Police Overtime Abuse Contributes to Budget Crisis
The City’s budget is in crisis, but the Mayor is asking for more money for policing. Is it justified?
Watching Mayor Lurie put together his first big boy budget is like watching a car crash in slow motion. The budget always feels like a car crash at the end, but it feels like the recklessness is getting worse and accountability is conspicuously absent.
At the same time, San Francisco faces a huge shortfall if Trump succeeds in his plans to punish us for our values. Some say it’s why Mayor Lurie refuses to utter Trump’s name like a cringe millennial dancing around the word Voldemort. But whatever his inner reasoning, the reality is that we have an embarrassingly silent leader at the top who really, really wants everyone to just play nice.
Mayor’s Motto: Keep Calm
Mayor Lurie seems to hope the budget crisis is an instant replay of the tacky “Keep Calm and Carry On” fad. It appears that he expects all of us poor and working class people to sigh heavily at the inconvenience of service cuts to the essentials that make this city somewhat habitable for us and then move on.
The untutored mayor wants his first budget battle to be a neutered pillow fight, at most. But with an audacious ask for additional police overtime money at the heels of a damning accountability report, he’s setting himself up for something a lot more dramatic.
The report says, “SFPD does not adequately control staff use of overtime or monitor and enforce established overtime limits.” And it’s not just a money problem. According to the report, “Excessive overtime hours pose risks to public safety and officer health, may contribute to employee burnout and negatively affect morale, and may generate unnecessary financial costs for the City.”
During budget season, advocates for services to our most vulnerable and underserved kin are like marathon runners. But this year the report gave them the fire they need to push through. Here, at last, is proof that the City is spending resources in a miscalculated way, throwing spaghetti at the wall so they can point to it and say they did something.
Spaghetti at the Wall
According to the report, “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… has not established adequate performance metrics or criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of these initiatives.” The optics are terrible, but more importantly the accountability is nowhere to be found. But will anything change?
SF Budget Priorities in 2025
It comes down, once again, to priorities. Right now, the alcalde we devotedly call Denim Dan has decided to ask the City for not only over $800 million this year but also $61 million to $91 million in additional overtime. The same mayor stood in front of transit advocates during Climate Week and warned them everyone would be facing cuts. Does everyone include the police officers who have been found, in explicitly documented reports, to be abusing the overtime rules and collecting time and a half pay?
Guess not. Mayor Lurie’s artless budget draft only cuts from the disenfranchised and working class folks who keep this city running, and we’re not talking about the cops who ineffectively push problems from one corner to another.
A Disturbing Pattern of Politicizing Policing
While top executives easily find themselves comfortable spots on the Mayor’s busy calendar, the rest of us get brushed off. And he’s shown a degree of ruthlessness in removing accountability experts like Max Carter-Oberstone from positions where they can make meaningful reform when they don’t roll over and show their belly for him.
Optics seem to be all that matters. Sweeps of dozens of people result in zero charges, a phenomenal waste of resources. And in the meantime, our neighbors are literally piling up in jail. In fact, San Francisco Assistant Police Chief David Lazar said, “We will continue to arrest people… We’re not really concerned about jail overcrowding at this point. That’s not going to stop us from doing what we need to do.” Yikes.
To compound matters, while on-the-ground homelessness service providers are being stripped of the tools they need to compassionately help folks on the streets, last week cops were given a “police-friendly” place to drop off people suffering from health issues. This untested path forward might reduce overtime, or it might be another excuse for cops to scam the city out of more taxpayers’ money.
And scam it is. The report was abundantly clear. There is abuse happening in the San Francisco Police Department. Even if it’s a small portion of police officers, it’s being tolerated by all of them.
Alleged Wage Theft among SFPD
Why does all of this matter in the context of the city’s budget? Anya Worley-Ziegmann, an organizer with the People’s Budget Coalition, says, “Everything is a trade off in a budget.” So asking for more money for police overtime means asking that less money be spent on other services.
According to organizers with the ACLU, who presented on the overtime fiasco on Monday evening, it appears the cuts to services are explicitly targeting “queer people, women, and immigrants.” One commenter poignantly remarked that Lurie is cutting the department on the status of women while adding more police. “What we need are more men with guns,” the commenter sarcastically quipped.
SF Budget Timeline 2025
We don’t need a picture perfect mayor. We need someone who can admit his mistakes, extend olive branches, listen to scientists and health specialists, and help protect the most vulnerable residents of our city. We need a mayor who can deliver (by June 1) a budget that doesn’t humiliate us as a city.
It seems like the Mayor (if not the Board of Supervisors) might be too scared to confront this blatant abuse of overtime by cops.
Should we be scared too? Nah. This is a 1200+ word article and we all know they can’t read. Please note: Adult illiteracy is not a joke; if we can fix the budget and devote more money to programs like the Public Library’s Project Read instead of paying mall cops 121% as much* as teachers or librarians, we can solve this issue. Then maybe the people abusing the policy either willfully or by oversight can run it back and read the fine print.
How Did We Get Here?
Police and police-friendly politicians claim the overtime is necessary because SFPD isn’t at recommended staffing levels. Is that true? According to the report, no. In fact, “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.” They’re making the staffing issues worse.
As early as 2023, we knew the increase in overtime costs was going to be an issue with the budget. The problem, according to the police union PR campaign, is that there’s a staff shortage. According to a 2023 conversation with UC Berkeley professor Sara Hinkley, “San Francisco is particularly unsuited to filling police department positions… Most of its adult population is college-educated, and thus can get higher-paying jobs in the private sector.”
But last week’s damning report explains that it’s not actually because of short staffing. Many of the overtime costs are actually because of abuse. There’s no way to explain it other than corruption. “Officers are abusing their sick leave by calling out sick, collecting city-paid sick leave, and then working private events through the 10B program — a double-dip scheme with no oversight.” Again, this is not overtime because of a lack of bodies, this is a body calling in sick to one job to ensure that they get paid time and a half at another job.
What Happens Next With the Budget
At the hearing, budget chair Connie Chan indicated that the SFPD will maintain their extraordinarily stacked budget. They may not get the additional money, but they also might not see any cuts. At the hearing Wednesday, Chan said, “How can the police department — at this moment, I’m asking every department — how do we do more with I wouldn’t say less, but flat?”
What else is flat? Hopefully not the full board’s response to the report. If the mayor wants to tune it out, so be it. It’s on his conscience. The dirt is on his jeans, so to speak. But the Board of Supervisors acts more directly accountable to the people. We can only hope someone in the City takes that accountability seriously.
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