The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spent $458 million on overtime last fiscal year. This is due to higher vacancy rates, higher labor costs and wider liability, the departmental authorities say.
County data shows that the number of new agents hired each year has plummeted during the Covid-19 pandemic and has not recovered completely. At the same time, the number of agents leaving the department has increased, returning to pre-pandemic levels last year.
More people than left the department took part, about 10,000 sub-services 1,461 in March were empty, with over 900 being held on vacation. Sheriff’s officials say those who remain are being picked up slowly. Last year, department data shows that agents worked over 4.3 million hours of overtime.
“I don’t know how proud our employees are that they are stepping up to the plate,” Sheriff Robert Luna told The Times in a recent interview. “This is not for them. They literally do the work of thousands of employees that are not available.”
Richard Pippin, President Asun. The union representing deputies of Los Angeles, rank and file deputies, is concerned about the impact on public safety.
“Thirty-five years later, I have never seen anything worse than this. Because of all forced overtime, the assistant morale is at the bottom of the rock,” he told The Times. “Operations, training and recruitment are all struggling due to this crisis. Anyone who has to call 911 knows what a short staffing means in an emergency.”
Pippin said he fears the situation could get worse in his budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year, which includes salary increases in living expenses for county employees.
However, some supervisory staff and lawyers have questioned whether the department really needs to hire more representatives or whether it requires very strict overtime. As the Times previously reported, in prisons, far fewer inspectors care for them in prisons than ever before, far fewer people care for them in prisons.
Melissa Camacho, the American Civil Liberties Union in Southern California, represents prisoners in two long-standing class action lawsuits relating to conditions and abuse in departmental prisons. She suggested that agencies require staffing level outsider views, particularly in county lockups.
“We are reluctant to close certain positions. “For a long time, they have desperately needed an external audit of their staffing.”
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Some internet critics have denounced Luna for the staffing crisis, but closer look at the numbers shows that the problem has been taking years.
In 2019, sheriff’s officials hired 814 new deputies, according to department data. The following year, those numbers plunged in when the country was caught up in the pandemic and police were caught up in George Floyd’s murder and subsequent racial calculations. All over the country, law enforcement agencies have had trouble bringing in new officers. Recruitment had been immersed almost 20% nationwide by the end of 2020, according to the nonprofit police executive research forum.
In Los Angeles, the county data recruited employment in 2021, when only 81 new agents joined the department.
At the same time, the number of people leaving law enforcement has increased. Nationally, one of the major drivers of that change was resignation. The Police Enforcement Research Forum has found that it rose by more than 60% between 2019 and 2022.
In LA, Exodus peaked in 2022, with county data showing that over 600 lawmakers left the department. Most of these departures were a steady stream of retirements that had been exacerbated by a surge in resignations that year.
As a result, the sheriff’s department was shrunk. In January 2021, there were 9,937 sworn holders. However, by the beginning of this year there were 8,785. This is almost a 12% drop. This contrasts with small and medium-sized sectors. This found that the Research Forum employs more executives overall than it did in early 2020.
According to Luna, large departments are struggling even more for their staff as they often can’t provide the hefty employment bonuses and other incentives that smaller departments with poorer staff needs can use to attract and retain executives.
For the LA County Sheriff’s Office, even at peak 2021, agents were hundreds of deputies to have staffed them entirely. By last month, 23% of the units were virtually unavailable after accounting for more than 900 people on various types of vacation.
Overtime costs in the department have skyrocketed as few people can work.
County records show that during the 2020-21 budget year, the department spent $180 million on overtime. That figure rose to $297 million for the following budget year and to $397 million the following year, reaching $458 million.
However, the increase in overtime costs far outweighed the increase in vacancy. This is a contradiction in the department, partly due to the fact that the county eliminated 586 secondary jobs in 2021. Despite these jobs gone, in many cases the work still had to be done – usually the agent is working overtime. As Luna explained, “We didn’t reduce our responsibility for everything we do.”
Instead, the department said new policies and laws are expanding the scope of its responsibility. The Bodyworn Camera, which the agency began using in 2020, has created additional work for lawmakers who suddenly need to spend time reviewing video footage before writing incident reports. State laws to combat racial profiling required better data tracking. This means that the agent had more documents to do more documents each time he pulled someone, officials said.
In prisons, consent orders from several long-standing lawsuits aimed at improving surveillance have been aimed at surveillance, but are busy requiring the department to provide more cell time for prisoners.
And on the streets, a return to pre-pandemic norms meant that agents would do more work. They commanded traffic in sports games, patrol again, patrol public spaces, and security at newly built event venues.
“Many people think that agents love overtime, but among the 10 agents I’m talking about, their primary problem is that mandatory overtime is killing them,” Luna said. “People work on six, eight, ten or twelve orders per month, but that’s not sustainable.”
One aide who asked him not to be named because he was not allowed to speak publicly said the constant possibility of forced overtime made it difficult to schedule basic tasks and even errands.
“You can’t plan any kind of normal life,” the aide said. “Your shift could be 5 [a.m.] In 1 [p.m.]so you plan to pick up your child or make an appointment with the doctor, and then at 10am [a.m.] You are told you cannot leave. ”
In some cases, department staffing issues have led to lawsuits. Last year, the city of Lancaster sued the county, and the sheriff’s department said it had “illegal profits” by assigning Lancaster fewer deputies than the city paid.
Similar to the lawsuit filed by the family of murdered Deputy Ryan Clinkon Bloomer, he accused his son of forcing him to work overtime, and he accused him of avoiding the threat, including the gunman who killed him near the Palmdale Sheriff station, as he accused him of forcing him to work overtime.
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However, in recent months there have been signs of shifts. Since Luna took office, resignations have been steadily declining, and officials said employment has begun to recover since the department brought it to the marketing company to attract more applicants.
In a request for the budget year that begins in July, sheriff officials sought money to fund four more classes at the Sheriff Training Academy.
By the end of 2025, the department expects to hire at least 410 new agents. This will be the most employed in a year, even before the pandemic.
In the meantime, the sheriff and his team are evaluating ways to reduce the workload of those remaining by dialing the scope of the agency’s services and knowing which tasks the oath’s deputies don’t need to handle.
“We have to leave lawmakers to patrol, detention and investigation,” Luna said. “But what else do you do to temporarily shelve it until you’re healthy?
For inspectors of county watchdog General Max Huntsman, such a readjustment appears to have been postponed for a long time.
“If you really want to run a government agency ethically and legally, you can’t produce more products than your staff,” he said.
Previously, Huntsman recommended the department to Shutter the Department of Risk Management. He said he silenced whistleblowers and downplayed fraud. In an interview with the Times this week, he suggested that the department could also scale back the intelligence agency that said it would be that it would give out a PR story, and allocate more people to process requests for public records.
He then suggested that by releasing some people, prison staffing needs could be reduced if prison guards were unable to provide a constitutionally appropriate level of care.
“I have said many times that prisons have inadequate staffing levels,” he told The Times. “We have repeatedly identified negative outcomes that are the outcomes of inadequate staff. I think all we need to do is accept the fact that we are not successful in our mission and stop pretending to be us.”
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