ISSUE AREA
POLICE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
Oakland says it can't afford senior meal delivery, eviction defense, or fully-staffed violence prevention programs, but it has found $55 million for police overtime—more than double the $24 million it budgeted, a 128% overrun. One sergeant alone took home $493,000 in overtime in a single year, nearly half of it undocumented, on top of a $163,000 salary.
This is a decades-long issue. Police overtime has blown past its budget in all but one year since 2010, and city auditors have flagged it for two decades. Meanwhile, every other department has absorbed real cuts to balance the books: Human Resources lost nearly its entire general-fund budget, IT and Violence Prevention each lost close to half, and the city cancelled community contracts to save $2.6 million.
The One Budget That’s Protected Where It Counts
In 2024, a single Oakland police sergeant collected $493,247 in overtime, on top of a base salary of about $164,000, for total pay above $711,000. The department could not document close to half of those overtime hours. He was not an outlier: 92 officers earned more in overtime than in their base salary that year, and the number of officers clearing six figures in overtime alone nearly tripled in three years, from 58 to about 170.
Source: Oaklandside (2026)Featured Projects
