SDPD SEES SPIKE IN OFFICER DEPARTURES
More than 230 left the Police Department in last fiscal year, a 52 percent increase over the previous year
For the first time in three years, the San Diego Police Department hosted an awards ceremony for officers who went beyond the call of duty.
During the event last month at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, a dozen officers received the prestigious lifesaving medal for making rescues, despite the danger they faced.
Officer Daniel Clark freed a man from a burning car in 2020. That same year, Officers William Krout and Paige Haar pulled 2year-old twin girls to safety after their father drove a pickup off Sunset Cliffs into the ocean.
All three officers have since left the San Diego Police Department — two in the last 4 1⁄2 months. They weren’t alone.
In fiscal 2022, which ended June 30, more than 230 San Diego police officers left the department — a 52 percent increase compared with the previous year. It’s the highest separation total the department has seen in more than a decade, police officials say. The department has lost patrol officers and detectives, seasoned homicide investigators, collision reconstruction experts, SWAT officers, canine handlers, training officers and police helicopter pilots.
Most who left, 67 percent, didn’t retire from the department — they resigned. And nearly half of those resignations were by officers who went to other law enforcement agencies.
Haar accepted her lifesaving award in her new Carlsbad Police Department uniform.
It’s a spike police leaders knew was coming.
For months, officials with the San Diego department have warned that officers were leaving faster than they could be replaced, a phenomenon fueled by a storm of factors. Between July of last year and early March, 168 officers had left the department. In the next three months, the de
partment would lose 65 more.
Police union leaders have blamed the city’s vaccine mandate for the steep rise in departures, but there are other reasons: staffing shortages that require overtime or constrain time off, a continuing call for changes to police practices, and jobs at other departments that offer higher pay and better retirement packages.
Department spokesperson Lt. Adam Sharki said some officers reported during exit interviews that the negative narrative surrounding law enforcement has left them feeling demoralized and under greater scrutiny, all while they continue to face the increasing challenges of policing in a big city.
The staffing shortages that departures often leave in their wake can have shortterm and long-term impacts on public safety, law enforcement leaders say. It may take officers and deputies longer to respond to emergency calls — and some minor incidents might not get responses at all.
According to annual budget reports, the San Diego Police Department responds to the most serious calls, like shootings and stabbings, in about seven minutes. For Priority 1 calls — which include things like burglaries in progress, hitand-run crashes and some serious felonies like child abuse and domestic violence — the wait time is nearly 40 minutes and has been climbing.
Relationships with community members and proactive policing efforts suffer as well, police leaders say.
Jared Wilson, president of the San Diego Police Officers Association, said officers from specialty units across the department have been pulled back to patrol so the department can keep up with 911 calls. The shortage has affected the special operations unit, which investigates violent crimes; the motor unit, which provides traffic enforcement; the neighborhood policing division, which coordinates homeless outreach efforts; and others.
“We’re at the point where we’re just chasing 911 calls,” Wilson said. “We’re not really doing a whole lot of preventative policing or patrolling. It’s really toxic for our community, for community trust and relationships.”
San Diego isn’t the only local department struggling to retain sworn staff. In calendar year 2021, the San Diego County Sheriff ’s Department lost 252 sworn deputies, more than half to retirements. That’s the highest total in five years. So far this year, 200 deputies have left.
It’s an issue across the nation. Last summer, after a year of large-scale protests demanding police reform, the Police Executive Research Forum found that 194 police agencies saw, on average, an 18 percent increase in resignation rates and a 45 percent increase in retirement rates when comparing April 2019 through March 2020 to the same period a year later.
The city of San Diego said in a statement that Mayor Todd Gloria had invested in a variety of initiatives designed to recruit and retain police officers, including a 10 percent pay raise in the most recent police contract, proposed bonuses for lateral moves from other police jurisdictions and increasing the budget for recruitment.
“With these efforts, the Mayor is confident SDPD can reach full staffing and ensure San Diego continues to be one of the safest big cities in America,” Rachel Laing, the mayor’s communications director, said in the statement.
Despite those actions, the department has struggled to fill nearly 150 open positions. Currently, the department has 2,036 budgeted positions, and about 1,890 are filled, according to staffing reports. However, of those, about 90 are academy trainees who aren’t fully sworn until they graduate and 84 more are in field training, so they aren’t certified to work on their own, Wilson said. About 140 are on some kind of leave.
That leaves about 1,570 full-duty officers.
Wilson said the city of San Diego’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate was the breaking point for many officers, who already felt underpaid and underappreciated.
Many San Diego police officers opposed the mandate when it was announced in August, with some saying they would rather be fired than comply. Most of the police union’s members did, ultimately, get vaccinated, but 425 out of about 1,900 asked for medical or religious exemptions. City officials said 417 of those requests have been approved.
“If you make a requirement for your employees, and they’re not interested in following it for whatever reason, and their portability as an employee is very high, then you’re going to lose them,” Wilson said. “And that’s what we saw. We have lost an extraordinary number of people because of it.”
More than a quarter of the total officers who left the San Diego Police Department this past fiscal year didn’t leave the profession. They went to other law enforcement agencies.
El Cajon City Manager Graham Mitchell said the department hired seven San Diego police officers in the last fiscal year. San Diego officers have also gone to police departments in Carlsbad and Oceanside, the Sheriff’s Department and the county District Attorney’s Office, Wilson said. Of all the departures in fiscal year 2022, nearly a quarter — more than 60 officers — left for other police agencies. That’s more than triple the amount of officers who went to other departments last year and the highest total in the last five years.
Mitchell said he speaks with every police officer who joins El Cajon’s department and that many officers from San Diego have said they enjoy the policing experience a smaller department offers.
At large agencies like the San Diego Police Department, serious cases like assaults are often handed over to detectives. And while El Cajon has detectives as well, many cases are handled by the officers who respond first to an incident.
So even though the San Diego officers who come to El Cajon are often veterans from a bigger department, some of them are submitting cases to the District Attorney’s Office or serving search warrants in connection with their cases for the first time, Mitchell said.
“We’re hearing the laterals like that,” Mitchell said. “They like to be a part of the entire process, and not just a cog in the wheel.”
Mitchell said he’s also heard that many enjoy the intimacy of a smaller department, in which officers are much more interconnected as a department and with the community they serve, he said.
“If you look at any sort of employment satisfaction survey, it’s about fulfillment and being a part of a team,” Mitchell said. “We can provide that because we’re smaller. They’re really a part of a community.”
Mitchell said the El Cajon City Council is supportive of its Police Department and that officers from San Diego can likely feel that, especially after so much strife over San Diego’s vaccine requirement.
El Cajon doesn’t have a vaccine mandate.
Cid Martinez, an associate professor at the University of San Diego who specializes in policing, said it’s no coincidence officers are leaving now.
After George Floyd was killed in May 2020 at the hands of Minneapolis police, protesters called for police departments across the nation to demonstrate greater accountability and transparency.
Many said they wanted a complete reimagining of public safety, arguing that the current system is inherently racist, which leads to racial profiling, over-policing and use of excessive force — especially in Black and Brown communities. Some demanded that departments be defunded, while others called for getting rid of certain police protections like qualified immunity, which shields officers and deputies who are accused of violating constitutional rights.
In San Diego, proposed policy packages like the Preventing Over-policing Through Equitable Community Treatment ordinance — or PrOTECT — would limit when officers can stop and search people. Proponents say the changes would guard against racial profiling and strengthen accountability. Law enforcement leaders have called the package radical and contend it would seriously hamper important police work. Last year, the Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods committee asked the City Attorney’s Office for a review of the proposal, but the City Council has not formally reviewed it.
Many members of the public are questioning policing as an enterprise, Martinez said, and officers can feel that while out in the field. For some, that heightened level of scrutiny may be enough to prompt a career change, he said. But officers who aren’t ready to turn in the badge may instead gravitate toward smaller, suburban departments where calls for accountability may be more muted.
There likely isn’t one factor that fueled the spike in departures from the San Diego Police Department, he said, not even the city’s vaccine mandate that caused such an uproar.
“If an officer feels committed and connected to their community, that’s not going to be their only consideration,” Martinez said.