recalcitrant in doing its fair share. The current police budget is $246 million, but even in a deficit year, the proposed city budget for 2025-26 suggests increasing that to $254 million. Most astonishingly, over the past six years, there has been an increase in the Sac PD budget of more than $115 million.
Meanwhile, there are nearly 180, fully-funded vacancies in the police department: About half are sworn officers and half are administrative staff. Police Chief Kathy Lester has been asked to give up a mere 27 of those positions. Her argument is that the funding allocated for those vacant positions is still used. It doesn’t go toward anyone’s salaries but toward overtime costs instead.
If the funding for more vacant positions is taken away, then public safety will suffer, Lester argues.
But this is nothing more than a threat, a tactic Sacramento Police are particularly adept at. While the police budget has ballooned to record highs, crime has actually gone down — something Lester herself admitted in a recent council meeting. So why do they need more and more money every year, particularly when the city is cutting essential services to balance the budget?
It’s either vacant or it’s not
Now, it was 11 p.m. on Tuesday when this police budget exchange happened, and the city council had been in meetings for nearly nine hours straight — so everyone was a bit loopy. But I want to highlight one specific, extremely confusing conversation between the council, city staff and Lester:
During a discussion over Council member Mai Vang’s proposal to cut a handful of vacant police positions, Council member Caity Maple called Lester up to the podium and asked how long certain positions in the marine unit had been vacant. (The Sacramento Police Department marine unit patrols the city’s waterways. Vang’s suggestion to find the money to avoid cutting essential city services was to eliminate the vacant positions on the marine unit and ask a similar unit under the county’s purview to cover patrols of the same area.)
Vang and Maple both referenced data given to the council and the public by the police department, which clearly listed a handful of long-empty positions in the marine unit, among other units.
“Our marine unit isn’t vacant right now,” Lester replied.
Maple: “OK, so those are all filled positions?”
Lester: “Yes.”
Shortly after, Vang asked for clarification, since Lester’s assertion did not align with publicly-released information.
“In the budget item, we clearly list that these (marine unit positions) are vacant, but then (Lester) just said that it is filled,” Vang said. “If they’re filled, then the budget … we have out to the public is inaccurate?”
Sacramento finance director, Pete Coletto, jumped in:
“The positions themselves are filled, but we would first cut to vacant positions,” Coletto said. “So the marine unit would go away, the services would go away (and) the two people that are in those spots would go elsewhere in the department.”
That was still confusing for Vang (and anyone else with two ears and a brain), though, so Coletto tried again.
“To clarify what police are saying is there’s appropriations associated with each position that we have budgeted. And one of the things that we tried to do during the budget process was produce these strategies so you would understand the impacts of eliminating filled or vacant positions. What police is saying is, ‘Hey, you know, we have people operating in the marine unit, but if we were to eliminate the marine unit, we’re not going to fire all those police officers because we have other vacancies.’ But it’s that spending authority that allows them to use the overtime to staff all the service level that they’re providing now. So what they’re saying here is, ‘What position would you actually cut?’ And if you have a bunch of patrol vacancies, you’re not going to fire your marine officers, and then to still have patrol vacancies, you’re going to move those marine officers to patrol.”
Vang spoke for us all, I think, when she replied to that with a quizzical: “Um... thanks Pete.”
The police department wants the city to believe that there are nearly 200 job vacancies that cannot be filled, but they also want us to believe that most of those jobs are actually filled by people doing more than one job who need twice — or even triple — their pay to do it all. How is that possible? Well, it’s not.
But if Lester can muddy the waters for the public and council alike, then they can scare the council into the belief that removing any of those already-funded positions would result in “catastrophic” crime, as Lester recently put it.
So the police department will happily play the role of Schrödinger’s Cat, where vacant positions are somehow both a drain on the force’s resources and also can’t be eliminated because they’re actually filled.
Understand? It’s ok, neither does anyone else.
Public safety is not just policing
Two years ago, the city passed a resolution stating that safety comes from the way we invest in our communities — not just the way we police them. On Tuesday, Vang said if the city’s priorities have changed since that time, they ought to bring that resolution back and clarify exactly what public safety means.
Unsurprisingly, no one took her up on the offer.
The police budget is as high as it’s ever been, and it’s continued to grow every year. At what point will it be enough? (I fear the answer is “never.”)
Vang’s request to eliminate a handful of the nearly 200 vacant police positions is not only reasonable, it’s a good faith effort to protect critical programs both in the police department and in the city.
“We have to have the courage to reallocate some of these vacant positions from the police department to protect services that directly support our working families,” Vang said. “I think choosing to keep these unfilled positions while cutting real people and taking away resources from children and families cannot be how the city leans into our values.”
If Sacramento continues to cut community programs in favor of funding policing without any tangible benefit or increase in public safety, then we are simply giving in to the fearmongering that the police department leans on every time their murky budgeting is questioned.
The Sacramento City Council will not take a vote on its 2025-26 budget until June 10. The likelihood of a majority of council members finding enough courage to say “no” to the police’s outstretched hand is extremely low. But the day will come — and soon — when no more cuts can be made to Sacramento’s community centers, homeless programs, libraries, legal services, public works, festivals and grants.
I just hope that, by then, not everything we cherish about the city will be chaff, ground under the wheel — and we’ll be left forever chasing the promise of public safety.
