People in Sacramento seem to think more cops means more safety. Think again | Opinion
At the last Sacramento City Council meeting, more than 45 public speakers signed up to comment on the city’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025-26. Many — though certainly not all — were concerned about Councilwoman Mai Vang’s proposal to cut vacant positions in the Sacramento Police Department to help balance the budget.
“We are a city looking to grow. You can’t grow a healthy city without core services, and those services start and end with the police department and public safety,” said Dustin Smith, president of the Sacramento Police Officers Association.
“We should never be in a place where we are even discussing cutting funding to the police department,” said Stephanie Duncan, a woman who identified herself as a renter living in District 7. “How the city prioritizes the safety of the citizens is by every member of the city council, first and foremost, openly supporting the police.”
“With everything at hand tonight, I must be direct: Public safety is the bedrock of a thriving downtown,” said Madeline Noell, a local realtor and policy manager with the Downtown Sacramento Partnership. “Any proposed budget cuts to the police department directly threaten our ability to attract and keep businesses, customers and residents.”
These are certainly thoughtful remarks from a cross-section of Sacramento’s business community and residents, but I believe they represent a misguided and growing mindset in Sacramento and our nation that more policing means more public safety.
That’s simply not true. It is far more important to public safety how the police are deployed than how many there are. And Sacramento doesn’t know how its police officers are being deployed because of a confusing shell game aided by the highest levels of city government. It’s a game Police Chief Kathy Lester is all too willing to play if it means that her department continues to be funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Continuing to fund the police at increasingly record-breaking levels does not guarantee increased public safety, but in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, the term “defund the police” became a polarizing idea.
It was never a literal call to abolish police departments, but that’s how it was misrepresented and weaponized by law enforcement and their supporters. What’s been lost in the argument is the moment of clarity to end police brutality that many people felt after Minneapolis Police killed George Floyd.
But in the interim five years since that time, instead of communities rethinking how we deploy police officers and whether we should invest in more anti-violence and pro-youth measures, police budgets have benefited from the backlash to “defund the police.”
What happens when you add more police?
Americans are generally pro-police. Three-quarters of Americans in a 2021 USA Today-Ipsos poll said they support deploying more police officers to street patrols and 70% said they support increasing police department budgets. Two-thirds of respondents agreed that “police officers are generally good and well-meaning,” and a similar amount said the “disrespect of police officers and law enforcement is a serious problem in the U.S.”
Professor Morgan Williams, an economist at New York Univesity’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, told NPR in 2021 that he and his colleagues found that adding more police officers meant more people getting arrested for petty crimes that are often victimless, such as disorderly conduct, drinking in public, drug possession and loitering. Unsurprisingly, Black people and people of color are disproportionately the target of these increased arrests, resulting in life-changing consequences for these populations without any evidence of an increase in public safety.
That indicates that an increased police presence is at its most useful when officers are being used to fight and solve serious crimes, not petty crime. Yet the police budget continues to climb in Sacramento without an increase in staffing. That’s in part due to a nationwide struggle to recruit and retain police officers, but also because vacant, budgeted positions are being used to prop up unbudgeted positions and overtime.
Something has to give here. The Sacramento Police department’s budget has been raised more than $100 million in the last six years. If the cuts don’t come, at least in part, from the police budget, then it will have to come from our city’s parks, youth programs, transportation and social services — until there’s no more blood to be squeezed from the stone. The recalibration of the police budget is the only answer to save all that we love about our city while maintaining as many officers on the ground as possible.
But if any questioning of the police budget is decried as abolitionism and dismissed out of hand, how many millions more is Sacramento willing to spend just to make people feel safer?
An example of department bloat
The City of Sacramento’s taxpayers are budgeted to pay more than half a million dollars in 2025-26 for a program that claims to identify the acoustic signature of gunshots and dispatch police accordingly. The “ShotSpotter” program has been in use in Sacramento since 2015.
But the technology is notoriously unreliable, and it often overwhelms dispatch centers with false reports. Other large cities like Atlanta, San Antonio, Chicago and Houston have already cut ties with ShotSpotter, and the Sacramento Community Police Review Commission issued a recommendation back in March of 2023 to do the same.
Data garnered by Keyan Bliss, a former commissioner on the board, shows that 73% of 6,737 ShotSpotter activations or alerts from June 2015 to May 2022 resulted in no reports. From the reports directly attributed to ShotSpotter, only 4% resulted in arrests and 8.5% resulted in firearms seized.
“Since 2015, ShotSpotter has cost Sacramento taxpayers over $4 million just to maintain,” Bliss said. “As the police budget only partially supports annual maintenance using $315K from Multi-Year Operating Project resources, every year the city must close the $195,000 funding gap using asset forfeitures and one-time grant funding.”
When the program was staffed, the labor cost was estimated to be as high as $2.9 million yearly, according to Fiscal Year 2021-22 budgeted compensation data.
Yet, in the three years from January 2019 to May 2022, the Sacramento Police Department reported seizing only 67 firearms and making 58 arrests. That amounts to an average cost for Sacramento residents of $22,818 per firearm seized and $26,359 per arrest — not including labor costs.
“Sacramento’s contract with SoundThinking (ShotSpotter’s manufacturer) is set to expire on June 14, 2025. Last February, Police Chief Kathy Lester reported publicly that the ShotSpotter unit of 12 police officers was already eliminated and reassigned to other areas,” Bliss said. “Given the mounting budget deficits coupled with this grossly inefficient program, this is a perfect time to allow ShotSpotter to expire without any further losses to the city.”
Moving forward
As I was writing this column, news broke that a 15-year-old boy in Vang’s district had been shot and killed on the streets of Meadowview, marking the city’s 18th homicide of the year. I reached out to Vang, who was nearly in tears, having spent the last several hours mourning with her community, with many more such days ahead of her.
“We’ve increased the police budget every single year, and our babies are still dying on the streets. Something isn’t right,” she said. “There’s so much more we can be doing to prevent this from happening.
“I’m heartbroken because I know we can do better as a city, and we’ve done it before. We need to have the political will to do it and to wrap our arms around these communities.”
Sacramento is a community crying out for a semblance of safety, but we cannot continue to pour nearly a quarter of its $1 billion-plus yearly budget into the police department without question. More money is not the answer to save lives or to make communities feel safer.
The situation requires a hard look at the city and police budgets to reduce spending where it is superfluous, and put it where it is most useful.
It will require an incredible amount of political will from our city council members, and it will take all sides — the police department most of all — to be open and honest with each other about exactly what $225 million annually has bought for Sacramento.
This story was originally published May 30, 2025 at 3:00 AM.
