The SF Police Department is now spending $108 million a year on overtime pay alone, with wild and potentially fraudulent abuse of paid sick leave, officers approving their own overtime, and some taking paid time off to moonlight as security guards.
You might recall a dustup about excessive SFPD overtime costs in early 2023 when Mayor London Breed asked for an extra $26.7 million to the SFPD budget just to cover more overtime costs — after the department had already blown through their allotted $55.6 million for overtime. The Board of Supervisors ended up granting $25.3 million of that, albeit with some skepticism that they were just handing out blank checks.
Supervisor Dean Preston complained that the department “wildly overspent their already-increased budget, and now want a bailout with more raises, bonuses, and unlimited overtime,” and he asked for an audit.
On Thursday, Preston got his audit, a 128-page report from the city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst. And KTVU reports that audit found the department was wildly overspending on overtime without any safeguards, with $108 million being spent on overtime in the most recent fiscal year, and many officers also abusing the paid sick-leave system to a shocking degree.
How shocking? According to KGO, the audit found that the average SFPD employee "took over 25 days of sick leave a year." What in the heck kind of job lets you take 25 paid sick leave days a year?
“SFPD does not adequately control staff use of overtime or monitor and enforce established overtime limits,” the audit says. It also notes that the report “identified high users of overtime who consistently work the equivalent of 80-hour work weeks every week of the year, in some cases for multiple years in a row.”
80-hour work weeks for multiple years in a row sure sounds like someone's being fraudulent in recording their hours. Indeed, the report found that 13% of overtime cards, which require two separate approval signatures, were either missing at least one signature, or had the same person’s signature twice, or even officers just plain signing off their own overtime cards.
The audit also found that 12% of officers were responsible for 32% of all SFPD overtime. And in the paid sick leave department, the audit discovered officers taking sick leave just so they could work other shifts as private security guards.
The report makes 30 recommendations for curbing overtime abuse, which the SFPD seems to be largely agreeing to. But the department does not sound particularly remorseful about the wild overspending the audit described.
"We’ve been aggressively hiring and filling our academies to fill our shortage of 500 officers necessary to adequately police our city,” an SFPD spokesperson said in a statement to KTVU. “As a necessary stopgap measure, the SFPD has been using overtime to backfill our patrol and investigation units to ensure San Francisco remains one of the safest cities in the country.”
Preston was taken aback by the audit he himself had asked for.
“I knew it was bad, but not this bad,” he said in an emailed statement. “The violation of laws and contracts, the lack of oversight, and the abuse of overtime are alarming and require immediate intervention and oversight.”
That intervention and oversight won’t fall on Dean Preston, who just barely lost his reelection bid. It will fall on incoming mayor Daniel Lurie, whose brief response to KGO was, "We are too short-staffed. We rely too heavily on mandatory overtime.”
Image: San Francisco Police Department via Facebook
