Sacramento City Hall is quietly dismantling a crucial check on police power | Opinion
Sacramento’s new City Manager Maraskeshia Smith recently said “some hard decisions had to be made” about the city’s 2026-2027 budget, and I’m sure that’s true.
But the budget cuts she presented to the Sacramento City Council earlier this month, to close a $62.6 million deficit, show exactly where the council’s priorities are — and they clearly are not with demanding accountability from those we give unspeakable power.
Smith has proposed to eliminate several positions at the Office of Public Safety and Accountability, gutting the staff there by more than a third. This office works to hold Sacramento’s police and fire departments accountable to the public, and to investigate allegations of abuse.
Smith’s budget proposes to eliminate three staff members at OPSA and redirect a fourth, including an investigator and investigator general, from the already-skeleton staff of just 11 that the council approved for the existing fiscal year budget.
With the recent departures of OPSA director LaTesha Watson and Sacramento Police Chief Kathy Lester, now is not the time to take eyes off of the city’s police and fire departments.
Normally, I’d argue to cut some money from the police budget, which alone constitutes nearly one-third of the city’s General Fund expenditures; and you might even agree with me that it would be an excellent candidate to face budget reductions.
But anytime someone suggests cutting back on the $273.5 million the Sacramento Police Department annually receives (or the more than $155 million the Sacramento Fire Department receives) certain people in this town start screaming about progressives wanting to defund the police, and nothing gets accomplished.
So instead, let me tell you some facts about OPSA’s highly necessary and important work for this city, and why cutting back on its staff is a terrible idea.
In 2024, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available, OPSA reviewed 100% of the complaints filed against the Sacramento Fire Department and 48% of the complaints filed against the Sacramento Police Department.
Staff at OPSA often have to fight behind the scenes at City Hall for access to documentation they have a right to see, a stalling tactic certain city employees and the police chief use to obfuscate information and frustrate OPSA’s investigators, Watson told me before she unexpectedly left the office last year.
She described OPSA’s 2023 audit as “contentious” behind the scenes in City Hall, noting there was an “excessive magnitude of resistance and barriers OPSA endured, trying to conduct the audit as well as present the audit.”
Thanks to Watson and her staff, OPSA documented a total of 679 complaints filed against the Sacramento Police Department in its 2024 report, including two deaths in police custody and one officer-involved shooting.
Of the 679 total complaints that year, 557 were filed with the police department and 122 allegations were filed directly with OPSA. The vast majority of complaints were for a failure to perform a required duty (neglect of duty) or failure to adequately provide timely and required police action (service).
Ultimately, just 70 allegations were referred to police command staff for discipline, including termination. But according to OPSA’s 2024 report to the City Council, only 50 total disciplinary actions were taken, and multiple actions could have been taken against a single officer. By the end of that year, four officers were terminated from their positions, five resigned prior to termination, eight were suspended and 14 received “verbal counseling.”
And, in the five years since the office started tracking complaints against the police and fire departments, allegations of violations of the Fourth Amendment (improper search and seizure) by Sacramento Police have plummeted by more than 71% overall.
Is that because officers know they’ll be held accountable by an OPSA investigation? I think so.
We wouldn’t have this data without the diligent team at OPSA: Cutting back on positions for these public advocates is simply a backdoor to unchecked power for the police and fire departments and a way to keep citizens in the dark about abuses.
“I definitely worry that we’re not going to have any type of oversight in Sacramento,” Tanya Faison, the founder of Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, told The Bee. “And that our City Council and mayor is treating it as less of a priority.”
If the City Council and our new city manager cut these positions at OPSA, they will be tacitly acknowledging they don’t care about holding local law enforcement accountable for the dozens of investigated and sustained misconduct incidents that occur every year in Sacramento.
Leaders here have already made it clear they won’t consider cutting the police or fire department’s overinflated budgets, a line item they increase practically every year. But if they go through with the proposed cuts to OPSA, they’re making it obvious that the people who truly control Sacramento — and the city’s budget — aren’t elected, and they certainly don’t sit on a dais.
No, the people who have the power at City Hall wear uniforms and badges. And soon, they won’t answer to anyone.
