City Budget Part 3: Sacramento Police Department Gets $28M Raise, City Faces $66M Deficit
TL;DR: the Sacramento Police Department seems to be able to get anyway with doing anything they want, including murdering our community members, breaking the law, violating peoples' constitutional rights, and engaging in targeted racial profiling and discrimination. So, they deserve a raise, right?
Highlights from this article:
The Sacramento Police Department received a $28M raise, bringing their budget to an all time high of $250M - all while our city faces a $66M deficit
The SPD's budget has increased $100M in the past 8 years, and now accounts for 39% of the City's General Fund
Check our receipts re: SPD violating the law, abusing, repressing, and murdering community murders, openly rejecting any attempts at oversight, and being held entirely unaccountable by our city government
Our City Council & Mayor are all talk when it comes to police accountability and harm inflicted upon the community, but they (most of the members) do absolutely nothing to reign the SPD in
Big thank you to Councilmembers Mai Vang and Katie Valenzuela for voting no on the 2024/25 budget because of the decisions made regarding the SPD’s budget
See recent monetary campaign contributions from the Police Officers Association to Councilmembers Kaplan, Talamantes, and Guerra, as well as Mayor Steinberg
Find some places to get plugged into working to dismantle the criminal punishment system and/or ways to engage with mutual aid and community care!
Table of contents:
Before getting into specifics regarding the Sacramento Police Department, we want to highlight this quote pulled from a 2021 article by Stuart Schrader, published in The New Republic:
Police attempt to achieve legitimacy through the stories they tell about themselves. Police legitimacy means public compliance. It means power…The core of policing is not safety. It is social control. All the other lies obfuscate this function
Quick reminder: The Chief of Police answers to the City Manager, and the City Manager answers to the Mayor and City Council.
1. SPD: Budget Introduction
The following information covers specifics regarding the Sacramento Police Department’s (SPD) 2024/25 budget and raise - budget numbers in this section are pulled from the Community Care First Coalition’s (CCFC) Sacramento City Budget Advocacy toolkit. Check out the toolkit for an even more in depth analysis of the SPD budget!
The SPD receives the largest portion of money from Sacramento’s General Fund.
ICYMI: The General Fund is the primary operating fund of the City and accounts for all financial resources except for those that are required to be accounted for in separate funds. Sources of General Fund revenues include taxes, licenses, permits, fees, fines, intergovernmental revenues, and charges for services, special assessments, interest income, and other resources available for discretionary funding. (Sacramento City Proposed Budget 2024/25 p. 85)
The 2024/25 SPD budget takes up 39% of the City's General Fund.
This comes at the expense of every other city department except the Fire Department
-Quote pulled from CCFC toolkit
The SPD’s budget has been increasing steadily - by over $100M - over the previous eight years. Last year’s SPD budget was a record-breaking $222M. This year the SPD was given yet another raise, resulting in yet another record high budget of $250M.
Table pulled from CCFC toolkit
This year, the SPD requested, and was given, another $28.4M. This is AFTER receiving:
(1) $500,000 to purchase a new armored vehicle (aka the ROOK) in January 2023
SJPC write-up on this decision
Below is an image of the ROOK
(2) $600,000 to purchase new body armor in March 2023
SJPC write-up on this decision
Below is a photo of Chief of Police Katherine Lester on the right, and Captain Rudy Chan holding the 'insertable plate' (requested body armor) on the left
(3) $886,000 to purchase more new vehicles in June 2023
2. SPD isn't effective at what it claims to be effective at
Crime rates have been on an overall downward trajectory for the last 40 years, while our police department’s clearance rates have been getting worse.
Graph from Public Policy Institute of California 2023 Fact Sheet
For comparison, between 2016-2022 (2016 was the year the SPD began its $100M budget climb) the clearance rate for violent crime was 38.4% in 2016 and 37.3% in 2022; the clearance rate for property crime was 9.7% in 2016 and just 6.5% in 2022.
*According to the California Department of Justice, a reported crime is “cleared” when a suspect is arrested or charged. That means that someone doesn’t have to be convicted of a crime for it to be considered “cleared” by the Justice Department’s standards (search tool here).
Clearance rate data pulled from Open Justice
Sooooo you’re getting worse at your job, but getting paid more money? Where they do that at?! Apparently in our dear Sacramento. Make It Make Sense.
To be clear, there is no compelling evidence to support the idea that increasing the size of a police force results in meaningful reductions in crime
The following quote is pulled from a 2020 analysis by Philip Bump, published in the Washington Post:
A review of spending on state and local police over the past 60 years…shows no correlation nationally between spending and crime rates
3. What has the SPD done to deserve a raise?
Check these receipts:
The Sacramento Police Department has abused, repressed, and murdered our community members, consistently violated people’s constitutional rights, relentlessly swept, harmed and criminalized our unhoused neighbors, engaged in relentless racial profiling and targeted criminalization, continually disregarded basic requests to provide data regarding their operations, refused to take responsibility for the violence they inflict upon our community, actively rejected any attempts at engaging with oversight bodies or complying with laws meant to provide oversight (e.g. 2023 sexual assault kit backlog & SPD’s noncompliance with law regulating Military Equipment Use policies), traumatized and handcuffed children, and yet, they continue to receive raise after raise.
The SPD is not held accountable by our City Council, our Mayor, or our City Manager (2023 SJPC write-up on SPD’s use-of-force policy, 2023 SJPC write-up on the “rook” purchase, 2023 SJPC write-up on yet another SPD equipment request).
Regarding the SPD’s lack of accountability, let’s talk about OPSA.
The Office of Public Safety Accountability (OPSA) is a Mayor and City Council established office, their main responsibilities are:
(1) taking in complaints from members of the public against Sacramento Police (SPD) or Fire Department (SFD) employees
(2) making sure that SPD and SFD investigates those complaints thoroughly and fairly
(3) recommending improvements to SPD and SFD policies and procedures
The Director of OPSA is Dr. LaTesha Watson, and the office is under the direction, control and supervision of the Mayor and City Council. OPSA is not part of the police department.
Last year, OPSA provided evidence that the SPD has been violating people’s constitutional rights. OPSA Director Latesha Watson & Sac City Inspector General Dwight White presented on this at a City Council meeting in June of 2023. No action was taken at the meeting, but there was a vague statement made that the SPD essentially needed to try harder.
Subsequently, OPSA and the SPD were given funding for more staff. The SPD received funding for four new positions, to be assigned to a new department called the Internal Compliance Office. This office was supposed to help improve oversight compliance within the SPD.
Something the SPD stated - in the previously mentioned City Council meeting - was that they didn’t have enough staff to process complaint information in time for OPSA to act on it. An incredibly obvious lie. So they get the money for these new positions.
This budgeting cycle, the funding for several of those positions was removed. Police Chief Kathy Lester says they need more officers on patrol.
Aaaand here's one more example of the SPD breaking the law: the Sacramento Police Department is not in compliance with SB 34. As explained by the ACLU, SB 34:
The Sacramento County Grand Jury recently found that the Sacramento Police Department is not in compliance with SB 34, and that
The practice of the SPD to share ALPR [Automated License Plate Readers] information with out-of-state entities violates SB 34 and unreasonably risks the aiding of potential prosecution by the home state of women who have traveled to California to seek or receive healthcare services
Here we have yet another example of the SPD openly disregarding laws meant to regulate their invasive and harmful practices. The SPD's violations of SB34 are not a new issue, organizations like the ACLU have been calling this out for years, but - yet again - there seems to have been no consequences for the SPD. How this department is one that our City continues to give more and more money to truly speaks to the values of our City officials and staff.
4. Sacramento City Council: values and buzzwords
First, we want to thank Councilmembers Mai Vang and Katie Valenzuela for voting no on this budget because of the decisions made regarding the SPD’s budget. Thank you for hearing the community and demanding better from our City government.
For everyone else on the City Council, next time you hear them - especially Mayor Steinberg - talking about the need for transparency, accountability within the SPD, the SPD’s need to repair community harm, or any of the other nonsense buzzwords they use, remember that in this budgeting cycle, facing a $66M deficit, they not only gave the police a nearly $30M raise, but also eliminated positions designed to help hold the police accountable. The SPD will respond to the threat of not getting their budget demands met. They will not respond to any attempts to implement accountability. Why would they? They don't have to, our City does nothing to hold them to even the most basic of standards. For example, actually having formal policies regarding the things they do...much less actually having those policies written down.
Budgets are moral documents. They are a statement of our values. This is what our Sacramento government values. They value community safety far less than they value winning reelection.
5. Elected officials and campaign contributions from the police
Mayor Steinberg loves to talk about accountability, but he does nothing to enforce it. He says we can’t dedicate more funding to things like the Department of Community Response or participatory budgeting, because we need to see the “data”.
This snippet and quote from Councilmember Valenzuela - published in an article covering the increase in the police budget for FY 2022/23 - captures the lack of accountability for the SPD:
Why do we not need data from the police department? Why do their budgets keep going up and accountability keeps going down?
Well, probably because the Police Officers Association has funded the campaigns of several City Councilmembers, as well as Mayor Steinberg. Probably because they’re unwilling to do anything that would even slightly appear to be taking away resources from the SPD, and probably because they want (or in Steinberg’s case, previously have wanted) to win reelection and continue receiving campaign contributions. Probably because they’re cowards. What ever the reason, the unequivocal support of SPD does not improve the lives of Sacramento’s most vulnerable citizens.
Here are the monetary contributions from the Police Officers Association for Councilmembers Kaplan, Talamantes, and Guerra, as well as Mayor Darrell Steinberg (located using this tool from the City of Sacramento). The data pulled covers contributions only from these officials’ most recent runs for office, filed contributions for upcoming runs for office, or both.
This data was identified by the SJPC Editor and may not be a comprehensive list:
Darrell Steinberg, Sacramento Mayor
$2,500 from the Sacramento Police Officers Association Political Action Fund for Steinberg’s 2020 Mayoral campaign
$500 from the Sacramento Police Officers Association Political Activity Fund for Steinberg's 2020 Mayoral campaign
Lisa Kaplan, D1 Sac City Councilmember:
$6,000 from the Sacramento Police Officers Association PAF for Kaplan’s 2022 City Council campaign
Karina Talamantes, D3 Sac City Councilmember:
$2,000 from the Sacramento Police Officers Association Political Activity Fund for Talamantes’ upcoming 2026 City Council campaign
$12,000 from the Sacramento Police Officers Association PAF for Talamantes’ 2022 City Council campaign
Eric Guerra D6:
$10,000 from the Sacramento Police Officers Association Political Activity Fund for Guerra’s 2024 City Council campaign
$1,800 from the Sacramento Police Officers Association Political Action Fund for Guerra’s 2024 City Council campaign
Thank you to Councilmembers Katie Valenzuela D4, Caity Maple D5, and Mai Vang D8 who all pledged during their campaigns not to take contributions from law enforcement. As previously stated, Councilmembers Valenzuela and Vang for voted no on this year's budget due to the increases in police funding - note that Caity Maple voted to approve the 2024/25 budget as is.
We need to invest in our youth, and invest less in the police. Police get more and more every year. Mai Vang voted no and I support her decision and reasons. I believe in prevention, and investing in our youth opens up a better future with less crime and more vitality
-Kim Sow, Community Member
The police budget should be heavily cut instead of [things like] parks to fix the deficit
-Anonymous Community Member
6. Wrapping things up & some ways to get involved!
We know that investment in community programming and social safety nets prevents crime and increases community safety. Spending $250M on our police department won’t just be ineffective, it will be actively dangerous and harmful to our community, especially our communities of color.
It can be hard to process how much our local law enforcement bodies can get away with, and it can be hard to imagine ways to change that. Honestly, it can feel bleak, and daunting. It’s important to remember that even though we might not feel powerful as individuals, when we move collectively we ARE powerful. There’s no one way for us to navigate out of these oppressive systems - there are many tactics and strategies to pursue at multiple levels.
If you feel drawn to working to dismantle our criminal punishment system, and/or finding ways to build systems of community care, we’ve curated a short list (by no means comprehensive) of places plug in! We can keep each other safe, build community together, and continue to fight for liberation.
Some local organizations working to shift our community away from the criminal punishment system (in alphabetical order):
Anti Police-Terror Project, Sacramento chapter; @aptpsac
“The Anti Police-Terror Project is a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color”
Decarcerate Sacramento; @decarcerate_sacramento
“Decarcerate Sacramento works to prevent jail expansions, decrease jail populations, and shift county funds away from policing and incarceration towards community-based systems of care that promote community safety and health”
Mental Health First; @mhfirstsac
“MH First project of Anti Police-Terror Project, is a cutting-edge new model for non-police response to mental health crisis. The goal of MH First is to respond to mental health crises including, but not limited to, psychiatric emergencies, substance use support, and domestic violence safety planning”
If you’re interested in mutual aid and building systems of care within our local community (in alphabetical order):
A Seat at the Table Books; @aseatatthetablebooks
Community Movement Builders (CMB) Neighbor Program; @cmb.neighborprogram
Democratic Socialists of America, Sacramento Chapter; @sac_dsa
Mobilize for Mental Health; @mobilize4mentalhealth
Sunrise Movement, Sacramento Chapter; @sunrisemvmtsac
The Awkward Gardner (TAG) Community Table; @tagcommunitytable
Tortuguita Community Pantry; @tortuguitacommunitypantry
