Opinion

Bay Area cities need more police, not higher pay for them

It is frightening to realize that despite rising crime rates, the Bay Area's largest cities are fielding fewer police officers.

The reason is not a lack of revenue: Those cities report greater tax revenues now than before the Great Recession. Rather, the reason is that those cities now devote more of their budgets to overtime and salary increases for officers, forcing them to cut the number of officers on the street. What our communities need, however, is more police.

Making citizens feel safe is only becoming more difficult for our cities' police forces. Between 2006 and 2012, more than 50 percent of homicides went unsolved in more than a half-dozen Bay Area cities.

Even nonviolent property crimes such as vandalism and theft are becoming more prevalent and garnering national attention. In the last year, property crime has risen by up to 30 percent across the largest cities in the Bay Area.

Though the Bay Area is home to four of the nation's 10 highest-paid regions for public safety officers, the number of officers is declining in every major city. The math behind this trend really is quite simple: With limited budgets and higher demand for police services, cities can either employ fewer officers and pay more for overtime work, or cities can hire more officers and pay less for overtime.

However, the implications of such cuts are more troubling than the math. Not only do cuts to police forces tend to leave cities under-patrolled and vulnerable, but such desperate acts also indicate that the cities in question are struggling at an even deeper level.

For instance, both Oakland and San Jose have reduced their police forces by more than 25 percent in recent years to save money. Their citizens also constantly bear the burden of repeated cuts to other often essential public services. All of these cuts illustrate that the cities are rapidly approaching "service-level insolvency," the point at which governments become unable to provide even the most basic services for citizens.

When questioned about hiring additional police to tackle rising crime, Oakland and San Jose consistently cite financial strains to justify their smaller police forces. This justification arises in other areas, too. A KTVU report recently found that many Bay Area cities are facing significant police staffing shortages due to insufficient funds. That is why it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that Bay Area's officers have some of the most generous compensation packages in the nation.

Compared with other high-cost-of-living cities across the country (Boston; New York; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago), overall, Bay Area cities pay their entry-level officers up to 60 percent more. A San Francisco police recruit's compensation is twice as high as a recruit's in New York City. Without question, compensation at this level is straining the region's largest local budgets.

There are certainly enough applicants. Oakland recently hired 29 cadets from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants. Such high demand for the positions suggests that a lower starting salary would still yield a sizable applicant pool while freeing the department's resources and funds to hire additional police.

The Bay Area's major metropolitan areas spent a total $1.3 billion in total police and sheriff's patrol salaries in 2012. If they paid their officers the average salaries of Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; New York City; and Boston officers, together they could afford nearly 5,000 more officers (a 36 percent increase).

Hiring additional officers would reduce high overtime costs and lower the pressure on individual officers who are shouldering the extra burden of eliminated positions. Remarkably, Oakland has only one part-time officer assigned to burglary investigation, which consists of 10,000 cases annually. Oakland detectives can expect to work up to 90 hours per week when they receive a new homicide case.

Reducing officers' starting salaries by even a small margin and increasing the number of officer hires could have a profound positive impact on local communities and police forces themselves.

Cutting squads, relying on expensive overtime and maintaining high entry-level pay is unsustainable. Refusing to correct these poor habits would simply further the problem by financially ruining cities while failing to address rising crime. This is a scenario that should frighten any concerned citizen.