Police Overtime
Oakland’s failure to control its police overtime budget is estimated to have cost the city $236 million since 2008. Comprehensive OT reform would help close our city’s $120m deficit.
The Basics
For more than two decades, Oakland has let its police department spend far more on overtime than the city budgets for it, and then absorbed the bill. Despite three reports (2015, 2019, 2022) from the city auditor’s office suggesting commonplace changes that would help curb the overspending and put Oakland more in line with other California cities, several recent follow-up reports make clear that many of the same problems remain, including the complete absence of a system for properly tracking overtime hours and approvals.
This is largely a fixable problem. Other large cities like San Jose govern their police departments overtime by doing this like requiring approval before an officer works overtime, capping how hours are accrued/banked, tracking spending in real time, limiting compensation time, and other practices. Oakland, conversely, allowed officers to approve their own shift extensionsand accrue overtime hours without management involvement.
Things are not all bad, however – facing pressure from the public and the mayor’s office following an Oaklandside report, in March of 2026 Interim Police Chief Beere issued an order requiring supervisory approval for all shift extensions.
While this is a step in the right direction, there is still much work to do based on successful practices in other California cities and would help us save millions in unbudgeted overtime costs.
By The Numbers
•
By The Numbers •
Five numbers that explain Oakland's approach to police overtime and why it keeps failing.
An analysis by the IFPTE Local 21, SEIU 1021, and IBEW 1245 coalition (May 2025) estimates that cumulative police overtime overspending has drained approximately $236 million from city reserves since 2008.
In 2024, 92 officers earned more in overtime than their entire base salary, 199 officers earned more than $100,000 in overtime alone, and one sergeant earned $493,000 in overtime on top of a $163,000 salary.
Oakland’s Office of the Inspector General could not locate overtime forms for 83%of paid overtime instances in its sample, as cited in the 2019 overtime audit.
Since 2019, 56% of the overtime hours OPD added were self-initiated shift extensions, where officers extended their own shifts with no prior supervisory approval required.
Of the 21 recommendations in the 2019 City Auditor audit, only eight had been fully implemented as of June 2025. The digital tracking system the city promised for December 2024 was never built, and has now been targeted for 2027 at best.
Key Facts
Unbudgeted overtime is a long-running Oakland problem, and the city has known it for years.
Year after year, the council adopts roughly the same modest overtime budget while the department spends far past it. The gap is not a surprise that arrives at year's end. It is built into the budget the day it passes. The City Auditor has found OPD over its overtime budget in every year it has examined, and the overruns have only widened: in a recent single year, what the department spent over budget was larger than the entire annual budget of some city departments. When OPD overspends, the general fund quietly absorbs it, and nothing about the next budget changes.
More officers has not meant less overtime, because the problem is management.
The spending moves independently of everything overtime is supposed to track. Between 2011 and 2024, officer staffing improved about 8.5% while overtime spending rose roughly 200%. In 2024, serious crime fell 33% and overtime hours still went up.
OT mismanagement must be addressed to prevent additional cuts to critical programs and services.
The City of Oakland just closed a deficit by cutting critical services, eliminating positions, terminating contracts with community organizations, and reducing programs in neighborhoods across teh city. Unfortunately, we will be forced to do the same next year when creating our 2027-29 budget which is estimated to face a $115 million dollar deficit. We simply cannot afford any more unbudgeted overtime. Existing programming and services have been cut to or beyond their breaking point, and we still have a deficit to close.
Oakland has been very slow to make changes to its overtime policy.
Until December 2020, the Oakland Police Department was still running on an overtime policy written in 1999. Until March of this year, Officers could extend their own shifts without anyone signing off on the hours in advance, which is why so much of the recent growth comes from self-initiated extensions. The city cannot see in real time whether those hours follow its own rules, and the forms that are supposed to justify overtime have repeatedly turned up missing when auditors or inspectors general went looking. This is not a department straining through a crisis. It is spending that no one was required to approve, monitor, or explain before it was paid.
Oakland is an outlier among its peers.
San Jose, San Diego, and San Francisco have all required a supervisor to approve overtime before an officer works it. Oakland's cap on banked compensatory time is the highest among major California cities, and its practice of letting officers defer overtime pay to cash out later is unique among the large California departments when our auditor surveyed the practice. On the ordinary cost controls comparable cities rely on, Oakland uses almost none.