SJPD overtime pay rising, audit finds
Workload has been increasing despite hiring more officers
Overtime pay for San Jose police officers quadrupled over the past decade, as dozens of officers each year have exceeded work limits set by the department’s duty manual, a newly released city auditor’s report reveals.
The report’s findings starkly illustrate the gap between the San Jose Police Department’s staffing levels and the ever-increasing workload, fueling discussions about whether officers should spend so much time responding to calls involving non-crime matters such as mental health crises and homelessness issues.
For several years, SJPD has relied on overtime pay to cover vacancies, particularly to provide minimum patrol required every day. But the audit, spearheaded by City Auditor Joe Rois, found that even as the department hired hundreds of new officers in recent years, overtime has not declined proportionately.
In the 2019-20 fiscal year, overtime pay accounted for 10% of SJPD’S $464 million budget but didn’t significantly dent call-response times. A separate auditor report released earlier this year found response times lagging sharply behind the city’s stated goals.
The department’s duty manual states that officers should not work more than 16 hours, including regular time and overtime, in any given 24-hour period, but the audit found nearly 200 instances of officers exceeding that limit last year.
The audit noted that one officer worked 25.5 consecutive hours of overtime. It also found that overtime claimed for activities historically considered discretionary — such as report writing — rose faster than mandatory overtime responsibilities, chief among them maintaining the minimum required number of officers on patrol each day.
Councilmember Raul Peralez, a retired SJPD officer who represents the city’s downtown area, said the city has two options if it wants to drastically decrease overtime — hire more officers or decrease workload. Peralez said the latter gives even more weight to ongoing city discussions about reimagining public safety and parsing out certain emergency calls to specialized professionals.
“I think we can absolutely look at some of these calls for service, such as issues like homelessness, and decide that someone else — whether that be mental health providers or other professional staff — should take that responsibility,” he said. “It may not solve the dilemma but it would absolutely free up some time for our officers.”
City leaders often point out how SJPD, with around 1,200 officers, is much more thinly staffed than police forces in comparably sized cities. The average officer-to-resident ratio in cities across the nation is 2.4 per 1,000, according to FBI data.
In the Bay Area, San Francisco has a ratio of about 2.54 officers per 1,000 residents, Oakland has 1.85 and San Jose 1.17.
The department has in recent years tried to cover the gaps by using overtime to staff 10% of its patrol shifts. Foot patrol positions, for instance, are fully staffed by officers who choose to sign up for a shift and earn overtime pay.
Both the city auditor and Peralez contend this model is unsustainable and counterproductive to building community trust. Because of the way overtime positions are assigned, a different officer could be on foot patrol each day in a given neighborhood, if the shift gets filled at all.
“It’s so inconsistent, it lacks accountability, it’s more costly, and I don’t think it’s giving us the benefit that we should be getting out of foot patrol,” Peralez said.
Mayor Sam Liccardo said the department’s over-reliance on overtime has been “an ongoing concern and frustration” of his that “needs to be addressed squarely by our next chief.” SJPD is currently vetting four finalists to fill the department’s vacant chief position.
“There is no question that it needs to be monitored more carefully,” Liccardo said. “But as long as we’re dramatically understaffed as a police department, we are going to have some overtime use.”
Liccardo also noted that last year’s overtime tally could be an outlier, as it included police response to massive protests that took place over the course of multiple days and nights in downtown San Jose following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“The real question is what’s going to happen this year, making a big assumption that the civil unrest is behind us,” he said.
When asked about the overtime findings, the police department deferred to the auditor’s report, which included a response by acting Chief David Tindall. In the memo, Tindall wrote that SJPD will work over the course of the next year to develop a plan to “ensure supervisory staff can better assess the purpose and appropriateness of overtime use.”
Tindall also wrote that the department will review overtime policies and consider changes including better defining discretionary and mandatory overtime.
The city’s standing agreement with the San Jose Police Officers’ Association gives officers working overtime a choice between claiming overtime pay or compensatory time off, with some exceptions for certain assignments. As the department’s overall use of overtime has risen in recent years, claims for comp time have grown at a faster rate, which the audit stated will likely be costlier to the city long term.
“This has created a future liability for the department because remaining compensatory time is paid out when employees leave, typically at a higher salary rate than when it was earned,” the city auditor wrote.
The audit also recommends that the city and police department move faster to redraw police districts — which haven’t been updated in more than two decades — to better distribute workloads. SJPD received $350,000 in the current fiscal year’s budget for that review, which has not yet begun.
A 22-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder March 9 after police say he attacked a man at his former workplace with a machete a day earlier.
The Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety said around 1 p.m. March 8, officers were sent to a business on the 500 block of Mercury Drive after getting a report that a man was attacked with a machete.
Officers found the man lying in the parking lot. He suffered “several large lacerations and a fracture during the attack,” and officers began life-saving measures to control bleeding, police said in a statement March 10. He was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Detectives said they determined Ryan Jeansimon of San Jose was the suspect in the attack. Authorities said that Jean-simon was fired from the workplace in January. He was arrested March 9 “without incident,” police said, and booked into the Santa Clara County Jail on a charge of attempted murder.
“This incident is being investigated as workplace violence and an isolated event,” police said.
Police said anyone with information about this incident can contact Detective Ben Holt by calling 408-730-7143 or emailing bholt@sunnyvale.ca.gov.
— Joseph Geha