Police working in some of Orange County's most difficult and dangerous neighborhoods have had their overtime pay cut to nothing as the city strains to make ends meet.
Sgt. Lorenzo Carrillo, left, of the Santa Ana police department gang unit questions a teen who was stopped on the street. After being checked for any outstanding warrants, he was released. (Leonard Oritz, The Orange County Register)
The City Council approved a budget late Monday that eliminates overtime at every level of the Police Department, from the patrol officers chasing suspects to the detectives chasing leads.
Faced with layoffs, Police Chief Paul Walters said he decided that erasing overtime pay from the budget was the lesser evil. He said he has never gone without overtime pay for his officers in more than 20 years in the chief's office.
"It's going to hurt us," said Sgt. Joseph Perez, the president of the Police Officers Association. "It's definitely going to affect crime, without a doubt."
The cuts mean that overtime pay would vanish on July 1. But Perez said police and union leaders are still hoping to negotiate a better solution that would compensate officers - with time off, for example -- for the overtime they work covering cases or testifying in court.
As part of that, the union is also in talks to have detectives work occasional patrol shifts, Perez said. That would relieve some pressure on the overtime budget, which the understaffed patrol division has used to fill shifts.
Barring a last-minute deal, however, police would lose the possibility of overtime pay just as they head into the long summer months, a peak season for trouble. Santa Ana - the biggest city in Orange County, with the highest levels of crime and the most gangs - has seen a spike in gang violence in recent months.
City leaders have said that crashing tax revenues and the lingering effects of a national recession have helped push Santa Ana into a budget crisis of historic proportions. The main city budget that they adopted Monday spells out more than $197 million in spending - the lowest level in more than five years - and nearly $21 million in cuts.
A handful of special police programs - mostly funded by grants - do provide money for overtime pay, but only in limited circumstances. Police also hope to receive about $950,000 from the U.S. Department of Justice for overtime, pegged to asset seizures. But the main Police Department budget sets aside not a single dollar for overtime.
The last police budget, by comparison, provided more than $2.6 million in overtime pay, records show. And even that was down sharply from earlier years; in 2007-2008, for example, the department spent nearly $5.6 million on overtime.
The new city budget deletes more than 120 jobs - many of them already vacant - in departments from parks to planning, fire to finance; it also temporarily un-funds a dozen more. The Police Department loses records specialists and correctional officers, a pair of lieutenants and a pair of parking officers.
Walters said that cutting overtime pay - for now - headed off additional layoffs. It was the second time in as many years that police have made concessions to preserve jobs; last year, the Police Officers Association - along with most other unions that represent city workers - agreed to defer pay raises for a year.
"I'd rather try to scrape by than I would to not have the full-time bodies at all," Walters said. Cutting overtime, he added, "is certainly not what we prefer. But these are unique economic times."
