Staffing Figures in City Budget Are Fiction

You cannot tell how many employees the police department has (or will have anytime soon) by looking at the council's budget for it. That's what we found out when we obtained police personnel reports.

The budget for fiscal year 2004-05 authorized 739 sworn police officers. Near the end of that fiscal year, on June 8, 2005, the department employed 697 officers. One excuse is that the council only recently lifted a hiring freeze imposed for nearly three years. Candidates to become police officers must graduate from a police academy, and the first one began late in February 2005.

  
Budgeted but not hired

But what about dispatchers, who take your calls to 777-3333 or to 911 in an emergency? They are not sworn police officers. The budget authorizes 73 dispatchers, but as of May 4, 2005, the City had only 62 employed. That's a 15% shortfall.

It turns out that the missing dispatchers are deliberate. We spoke with one of the four dispatch shift supervisors in May 2005. She confirmed the figures above ... and told the story behind them. The council's hiring freeze applied to the entire police department, not just sworn officers. When it was lifted, OPD was able to hire three dispatch candidates from an old list of qualified applicants; they are now in training (which takes nine months).

Still, there were eight missing dispatchers. Hire them, and you would have a noticeably shorter wait to get an answer when you call for help. OPD moved to create a new list of qualified applicants. But someone "up above," as the supervisor put it, froze the hiring process!

In other words, the budget's authorized allocation of money for personnel is a lie. If the powers that be do not want to spend it on the budgeted staff, they just say so.

Dispatchers are not the only understaffed position.

• The budget authorizes 64 record specialists, but there were only 53 employed as of May 4, 2005.
  
• The budget calls for 37 service technicians II, but only 29 are employed.
  
• In total, the budget authorizes 434 non-sworn employees of OPD, but 380 are struggling to do their work.
  

(Since this report was originally written, the figures have improved. In total, the budget for 2005-06 now authorizes only 342 non-sworn employees, but actual employment is 316, reducing the shortfall from 54 to 26, all as of Aug. 10, 2005. What happened? The City closed its jail, eliminating a number of positions while some of the laid-off jail staff moved to vacant non-sworn posts. Closing the jail was a mistake.)

The budget for 2005-06 authorizes 803 sworn police officers – just as it budgets again for 72 dispatchers. These are nothing more than convenient fictions. The first is especially convenient because one of the obligations of collecting and using Measure Y taxes is to provide 802 officers. It's a fiction because of the shenanigans just described, not to mention the fact that the City's own implementation report for Measure Y projects no more than 728 sworn officers by the end of 2005-06 (June 30, 2006).

  
Budgeted and deliberately not hired

The councilmembers' chicanery is about betraying their budget commitments to the residents of Oakland. The larger scandal is their refusal to address the fact that Oakland, the most understaffed of the nation's major cities, needs at least 1,100 officers.