Mayor London Breed was one of the first politicians to speak out in support of defunding the police as widespread calls for reforms swept the nation following George Floyd's murder.
"You got to remember where we were two years ago. I mean we were in a bad way in this country, in terms of policing incidents," Chief Scott said."We haven't been able to reduce the police budget," said San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen. For fiscal year 2021-2022, the budget is over $27 million more than it was in fiscal year 2018-2019.This year the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a $50 million increase in SFPD's budget.
Chief Scott said there is "about a 648 officer shortage... We definitely need the overtime to stay afloat with the staffing crisis we have right now."San Francisco's DA says new policies will start to clean up streets in 'few months' "I'm a little sick of them blaming everything on understaffing when we just increased their budget by $50 million, and we gave them an unprecedented number of police academies," Ronen said. "You no longer have the DA in charge that was their scapegoat for everything under the sun."
Public records show the city has seven street crisis response teams that respond to mental health calls. If there's an influx of calls, the San Francisco Fire Department is assigned to be the backup, removing any responsibility from SFPD. The reduced workload isn't cutting a dent in overtime spending.
In terms of overtime spending to date, Chief Scott said the department is over budget, but has nine months to fix that issue. And for the need to hire more officers, he said, "Ideally yes. And if we were able to do that, we'd be doing that. But when we're unable to meet our hiring needs, we still have a workload that we have to deal with."
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