Mayor London Breed has made it clear for the past few years that the Police Department budget can’t be touched; in fact, it keeps going up. In the mayoral campaign, Daniel Lurie constantly said he would continue to increase the police budget—and has shown no indication now that he is the mayor-elect, facing a massive budget deficit, that his position has changed.
The police budget has become a toxic political issue: The few times that Sup. Dean Preston has sought some transparency over the way the cops spend more than $820 million a year, he’s been attacked as anti-law-enforcement.
And yet, a scathing new audit shows, the progressive critics of department spending were right: The cops appear to be wasting millions of dollars on overtime, with little or no planning or accountability.
“What’s clear from the audit is that these aren’t one-off bad decisions,” Preston told me. “This is a systematic lack of oversight.”
Among the findings of the audit by the board’s Budget and Legislative Analyst:
—The department uses overtime with no limits or controls, and sworn staff regularly violate the rules on how many hours they can work in a day or a week:
Overall, we found a lack of both internal and external accountability for overtime limit violations and excessive overtime at SFPD. The Department has not taken sufficient steps to enforce its overtime limits, and violations typically do not result in consequences or corrective action. In addition, several key Citywide overtime controls, such as annual public reporting and public hearings on overtime limit violations, did not occur between FY 2018-19 and FY 2022-23.
—Cops are taking advantage of the city’s sick-leave programs to avoid weekend shifts, take long weekends—and all too often, calling in sick to then work as private security guards for private companies.
The city has a program known by its City Charter section as 10B, which allows off-duty cops to work private security—and the companies that hire them pay them time and a half. According to the audit, SF police used sick time to work 51,000 hours in the private sector.
Sick leave and injury-related leave used by SFPD sworn staff increased by 77 percent over the five years of our audit scope period, from 14.4 days annually per employee in FY 2018-19 to 25.5 days annually per employee in FY 2022-23. Our in-depth review of paid sick leave use in FY 2022-23 revealed potential abuse patterns, including frequent sick leave use on specific days of the week (often the first or last day of a work week), Saturdays and Sundays to avoid weekend duties, and coinciding with working voluntary 10B overtime.
Our evaluation of SFPD’s sick leave management practices found that SFPD did not enforce existing absenteeism policies or adequately monitor attendance during the audit scope period, which allowed potentially improper uses of sick leave. Additionally, we found that SFPD has not adhered to key provisions of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Police Officers’ Association related to sick leave, such as conducting quarterly reviews of sick leave to determine eligibility for 10B overtime assignments. As a result, approximately 51,000 ineligible 10B overtime hours were worked by employees with high sick leave usage between 2020 and 2023. SFPD has also not convened the required Health and Safety Committee to address health and safety issues or update the Department’s Injury and Illness Prevention Program.
That means a department that officials say is desperately shorthanded had to fill 51,000 hours of patrol duty—that’s 6,300 shifts—with overtime to make up for cops who called in sick to make overtime in the private sector.
“That’s time that could have been spent in the Tenderloin, or in other high-crime areas,” Preston told me.
—The department allows cops to collect compensatory time off, instead of pay, for some overtime—which means even more officers missing more shifts:
SFPD officers’ ability to earn compensatory time off, rather than pay, for overtime creates an ongoing and compounding staffing liability and increases the costs of overtime for SFPD and the City. SFPD’s current practice permits an officer who works 10 hours of overtime to choose to earn 15 hours of compensatory time off rather than pay, which could require another officer to work 15 hours of overtime to backfill that absence.
The department has allocated substantial overtime to “special initiatives,” like the Union Square Safe Shopper Initiative—but there’s no way to determine if those programs actually work:
SFPD has deployed significant police resources in designated areas to carry out targeted initiatives staffed using overtime, including the Union Square Safe Shopper Initiative, the Tenderloin Triangle Safety Plan, and Tourism Deployment. However, the Department not has not established adequate performance metrics or criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of these initiatives.
Sergeants and lieutenants are approving their own overtime, and there’s little control or accountability for other overtime spending:
. We also found through a review of a judgmental sample of 559 overtime cards that the Department-wide practice of obtaining two separate verifying and approving signatures for overtime worked was not consistently followed, which increases the risk for overtime fraud or abuse. Forty-eight out of 559 overtime cards reviewed were missing one or more required signatures, eight out of 559 cards had two of the same signatures, and 18 out of 559 cards had lieutenants or sergeants approving their own overtime.
We’re talking a lot of money here: SFPD spent $108 million on overtime in 2022-2023, 13 percent of the entire budget.
The department, and the mayor, say all that overtime is necessary because the department is understaffed. The audit notes that the number of full-time sworn officers is down 21 percent over the five-year period studied.
At the same time, crime, especially violent crime, declined by 14 percent; so did property crimes.
Among the issues here: How is the overtime allocated? How much of this is filling in positions that are open because the cops can’t hire enough new people—and how much is abuse, like the 10B program?
Preston asked for the audit in 2023, when the cops came to the board and asked for a $25 million supplemental budget appropriation to fill in overtime because of short staffing.
From Preston’s office:
At the time that SFPD sought a $25 million supplemental in March 2023, 911 calls had decreased by 21.6%, and self-initiated calls— or calls initiated by officers instead of 911 reports— had decreased by 55.7%. With declining calls for service, increasing spending, and little transparency on deployment decisions, Preston called for this audit in 2023 and the audit motion was unanimously approved by the Board of Supervisors.
“I knew it was bad, but not this bad,” said Supervisor Preston. “The violation of laws and contracts, the lack of oversight, and the abuse of overtime are alarming and require immediate intervention and oversight.”
I sent Lurie’s office an email asking if the mayor-elect had seen the audit and had any comments. I got no response.
But if there’s a policy recommendation here that might save a lot of money, it might involve eliminating or greatly reducing the 10B program.
The cops who get hired as private security guards were trained at the expense of the city taxpayers. They are equipped with guns, uniforms, radios, and other gear at city expense. The city covers their health care, their retirement, and their promotions.
It’s not clear to me why private corporations should be able to take advantage of all that and take cops off the streets at a time when the department is supposed to be so shorthanded.
Shouldn’t San Francisco cops be working for San Franciscans?
And is it okay to have cops, who carry guns, working more hours a week than the city and state say is safe?
I wonder what Lurie, and all the supes like Matt Dorsey, who are all in on giving the cops more money, will say if this comes up in the spring session.
