I knew before opening the page that it was someone in the police department.
I remember talking to a Seattle PD officer about how they could consistently earn more overtime hours in fortnight than there are in a fortnight with the right schedule/time-off choreography with everyone else in the department. And that’s on top of their “regular” hours.
As someone who implemented payroll solutions for cities, police (and fire) are the worst when it comes to creating/abusing loopholes to massively pad their pay and essentially defraud taxpayers. Their unions play a big role in this by making it difficult to rein in this behavior.
Yeah they could do a whole slogan and everything about it, maybe something about funding the police less or doing more oversight over police departments! It'll be super popular and definitely won't be misrepresented.
That's clearly not the point - it's not a function of everyone knowing, but rather a function of the attempt to cover it up. Waving defeatism as some kind of universal truth is neither particularly enlightening nor useful.
What about a high public salary implies corruption? If anything, it would seem to be a signal in the opposite direction - a very highly paid police officer is not out to collect bribes.
Also, is there any inherent reason why police salaries should not exceed "physician administrators, investment managers and top elected officials" and other fields the article mentions? Also noted in the article is that some of these people are working ~30 hours a week average in overtime (70 hour weeks.)
It's not clear to me that this is a result of corruption - the article notes that a big driver is overtime pay, and that SF has struggled with hiring in recent years, which could be a legitimate cause.
Also note about the mayor: "Lurie is required to receive that salary, but donates nearly all of it back to the government, accepting a net pay of $1 for the calendar year".
There were a number of reports and observations some years back of NYPD officers gaming overtime pay to pay themselves more, in some cases even claiming it while doing other jobs (like bouncer duty, private protection, etc).
Yeah so this would certainly be unacceptable, especially for NYC tax-payers struggling to get by I'm sure. My point is that the article leaves open room that the situation in SF isn't necessarily only due to unscrupulous behaviour. With that said, if there are other sources that indicate that this is happening in this case, I wouldn't be overly surprised either.
I knew before opening the page that it was someone in the police department.
I remember talking to a Seattle PD officer about how they could consistently earn more overtime hours in fortnight than there are in a fortnight with the right schedule/time-off choreography with everyone else in the department. And that’s on top of their “regular” hours.
As someone who implemented payroll solutions for cities, police (and fire) are the worst when it comes to creating/abusing loopholes to massively pad their pay and essentially defraud taxpayers. Their unions play a big role in this by making it difficult to rein in this behavior.
Sounds like mismanagement on the part of city. Why are the tax payers not revolting?
Yeah they could do a whole slogan and everything about it, maybe something about funding the police less or doing more oversight over police departments! It'll be super popular and definitely won't be misrepresented.
Police have the strongest worker's unions in the country...
‘one sergeant who logged nearly 1,700 overtime hours in a single year.’
Looks like the police are scamming the city. The highest paid person runs the pension funds? Totally not the mafia.
*plus "tips"
cleaned up url: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2026/san-francisco-empl...
Welcome to the third world, America:)
In my experience, it's not so typical in the 3rd world to provide such a detailed level of transparency to be critiqued.
In the 3rd world everyone knows anyway. Jealousy is even stronger force than transparency laws.
That's clearly not the point - it's not a function of everyone knowing, but rather a function of the attempt to cover it up. Waving defeatism as some kind of universal truth is neither particularly enlightening nor useful.
What about a high public salary implies corruption? If anything, it would seem to be a signal in the opposite direction - a very highly paid police officer is not out to collect bribes.
Also, is there any inherent reason why police salaries should not exceed "physician administrators, investment managers and top elected officials" and other fields the article mentions? Also noted in the article is that some of these people are working ~30 hours a week average in overtime (70 hour weeks.)
And here I thought the Asian police were corrupt as fuck.
It's not clear to me that this is a result of corruption - the article notes that a big driver is overtime pay, and that SF has struggled with hiring in recent years, which could be a legitimate cause.
Also note about the mayor: "Lurie is required to receive that salary, but donates nearly all of it back to the government, accepting a net pay of $1 for the calendar year".
There were a number of reports and observations some years back of NYPD officers gaming overtime pay to pay themselves more, in some cases even claiming it while doing other jobs (like bouncer duty, private protection, etc).
No shade against the mayor.
Yeah so this would certainly be unacceptable, especially for NYC tax-payers struggling to get by I'm sure. My point is that the article leaves open room that the situation in SF isn't necessarily only due to unscrupulous behaviour. With that said, if there are other sources that indicate that this is happening in this case, I wouldn't be overly surprised either.