San Francisco Cops Working Overtime Over Staff Shortage, Report Finds

Police officers in San Francisco are being forced to work extra overtime because the department has decreased the number of new hires it’s made.

A recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted that this has forced overtime pay to skyrocket over the last three years, while overall staffing at the police department has gone down.

According to the Chronicle, this huge increase in OT for officers has happened “in spite of a city law that caps the total number of overtime hours a full-time city employee can work at 520 hours in one fiscal year unless a ‘critical staffing shortage’ necessitates an exemption.”

If that were to happen, the director of human resources for the city would have the ability to increase the OT cap in certain departments that were affected.

The media outlet spoke to a police union spokesperson who said the OT cap for police officers has been increased repeatedly in the last few years. It currently sits at 2,000, “with overages beyond that allowed in certain circumstances.”

The Chronicle further reported that there is one police sergeant who earned more than $400,000 in overtime pay alone, which marked the highest amount any employee has earned in the city since back in 2013.

Additionally, the total number of police department employees who earned in excess of $100,000 in OT pay alone increased by more than three times from the 2021-2022 fiscal year to the 2023-2024 fiscal year — from 131 to 493.

Research the Chronicle cited also shows that an excess of OT shifts can ultimately lead to officers performing poorly on the job. 

That’s something that the San Francisco Police Officers Association’s president issued a stern warning about recently. Tracy McCray said that all this increased overtime is “an unsustainable, necessary evil that needs to be addressed immediately.”

She added:

“Unless you want to see a catastrophic cut to police services, the city must either solve the staffing crisis or run the department through overtime. Most of our officers would prefer to keep their days off and their scheduled vacations to spend time with their families and loved ones rather than work countless hours of overtime.”

The Chronicle said that the police department in San Francisco didn’t respond to their requests for comments about the situation.

Recently, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a new measure that seeks to address the police department’s major staffing shortage. Proposition B, as the measure is called, would require the department to hold a minimum level of staffing, and the funding for that would come through an amended tax or some other unspecified new tax.

The Chronicle published a report back in February that blasted officials in the city, calling their proposal “absurdly complicated.” Simply put, the paper has written that San Francisco just needs to hire additional police officers.

The city’s Democratic Mayor London Breed cut police funding in 2020 in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. She redirected $120 million from the city’s law enforcement budget so that other initiatives in the city could be funded.

Now, that move seems to be coming back to bite Breed — and many other liberal leaders across the country who did the same thing.