The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spent $458 million on overtime in the last fiscal year, a shocking number that department officials said was driven by rising vacancies, increasing labor costs and expanding responsibilities.
County data shows that the number of new delegates employed each year plummeted during the pandemic on the 19th and has not fully recovered. Meanwhile, the number of delegates leaving the department has increased, returning only to pre-pandemic levels last year.
With more people leaving the department than joining the department, more people on the agency’s jobs fall into the agency’s vacant spaces and more than 900 more people are on leave during the leave. Sheriff’s officials said those remaining were left behind, with dozens of hours of overtime each month. Last year, department data showed that representatives worked overtime for more than 4.3 million hours.
“I can’t tell you that I’m proud of our employees adding to the plate,” Sheriff Robert Luna told Times in a recent interview. “It’s not on them. They’re actually doing the job of thousands of employees who don’t have available.”
Assn President Richard Pippin. The Los Angeles deputy sheriff is the union of the last-ranked representatives, worried about the impact on public safety.
“In 35 years, I’ve never seen anything so bad. The morale of the deputy was at the bottom of the rocks due to all forced overtime,” he told the Times. “There have been suffering due to this crisis, operations, training and recruitment. Anyone who has ever called 911 knows what staffing might mean in an emergency.”
Piping said he fears it will get worse due to budget proposals for the next fiscal year, including the increase in the cost of living for county employees.
However, some oversight officials and attorneys question whether the department really needs to hire more representatives or require such a tough overtime. In prison, there are much fewer inmates than before, and inspectors have repeatedly found that in prisons are at work or watching movies and inappropriate videos, as previously reported by The New York Times.
Melissa Camacho, an American Civil Liberties Union of senior staff attorneys in Southern California, represents two long-standing class action lawsuits involving conditions and abuse in the department’s prison. She suggested the agency needs outsiders’ perceptions of its staffing level, especially in the county suspension.
“There are no desires to close certain positions even if they may not be needed,” she said. “For a long time, they have been in a desperate need of external audits of their personnel.”
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Although some internet critics defended Luna’s crisis of numbers, a closer look at numbers shows that the problem has been around for years.
In 2019, sheriff’s officials hired 814 new delegates, according to department data. The following year, as the country emerged from the pandemic, the police killing of George Floyd and subsequent race estimates, the number fell. Nationwide, law enforcement agencies work hard to recruit new officials. By the end of 2020, recruitment of nearly 20% fell nearly 20% nationwide, according to the nonprofit police enforcement research forum.
In Los Angeles, recruitment bottomed out in 2021, when county data showed that only 81 new representatives joined the department.
Meanwhile, the number of people leaving law enforcement has increased. Nationally, one of the biggest drivers of this change is resignation, the Police Execution Research Forum found that the forum grew by more than 60% from 2019 to 2022.
In Los Angeles, Exodus peaked in 2022, when county data showed more than 600 deputies left the department. Most of the people who left have a stable retirement flow, and the drama of resignation this year has increased dramatically.
As a result, the sheriff’s department shrank. In January 2021, there were 9,937 sworn in representatives. But by the beginning of the year, there were 8,785 people, a drop of nearly 12%. This is in stark contrast to the small and medium sectors, which now find that the research forum now employs more officials than early 2020.
According to Luna, large departments have been providing more efforts for employees because they often fail to provide high hiring bonuses and other incentives, i.e. small departments with more meager staff needs can be used to attract and retain staff.
As for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department, even at its peak in 2021, the agency had hundreds of representatives, not enough staff, and that number has risen. By last month, after considering various holidays of over 900 people, there was actually no 23% of the troops.
Overtime pay in the department soared as fewer people were able to work.
According to county records, the department spent $180 million on overtime in the 2020-21 budget year. The figure rose to $297 million in the next budget year, and $397 million in the year after that, and then hit $458 million before the previous budget year.
However, the increase in overtime costs far outweighs the increase in vacancy, and the division’s differences are partly attributed to the fact that in 2021, the county eliminated 586 vice chairmen. Even if these jobs disappear, in many cases the job still has to be completed – usually by delegates working overtime. As Luna explains: “The responsibility for everything we do is not narrowed down.”
Instead, new policies and laws have expanded the scope of their responsibilities, the department said. The agency started using cameras on the body in 2020 to create other jobs for representatives, and they suddenly need to take the time to review the videotape before they can write an incident report. Officials say a state law for race profiles requires better data tracking, meaning deputies have more paperwork every time they pull someone apart.
In prison, consent ordinances aimed at improving supervision of several long-term litigation, but they also require the department to provide prisoners with more time to sell, better use of documents of force and more closely monitor conditions, keeping deputies busy.
On the streets, returning to the vast norms means that deputies have more work to do – directing sports games traffic, patrolling public places again and working safety on newly built event venues, among other tasks.
“Many people think that deputies like overtime, but out of every 10 deputies, there are seven or eight deputies, and their first problem is that mandatory overtime is killing them,” Luna said. “People work 6, 8, 10 or 12 tasks a month, which is not sustainable.”
A deputy delegate was not named because he was not authorized to speak publicly and fear revenge, saying that the possibility of forced overtime continues to make it difficult to arrange even basic tasks and errands.
“You can’t plan any normal life,” the agent said. “Your transformation may be 5 [a.m.] To 1 [p.m.]so you make a plan to pick up your child or doctor’s appointment and then at 10 o’clock [a.m.] You are told you can’t leave. ”
In some cases, staffing issues in the department have sparked lawsuits. Last year, Lancaster City sued the county, saying the sheriff’s department made up for the difference by assigning deputies to Lancaster less than the city paid, and then forced those deputies to work overtime.
The case is still under trial, a lawsuit filed by the family of the killed deputy deputy Ryan Clinkunbroomer, accusing the ministry of forcing their son to go too much overtime to he was too tired to stay alert and avoid threats, including a gunman who killed him near the Palmdale Sheriff station.
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However, in recent months, there have been signs of a change. The resignation has been steadily declining since Luna took office, with officials saying recruitment has begun to rebound since the department brought a marketing company to attract more applicants.
Sheriff’s officials asked money to offer four more courses at the Sheriff’s Training Academy, under the requirements of the upcoming budget year that began in July.
By the end of 2025, the department is expected to hire at least 410 new representatives, which will be the largest number of employees in the year before the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the sheriff and his team are evaluating how to reduce the workload by calling the agency’s scope of service and figuring out which tasks do not need to be handled by oath representatives.
“We have to get the deputies on patrols, detain, investigate, but what else can we do until we get healthy until we are healthy? We will have to make some tough decisions.”
For Max Huntsman, the inspector general of the county regulator, this recalibration seems to have been long overdue.
“Really, if you want to operate a government entity morally and legally, you can’t produce more products,” he said.
Earlier, Huntsman suggested the department shut down its risk management agency, which he said was silence of whistleblowers and understatement of misconduct. In an interview with The Times this week, he suggested that the department could also reduce its information bureau – he said “basically the story of PR” and assigned more people to handle public record requests.
He suggested that if the jail cannot provide sufficient constitutional care, the department could reduce the demand for prison personnel by issuing certain people.
“I say over and over again that there is insufficient staffing,” he told the Times. “We have repeatedly identified the negative consequences of insufficient staffing and I think all we need to do is accept our mission that we have not succeeded, but stop trying to pretend to be ourselves.”
