How police department plays large role in Oakland's $93 million budget deficit

OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) -- At Tuesday's Oakland City Council meeting, the finance department raised concerns about the city's current $93 million budget deficit. Part of the discussion was around the Oakland Police Department.

"Your police department, which is expected to overspend by $51.9 million dollars or 16% of its budget," Bradley Johnson the city's budget administrator told the council.

Much of the overspending owes to overtime. Sergeant Huy Nguyen, president of the Oakland Police Officers' Association, says it comes down to staffing.

"An understaffed police department and the demand for service is the biggest driver of overtime," Nguyen said.

He said OPD received 1.2 million calls for service 2023. He added that OPD currently has 678 sworn officers down from more than 800 a few years ago. It could be reduced to around 600 officers if more budget cuts are introduced.

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"I think the city is in a real difficult position of what do they want the officers not to do anymore. And I think that is the bigger question," said former Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong.

Armstrong says it's unfair to blame OPD for overspending. And he adds that the city administration knew OPD was going to overspend its authorized overtime budget back in July.

A contingency budget was enacted in September, which includes cuts. But Oakland city department heads, including police and fire, have been instructed to come up more cost-saving cuts by Friday. If more cuts are to be made, city council must vote on them by the end of the year. Armstrong says Oakland's new Chief Floyd Mitchell has to weigh cuts with public safety.

"What you want to do is minimize any cuts to the 911 response officers, our patrol officers. But every other unit would see some level of potential cuts. And that's going to have an impact on, obviously, the department's ability to respond to all of the community's request," he said.

In addition, Nguyen says officers have more work to do more because of new mandates around accountability, which ties up an already short-staffed department that could be responding to service calls. He uses a routine traffic stop as an example.

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"A car stop for a traffic violation can last somewhere between five to 10 minutes during that interaction. Now, will take up to 45 minutes," Nguyen said. "The officer administratively has to deal with reporting, body-worn camera documentation, and it can lead up to 45 minutes."

But James Burch, policy director for the watchdog group Anti Police-Terror Project, says there is more to the OPD's overtime dilemma.

"It seems every year police come in $10, $20, $30 and now $50 million over budget. This is because there is no accountability measure. No meaningful way of holding them accountable," Burch said.

He points to a city audit that dates back to 2015, which first raised concerns about overtime compensation.

The audit uses a diagram to illustrate how it works: Officer A works 10 hours of overtime and accrues and 15 hours of comp time off. Officer B Works 15 hours of overtime to cover Officer A's absence and accrues 22.5 hours of comp time. Then, Officer C works 22.5 hours of overtime to cover Officer B's absence and accrues 33.75 hours of comp time off.

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"So it's an upward spiral to a point where everyone is getting paid overtime to do normal shifts," Burch said.

Armstrong said new rules are in place to address this overtime issue. But a 2024 audit suggests, while some changes have been made to the overtime compensation, more needs to be done.

The website Transparent California--the state's largest public pay and pension database--shows, by name, the vast number of Oakland police officers who earn more in overtime then their base salary, totaling several hundreds of thousands of dollars per officer.

"Paying officers $4, $5, $600,000 a piece and trying to maintain a force of 700 officers around that price tag, is not feasible. It's not possible," Burch said. "There needs to be a change. We are looking to elected officials to have the courage to address what we have known for years: That there is a big, big problem when it comes to police spending."