Pay Gap Widens Between Cops and Other City Workers in SF

(TNS) – Police officer pay has risen significantly in San Francisco in the last decade, and the pay gap between cops and non-police city workers is widening.

According to data from the California State Controller’s office, the typical SFPD officer’s wages rose by 21 percent from 2011 to 2022, adjusting for inflation, with the trend accelerating in recent years. Meanwhile, typical non-police city workers’ pay increased by 4 percent.

The recent growth in police wages has attracted criticism from progressive leaders, who say the prioritization of funding the police over other city services is a repeat of the failed war-on-drugs tactics of the 1980s and 90s. Moderates, meanwhile, argue that SFPD needs more money because it is understaffed and a critical part of the city’s post-pandemic recovery.

But the increase to officer pay doesn’t just reflect the city’s struggles over its police force — it points to a widespread staffing shortage across San Francisco government departments, including many who work in health, emergency services and public transportation. It’s just that city leaders are more willing to financially prop up the Police Department than other agencies, labor experts said.

Cities have two choices when dealing with understaffed departments in the short term, UC Berkeley labor law professor Catherine Fisk told the Chronicle: They can have fewer employees working at any given time, or have the existing ones work overtime.

For the police force, the city is choosing overtime. A typical San Francisco officer’s overtime pay rose more than four-fold from 2011 to 2023, from under $9,000 in 2011 to $41,000 in 2022, adjusting for inflation. In contrast, non-police workers in S.F. saw overtime pay grow by a modest 8%. (The figure includes departments whose workers mostly aren’t overtime-eligible, such as the Public Defender’s Office).

This increase in overtime has coincided with a large increase to the Police Department’s vacancy rate — but it’s not the only department struggling to fill positions. From 2019 to 2023, according to a recent San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report, the city’s occupational vacancy rate doubled, going roughly from 7 to 14 percent.

Vacancy rates are high across many departments that provide essential services. As of this January, the Department of Public Health, which employs nurses at city-funded hospitals, had a 10 vacancy rate; the Municipal Transportation Agency , which runs the Muni system percent, was at 11% vacancy; and the Department of Emergency Management , which staffs its 911 call center, was at 8%.

“People say we need to hire police? I absolutely agree,” said Rudy Gonzalez , co-chair of the San Francisco Labor Council’s Public Employee Committee.

But, he added, the city also needs more “medics, behavioral outreach workers, licensed clinical therapists, ER nurses, and high-voltage linemen. There’s vacancies that have an impact on, not just basic service delivery, but also our economic recovery.”

Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for London Breed’s office, told the Chronicle it has chosen to prioritize police over other departments for staffing growth and overtime funding.

“We want to fill staffing across a number of our departments. But I think, considering the critical issues facing the city, obviously public safety is a huge one for us,” Cretan said, adding that the mayor’s office planned to launch a working group dedicated to increasing police staffing and managing overtime.

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Earlier this year, Breed pushed for — and won — an additional $25 million for police overtime from the city budget, while supervisors rejected progressive supervisor Dean Preston’s proposed $10 million increase for non-police safety workers like community ambassadors and street intervention teams.

While several other city agencies have increased overtime since 2011, none have seen the same growth and sheer volume as the police, except the Sheriff’s Office and Fire Department . Other essential departments with especially high vacancy rates, including MUNI and Public Health , haven’t seen overtime rise by nearly the same degree.

Ahsha Safai, the District 11 supervisor who’s running against Breed for mayor next year, said he strongly supports funding police, but not necessarily at the expense of other departments, especially given the $500 million budget shortfall San Francisco faces next fiscal year.

“People are being overworked. They’re being burnt out. And it’s a crisis. But it’s a crisis of leadership and management on behalf of the mayor,” he said, asserting that Breed’s administration has failed to curb long hiring timelines and offer competitive pay across departments. In October, Safai attracted the ire of Breed and fellow Supervisor Matt Dorsey for amending a measure meant to allocate $30 million a year to police by requiring city leaders to identify a funding source first.

Dorsey called Safai’s amendment, which is scheduled to go in front of voters in March, “political gamesmanship” and said he was in conversations about moving forward with an alternative proposal. He added that, according to Controller’s Office estimates, if the police staffing boost reduced overtime by a corresponding amount, his measure would actually only cost $12 million a year.

“I saw firsthand what happens when you take people who are doing very dangerous jobs, and you run them ragged with overtime,” said Dorsey, who previously worked for the SFPD and the City Attorney’s Office .

U.S. police departments typically find it easier to secure strong wages and benefits, like eligibility for well-compensated overtime, than other public employees, said Fisk, the Berkeley law professor. That’s partly because they tend to have robust unions: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people in “protective service” including police are more likely to be unionized than any other labor category. Fisk said police also have leverage because political leaders believe they will be penalized at the ballot box if they don’t appear supportive of law enforcement.

“The power of police is not just that they have guns and have a high degree of solidarity in their unions,” she said. “The power is the political threat that elected officials feel.”

Public support of police ebbed during the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, but has bounced back, leading to improvements in officer morale and retention, SFPD spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky told the Chronicle. “Our officers are getting a lot of positive feedback from the people of San Francisco , which is really fantastic,” he said, adding that some officers who left their jobs during the pandemic have returned.

But while city officials appear optimistic that the pendulum on police staffing is swinging the other way, Sara Hinkley , a professor at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, said they may be fighting a losing battle. In addition to California’s tight labor market and population losses, San Francisco is particularly unsuited to filling police department positions, she said — most of its adult population is college-educated, and thus can get higher-paying jobs in the private sector.

Even San Francisco’s existing police force mostly don’t live here: Just one in four officers resided in the city in 2022, the lowest share of any large city department.

Hinkley further cautioned that while funding police might be important, funding them at the expense of other city agencies that provide services to vulnerable residents could make officers’ jobs harder and public safety worse.

“You’re kind of in this spiral where you have no choice but to have all these people working tons of overtime to keep the streets manageable, because you’ve reduced all of your other services,” she said. “I would prefer to see things not go down that road.”

Reach Susie Neilson : susan.neilson@sfchronicle.com

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