San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
City’s total of cops falls as funding increases
In June, the Oakland City Council passed a new budget that increased police funding. The council gave the department more money, but less than the mayor had proposed, instead investing more in policing alternatives such as the Department of Violence Prevention. After the vote, Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong blasted the council’s decision.
During a late June news conference, Armstrong said crime was out of control in Oakland and that the department needed more officers on the ground to address an increase in violent crime during the pandemic. He said the department is stretched thin, and that the city’s decision to keep personnel levels flat as the city’s population grows has functionally defunded the police force for several years.
The Chronicle examined personnel and
budget data to assess Armstrong’s contention. Is the Oakland Police Department underfunded?
The data shows that police spending in Oakland has expanded for years, establishing the Oakland Police Department as one of the most expensive in the country. Now, the city is starting initiatives that will transfer responsibilities away from the police to other departments. But many elements of the Police Department’s workload won’t be reduced for months, or in some cases, for more than a year. Until that happens, public officials agree, police resources will be strained.
The state of the Oakland Police Department’s funding
The Oakland Police Department’s number of sworn staff, which includes captains, lieutenants, sergeants and officers, declined in 2021. The department had 706 sworn personnel as of the end of July, Assistant Chief of Police Darren Allison said in an interview. That puts the department at about 166 sworn staffers per 100,000 Oakland residents, a slight decline from 2020, but close to the average during the 2010s.
However, while that ratio stayed relatively level between 2014 and 2020, overall police spending climbed substantially during the same period. In the 2019-20 fiscal year, the department spent $349 million. That was about $820 for every Oakland resident, a 37% increase from per-capita spending during the 2013-14 fiscal year, after adjusting for inflation.
Police spending also increased as a share of the city’s total spending, going from 19% of Oakland’s $1.2 billion spending in 2013-14 to 21% of its $1.7 billion expenditures in 2019-2020.
The city’s newly adopted budget directs $336 million to the Police Department in the 2021-22 fiscal year and $342 million in 2022-23, according to a budget analysis shared by Karen Boyd, the city’s chief spokesperson. That’s an increase from the $317 million budgeted for the department in 2020-21.
The department actually spent $349 million in the 201920 fiscal year, overspending its budget by about $30 million. That’s a fairly common occurrence: The department has overspent its general and special revenue fund budget in five out of the seven fiscal years between 2013 and 2020.
Historically, overtime has been a driver of Oakland’s police overspending. In recent years, the Oakland Police Department paid out more than twice as much for overtime than the council budgeted. The city should more realistically budget for police overtime, a 2019 report by Oakland’s city auditor concluded. The new budget set aside significantly more money for overtime than previous budgets, which more closely reflects actual overtime spending in years past.
Along with overtime pay, hefty pensions for retired officers have also driven up Police Department costs.
“The most significant cost driver in the police budget during the seven years cited in the analysis is the growth in retirement costs, which have outpaced all other expenditure categories,” Boyd wrote in an email.
CalPERS, the state’s pension fund manager, increased the city’s required pension
contributions during this time period to address investment losses, Boyd wrote. The Police Department’s retirement costs climbed to $67 million in fiscal year 2019-20, more than double what the department spent just six years before. Increases in salary, overtime and retiree health costs also contributed to the increase in police spending, she said.
Oakland spends an unusually large amount on its police, said Brenden Beck, a criminologist at the University of Colorado in Denver who studies police funding nationwide. In 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, the city spent the third highest amount per-capita on its police force among 111 cities with over 200,000 residents who filled out a U.S. Census survey on municipal spending.
“We live in the region with the highest cost of living of anywhere in the United States,” said Mayor Libby Schaaf when presented with Beck’s finding. “And so it should be expected that not only our officers, but also our civilian personnel, have higher compensation than most other cities.”
The two police departments in the Bay Area most comparable to Oakland are San Francisco and San Jose, Boyd, the city communications director, wrote. Both cities spent less on policing than Oakland’s $694 per capita in 2017, Beck found. San Francisco paid $627 per capita that year, and San Jose paid $257 per capita.
But neither city is subject to the mandatory increases in pension contributions that have grown Oakland’s police retirement costs, Boyd wrote. Both San Francisco and San Jose use their own independent retirement systems, not CalPERS, a CalPERS spokesperson confirmed. However, Oakland’s per-capita police spending was consistently higher than that of the other two cities tracing back to at least 2007, the census data shows.
Colin Heyne, a spokesperson for San Jose, declined to comment on police spending in other cities. However, he said the city had cut a large number of staff over the past 20 years, including police officers, due to the dot-com bust and 2007-09 recession, which hit the city particularly hard. In 2017, San Jose had a little over half as many sworn officers per 100,000 residents compared with Oakland, and far less crime. The city had less than a third of the number of violent crimes per capita as Oakland that year, according to federal data.
Oakland’s police force spends so much, in part, because it has many responsibilities outside of responding to violent crimes, City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas told The Chronicle. “Police have become the first responders for everything.”
The city spends significant resources on patrol, sending out at least 210 officers on patrol shifts each week. But the majority of the calls that patrol responds to are noncriminal, Bas said.
Patrol officers spent about a quarter of their time responding to calls for service which involved crimes against a person, including violent crimes, and nearly 15% of their time responding to property crimes, according to an analysis of 2019 service-call data by the city’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force. The rest of service response was for noncriminal incidents such as traffic incidents, disturbing the peace and mental health calls.
“Is that the best use of resources? Couldn’t a civilian be deployed that would be less expensive and also be able to come much faster because they’re not responding to a variety of 911 calls?” Bas asked.
Oakland’s police spending has not translated into high clearance rates for violent crimes (clearance rates are an approximation of the percentage of incidents that lead to an arrest). Nationally, a violent crime clearance rate of around 50% is typical, said Beck, the criminologist. But the Oakland Police Department cleared less than 20% of its violent crimes in 2018, 2019 and 2020, according to federal crime data.
Allison, the assistant chief, declined to specifically comment on the department’s clearance rates. Allison did say that Oakland has about 100 sworn staff members assigned to its criminal investigations division and that they have a tremendous workload. The department had the highest number of violent crimes per officer compared with the 50 largest U.S. cities that submitted crime and personnel data to the FBI from 2015 to 2019, according to a department analysis of federal figures.
“We absolutely need more staff assigned to (the criminal investigations unit). Having more staff gives us the ability to close more cases,” Allison said.
Bas said the Police Department should spend less resources on patrol, especially responding to non-criminal incidents, and devote more officers to criminal investigations and violence prevention programs.
The state of crime in Oakland
Violent crime increased slightly in Oakland in 2020. State and federal figures show there were 1,306 violent crimes — homicides, assaults, robberies and rapes — for every 100,000 Oakland residents in 2019. That number rose to 1,330 in 2020. But the city had just come off of three of the lowest violent-crime years in the past two decades.
Expanding to include property crimes — burglary, theft, car boosting and arson — 2020 was actually one of Oakland’s lowest crime years in two decades. There were 6,710 reported crimes for every 100,000 residents, as property crimes fell with the decreased foot traffic of the pandemic.
Through August 2021, the trend toward increasing violent crime but fewer crimes overall persists. Violent crimes are up 12% compared to last year, according to the police department’s latest weekly crime report, while total crimes are down 10%.
The drop in overall crime doesn’t mean demands on police services went down, Assistant Chief Allison said. Burglaries and auto thefts make up the majority of crimes, and since many of those crimes are discovered after the incident took place, victims often file police reports through the department’s online system, Allison said. Depending on the incident, a single officer may take on the case.
Violent crime is a different story.
“You won’t get just one or two officers responding to a homicide, you could get six, seven, eight officers depending on the scope and scale of the incident,” Allison said. Those officers will spend significantly more time investigating a violent crime, Allison added.
Homicides, the most resource-intensive crime, are way up in 2021, with 78 killings through Aug. 8 — well above the 54 homicides the department had recorded by this time in 2020 and the 49 in 2019. Last year, 109 people were slain in Oakland, a number not reached since 2012.
That spike in homicides, coupled with increases in nonfatal shootings, has been at the core of Chief Armstrong’s criticisms of the new city budget. “We see clearly that crime is out of control in the city of Oakland, but our response was less police resources,” he said at the June news conference.
Are more police officers the best way to bring down violent crime?
Many researchers agree that hiring more police officers reduces violent crime in a city. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Oakland should hire more officers, these experts say.
“The literature says that increasing the size of a police force by 10% will probably result in violent crime reductions of about 7% and property crimes reductions of about 3%,” said Emily Owens, a professor in UC Irvine’s Department of Criminology, Law, and Society.
However, Owens explained, the benefit of reduced crime comes with a cost that social scientists are only recently beginning to understand. The
“We live in the region with the highest cost of living of anywhere in the United States.”
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf