Tell Oakland City Council: Cut Waste, Not Services!
In the face of our city’s budget deficit, city council is putting vital programs on the chopping block. Meanwhile, wasteful spending has been skyrocketing in recent years. One Oakland insider even made $1,000,000 in overtime in just a few years. Before we cut vital services—from fire engines to senior centers—let’s cut out waste, fraud and abuse.
Public safety is critical, and residents have made it clear that it should be a priority. But the reality is that overspending in the Oakland Police Department ($52 million over budget this year) is jeopardizing essential services—including police academies and staff. This is a structural problem: over the past decade, OPD has stayed within budget only twice.
The City of Oakland has yet to do enough to control the skyrocketing cost of police overtime, which is the area most vulnerable to waste and abuse. For example, officers can extend their shifts as much as they want without prior approval. A study by Harvey Rose found that 12 officers extended their shifts 500 hours or more in one year. The average per officer is only 72 hours. That means just a handful of officers cost the City over $2 million in overtime through shift extensions. And in one year, the voluntary overtime policy was violated over 3,000 times, with officers claiming an excessive amount of both paid time off and overtime in the same week.
These issues have been repeatedly flagged by auditors, but most of their recommendations are not fully implemented. The City needs to start putting a cap on overtime per officer and at the very least enforcing existing policies.
