Supe pushing for police hiring bonuses
“At this time it has not been determined if the increased financial incentives have increased the number of applicants for new recruits.” Officer Robert Rueca, San Francisco Police Department spokesperson
A San Francisco supervisor is pushing the city to automatically match police officer hiring bonuses from other Northern California jurisdictions as the department grapples with vacant positions and a competitive market nationwide.
San Francisco offers a $5,000 signing bonus for officers coming from another department and none for new recruits, the police department reported last year, but other jurisdictions offer much more. In the Bay Area, transfers to San Mateo and Alameda’s police departments get $30,000, and in Redding, $40,000, the same report said.
Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former police spokesperson, said his push was critical as the department faces a wave of retirements and already can’t fill its vacant roles. The city already invested in pay raises and retention bonuses last year, but police said last week it’s not yet clear whether those have proven effective in recruitment, raising questions about whether hiring bonuses would help.
As of last week, police said the city had 267 funded vacant officer positions, with the total number of sworn officers at 1,923. Dorsey said the number of full-duty officers — those not on some kind of leave — has dipped to 1,537.
“San Francisco is on the precipice of a potentially catastrophic police staffing shortage, and there are too many public safety problems we’ll be helpless to solve if we don’t start solving SFPD’s understaffing crisis first,” Dorsey said in a statement Monday.
San Francisco bases its police staffing on an analysis every two years that considers a number of factors. But experts have debated how many cops the city truly needs, pointing out San Francisco has a higher ratio of police officers to residents than other cities. Dorsey argued San Francisco’s ratio is justifiably higher because of the unusual number of events, commuters and tourists compared to smaller cities.
Mayor London Breed appointed Dorsey as supervisor in May and made police staffing her top budget priority as voter angst about crime intensified, fueling the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin and leading to some calls for more police. Dorsey won election in November.
Dorsey’s resolution introduced at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors’ meeting urges the Department of Human Resources to create a policy to automatically match bonuses and make a plan for how to get to 2,182 officers — the number recommended in the most recent analysis — within four years.
Human resources spokesperson Mawuli Tugbenyoh couldn’t comment Monday on whether the department is considering hiring bonuses because negotiations with the police union are underway.
Other city departments are also struggling with staffing. The citywide vacancy rate in December was 9% — with higher rates of unfilled positions in some other departments, including the airport and port.
The city already invested significantly in the police department last summer, raising pay and introducing retention bonuses, to address staffing. But department spokesperson Officer Robert Rueca said in a statement last week that “at this time it has not been determined if the increased financial incentives have increased the number of applicants for new recruits.”
The number of vacant officer positions has only grown since last June, right before new financial incentives were put in place. The Chronicle reported the department had roughly 200 vacant positions in June and now has 267, even though 13 recruits graduated from its academy in October.
The department had tracked an anecdotal increase in applications and officers moving from other departments, police spokesperson Sgt. Adam Lobsinger said in October, but it doesn’t appear to have slowed the hemorrhaging of officers yet. The police department has not responded as to why that might be.
Dorsey said the cause of a staffing shortage “was never a single factor,” but pointed out signing bonuses would focus on recruits, instead of pay raises and retention bonuses geared toward existing officers.
He said he hoped hiring bonuses would have a measurable impact, “but this is an unchartered world for all of us.”
“I just want to make sure we’re more competitive than we are,” he said.
Dorsey said he hoped police spending now to boost officer numbers would save taxpayer dollars from overtime spending in years to come. The Chronicle reported last week that the city spent more than $2 million in overtime on police officers stationed in Union Square during the holiday season for two years in a row.
Experts in police staffing told The Chronicle last year that it wasn’t proven whether financial incentives alone will entice people to pursue policing when the profession has been the subject of negative perceptions following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Breed’s staff and police said they were working to overcome perceptions about policing.
San Francisco’s police department, which has in the past received accolades for its reformminded policing, also continues to be the subject of criticism for racially biased outcomes and perceived indifference to certain crimes. Data has shown that the police conducted less street enforcement under Boudin than since his successor, Brooke Jenkins, took office.
Other critical city workers in departments also struggling with staffing shortages, such as 911 dispatchers, have questioned all the attention on police. Nurses at San Francisco General Hospital have also pushed for hiring bonuses to compete with $10,000 offers at other hospitals.
Even if there is political support for police hiring bonuses, it may not be financially feasible this year. Breed has directed departments to cut back as the city faces a projected budget deficit, with pandemic relief funding running out and the economy struggling to recover from lockdown.