Spending on police overtime is a big budget problem for the city of San Diego. The city has busted its overtime budget for 10 of the last 11 fiscal years.
But the problem isn’t just budget related, according to a new report by the Office of the City Auditor. The report found that a large percentage of officers are working such long shifts that it endangers themselves and the public.
The report found that 55 percent of officers had worked 12-hour shifts — which doubles the chances of accidental officer death. A full 20 percent had worked 16 hours or more in a single shift — which is banned by many police departments around the country. And 3 percent of officers had worked shifts of 19 hours or more. That’s equivalent to having a blood alcohol level of .05, the report found.
The overtime problem stems at least partially from a hiring problem. The San Diego Police Department hasn’t been able to meet its hiring goals for years, as our Lisa Halverstadt has reported.
The report found that SDPD uses overtime to help ensure there are enough officers to respond to calls for service. But even with the overtime, police response times have skyrocketed in recent years, as Halverstadt also reported.
To deal with its staffing problems SDPD has said it wants to hire more civilian employees. The report by the auditor’s office also suggested this might be a good idea.
“Hiring more civilian employees who do administrative work and respond to lower-risk calls may reduce overtime, improve response times, and decrease department expenditures,” the authors of the report wrote.
The report also suggested SDPD set a cap on how many hours officers are allowed to work in a day, as many other departments have done.
I never heard the SDCC breath one word of any difficulties. Certainly not the mayor. Who do you believe? City fathers or VOS? http://www.dannytri.com maybe if you chose an honest man to lead our city, you would not write about these things. http://www.dannytri.com
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So the SDCC ran off officers and now they are complaining about the overtime. This is hilarious.
Try asking yourself how National City pays their officers more than does San Diego? Perhaps, we have a our priorities screwed up?
The cost of living is enormous in San Diego. Couple that with low pay for officers, ridiculous bureaucracy mandated by the federal government, and officers being accused of excessive force and racism relentlessly. Just the other day there was an article about the Philadelphia police being accused of racism again due to an arrest of some LGBTQ office manager working for the mayor. Evidently someone pulled up behind an officer engaged in a traffic stop, then got out and confronted the officer belligerently, was arrested for disorderly conduct, obstructing justice, and the mayor is concerned about racism. Who in the heck would want to work as a police officer anywhere let alone San Diego where the cost of living is out of control crazy? We are now at a point where I am not sure that you can pay anyone enough to want to become a police officer.
What nonsense being pedaled by our mayor. Even if it was about climate change, which it isn’t that is irrelevant. If you are admitting to that then you’ve also just admitted that the city wasn’t adapting to the changing climate. If the storm drains are clogging to easily, preventing the water from overflowing out of the causeways then that is still a failure on the party of the city to maintain that infrastructure. San Diego always gets most of its rain in a short period of time throughout the year. How much we get each time will always vary. We were told that this was an “el nino” climate pattern and that more rain was expected. Based on the observed patterns we’ve known for many years that the rainfall from year to year will vary significantly. Pretending that this was some kind of surprise is negligent.