A San Francisco police sergeant has quadrupled his salary thanks to massive overtime hours because the department is short-staffed.
Sergeant Dennis Lai earned more than $450,000 in overtime pay last year, boosting his base salary by $180,000, according to data analyzed by the Chronicle of San Francisco.
Data from the San Francisco Comptroller’s Office revealed that overtime paid to police officers has skyrocketed as the department struggles to staff.
The number of police officers who earned more than $100,000 in overtime more than tripled, from 131 in the July 2021-June 2022 fiscal year to 493 in the July 2023-June 2024 fiscal year.
“Unless we want to see catastrophic cuts in police services, the city must either resolve the staffing crisis or have the department work overtime,” said Tracy McCray, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association.
The police department is battling funding cuts and staff shortages while experiencing a crisis of homelessness and open drug use.
The police department’s overtime cap is 2,000 hours due to a “critical staffing shortage” waiver
‘Most of our officers would rather keep their scheduled days off and vacations to spend time with their families and loved ones rather than work countless hours of overtime.’
Despite a city law limiting the total number of overtime hours a full-time city employee can work to 520 hours, the police department’s limit on overtime is 2,000 due to an exemption for “critical staffing shortages.”
Lai worked nearly 3,500 hours of overtime, which is equivalent to working 21-hour shifts if those shifts were divided evenly over five days each week of the year, according to the Chronicle’s analysis.
Data from the Comptroller’s Office showed that 64 officers worked beyond the 2,000-hour limit and more than 85 percent of officers exceeded the 520-hour limit that applies to other city employees.
Evan Sernoffsky, a spokesman for the police department, said the increase in overtime is a “stop-gap measure” for the department.
“We recognize that overtime is unsustainable, but San Francisco needs police officers for public safety,” Sernoffsky said.
“We are accelerating our recruitment and selection process to rebuild our ranks as quickly as possible.”
He said the police department has 415 fewer sworn officers than in 2020, but is seeing more recruits.
The San Francisco Police Department has resorted to trying to recruit police officers from Texas because it faces a shortage of officers.
Data from the San Francisco Comptroller’s Office revealed that overtime paid to police officers has skyrocketed as the department struggles to staff.
Mayor London Breed (pictured) ordered city departments, including police and public health, to propose $206 million in budget cuts in October.
They visited four Texas college campuses throughout the month as part of a new recruiting campaign.
The recruitment drive comes after the police department suffered funding cuts, forcing it to pay massive amounts of overtime as the city experiences a crisis of homelessness and open drug use.
Following widespread calls for reforms across the country following the killing of George Floyd, the California city department has suffered a funding cut.
Mayor London Breed was one of the first to speak out in favor of defunding the police.
In October, Breed ordered city departments, including police and public health, to propose $206 million in budget cuts in a desperate attempt to reverse the battered city’s spiral of “loss” toward economic collapse.