Dozens of SF Cops Making $200K-$300K just in ‘Overtime Pay’
There is a police officer in SF who made $356,000 dollars last year just in “overtime pay”, and he’s not the Chief of Police, he’s a Sergeant in the Richmond District. He made a total of $587,000 in the 2022/23 fiscal year, and he’s not much of an anomaly, there are dozens of SF cops making more than double their base wages in overtime pay, and well over a hundred cops making six figures in overtime.
Sheriff’s too, Ronald Terry a Sheriff’s Lieutenant made $524,978 last year ($307,000 in overtime pay).
Did these officers do some ‘super cop’ shit we just didn’t hear about? Or are they just using the system and taking home over half a million dollars of taxpayer money simply because they can? Not to single out the police…but does anyone think the SF streets actually got safer last year?
This chart was made by By of the SF Chronicle, check out their reporting and awesome interactive charts here.
Last year, the police, sheriff’s, and fire departments recorded the highest accumulation of overtime hours. On average, employees worked for over 450 additional hours, equivalent to approximately nine hours of overtime each week, in addition to their regular 40-hour work schedule.
Owyang, holding the position of senior deputy sheriff with the highest overtime earnings, tallied over 3,300 overtime hours throughout the year. This signifies an average of 63 overtime hours every week. Alongside, two other deputies, Barry Bloom and Kristian DeJesus, also surpassed the 3,000 overtime-hour mark.
Each of the dots in the chart below represents the total earnings of an SFPD employee in the 2022-23 fiscal year.
To see the SF Chronicles interactive data on all government employees check out their article S.F.’s top-paid employee makes $640K. Here’s what every city worker gets paid.
Total pay is made up of three types of earnings — base pay, overtime pay, and ‘special payments’ like leave pay, premium pay, and payouts. It does not include the cost of health insurance or retirement benefits, which averaged $32,000 per S.F. employee in 2022.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, city expenses related to overtime surged drastically, and that massive expense was blamed on understaffing across various departments. Comparing the fiscal years 2020-21 and 2021-22, the amount allocated for overtime payments to employees in San Francisco increased by $100 million, reaching a total of $367 million. This upward trend continued into the most recent fiscal year, reaching $434 million. This figure accounted for over 7% of the total remuneration provided to municipal workers, marking the highest proportion observed in the past ten years.
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Being short-staffed is a great reason to justify working a lot of overtime hours. Hell, if you noticed you could make 200% more than your base salary if you worked more “overtime” hours, would you be in a hurry to hire more people? If you’re an SFPD officer, you certainly don’t have to make more arrests to justify that massive pay bump.
You could just work the system, put your head down and make a killing. Not that it needs to be mentioned, but SFPD’s crime-solving rates dropped to their lowest levels in a decade last year. Our city’s police department has one of the worst crime-solving rates of any city in California, but one of the highest staff-to-citizen ratios.
This chart and more can be found at MissionLocal.com via a great article titled: SFPD rate of solving crimes, already well below national average, gets worse
Take Fresno for example, Fresno Police Department made arrests on 17.7% of crimes committed, SFPD did 8.8%. Fresno had 2.1 officers/police staff per 1,000 residents, and SFPD had 3.5 officers/police staff per 1,000 residents. Fresno County is 6,011 square miles, SF County is less than 47 square miles.
We are constantly told that SFPD is short-staffed but we have the 2nd highest police-to-citizen ratio of major cities in the state, and easily the smallest geographic location to patrol.
I realize that arrests do not necessarily mean that crimes were solved, but no matter how you shake it, it’s clear that the way we are incentivizing our police force currently, seems all wrong.
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