The SFPD is making no friends among the top brass of other Bay Area police departments, with their LED mobile billboard going right into other departments’ parking lots offering their cops higher pay to jump ship.
The San Francisco Police Department has been complaining for years that they are short-staffed. But staffing shortages are hobbling police departments all over the Bay Area, and really, across the entire country.
The SFPD decided to get cute this week in a move to recruit more officers, and in doing so, has other Bay Area police departments pretty outraged. The Chronicle reports that the SFPD put a mobile billboard in others police departments’ parking lots blaring a message that if they quit their jobs, SFPD will hire them and give them a raise.
SFPD’s Instagram posts on this are now deleted, but the screenshots (and resentment) remain. The mobile billboard in question is apparently nicknamed the “poach coach,” and broadcasts messages like “$192,072 top step pay + $5,000 signing bonus,” and “What are you waiting for?” And as you see above, SFPD had the nerve to plop this thing in the Fremont Police Department's parking lot on Tuesday, and right smack-dab in front of the building’s entrance.
“I thought it was funny,” the Fremont Police Association officers union president Alex Gregory told the Chronicle. “But it did lead me to an hourlong meeting with the chief and deputy chief , and I can’t say they shared the same level of humor.”
(It bears mentioning that in the above Instagram screenshot, the Fremont Police Association has a comment responding, “Thanks for being willing to give our members a pay raise.” So there is perhaps some political maneuvering here.)
And Interim Fremont Police Chief Sean Washington did apparently make an angry phone call to Interim SFPD Chief Paul Yep. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.
The SFPD pulled the exact same stunt Wednesday in San Bruno, as documented in Instagram posts that they have again since deleted.
I’m no lawyer, so I don't know if this could be spun into anything like a trespassing charge from those other police departments. The Chronicle reports that Fremont’s Chief Washington is considering “a strongly worded letter to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors” asking them to have the SFPD quit doing this.
One SF supervisor would not be receptive. Former SFPD PR guy Matt Dorsey, whose solution to pretty much every problem facing San Francisco is to just give the cops more money, told the Chronicle, “I love that they’re doing it.”
“On this kind of thing, I’m from the Al Davis ‘Just win baby’ school of thought,” he said. “Just hire, baby.”
Admittedly, many of the quotes we’ve included here express amusement. And yes, it is usually funny when law enforcement organizations have bitter fights in public view. But these police departments often need to collaborate when crimes cover multiple cities or counties. And stunts or social media trolling are probably not good ways to foster that collaboration.
Related: That Huge, Bulky SFPD Cop Bus Is No Longer Sitting at 16th and Mission Streets [SFist]
Image: joinsfpd via Instagram (now deleted)
