As Board of Supervisors Approves $25M More for Police, Supervisor Preston Announces Formal Audit

SAN FRANCISCO — As the Board of Supervisors prepared to vote on a significant mid-year increase to the San Francisco Police Department’s (SFPD) budget, Supervisor Dean Preston, Chair of the Government Audit and Oversight Committee, announced an audit of the department’s usage and internal controls on overtime. Preston’s call for an audit comes on the heels of a new report, released yesterday, by the Board’s Budget and Legislative Analyst (BLA), which offers new and alarming insight into blatant overspending by the department.

“The new report is an eye-opener: SFPD has exponentially increased overtime hours, failed to seek timely approval for massive cost overruns, and spent tens of millions of dollars with little to no apparent oversight, transparency, or strategy,” said Preston. “It’s high time for an audit of SFPD’s overtime practices, decisions, and expenditures.”

Preston will introduce the audit request at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting. Once the audit will dive deeper into data flagged in the new BLA report and will review how SFPD’s overtime usage is affected by deployment decisions, metrics for programs that use significant overtime, and controls on other practices that lead to higher overtime rates.

The Latest BLA Report

The new BLA report reviewed the SFPD’s expenditures over the past year, including staffing/personnel costs, capital costs, multiyear projects, and others. The report includes previously-unreported information, including the following:

In Fiscal Year 2021-2022, SFPD overspent its approved budget by $23.8 million. However, it later received an additional $28.7 million infusion to its budget from the Mayor without Board approval, covering the costs it incurred despite overspending its budget.

There has been a nearly nine-fold increase in spending for a single category of overtime between 2019 and 2023— from 60,829 hours in Fiscal Year 2018-2019 (pre-COVID baseline) to a projected 544,037 hours for Fiscal Year 2022-2023.

Despite the recent decrease in full-duty officers, officers in 2021 and 2022 had fewer 911 calls per officer (181 calls) than they did in 2019 (193 calls). Nevertheless, SFPD has failed to meet its 8-minute goal for responding to serious/life-threatening calls for service since 2021.

Even if the Board approves SFPD’s $25 million budget supplemental, overtime hours dedicated to the Tenderloin are projected to be 36% lower than last year, in comparison to a projected 40.9% increase in overtime hours for the department’s Safe Shopper program and a 35.4% increase to its Tourism Deployment Plan.

SFPD has a total budget of $761.9 million, an all-time high that includes a $50 million increase approved by the Board of Supervisors last June. Although the Board included a $25.4 million budget for overtime expenses, the department is on track to overspend that budget by $55.6 million, for a total of $81 million. The department had already exceeded its overtime budget by the time it came to the Board seeking its approval for more overtime funds in mid-February.

But even as the SFPD seeks more money, 911 calls have actually decreased by 21.6%, and self-initiated calls— or calls initiated by officers instead of 911 reports— have decreased by 55.7%. Arrests similarly decreased by 28.8% in 2022. Per the San Francisco Chronicle, the most recent numbers show that SFPD’s clearance rates also decreased from an already-low figure of 9.6% in 2019 to 8.1% in 2021.

“This report shows that the San Francisco Police Department overspent its overtime budget like money was no object — all while its own metrics for performance were falling,” stated Preston. “An audit will provide the department with desperately-needed oversight, and hopefully put the department on a road to accountability, as we are set to consider approving significant raises to their pay next month in a package estimated by the Department of Human Resources to cost yet another $84 million over three years.”

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