By Ryan Lillis
Sacramento Bee
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Sacramento Police Department is severely cutting back service as a last resort to avoid laying off cops.
Police Chief Rick Braziel said Friday the cutbacks are necessary because of historic budget shortfalls and that the only way to slash more money “is to take people off the payroll.”
“I’m hoping for a miracle,” he said.
Braziel said the new cutbacks will have harsh impacts, including:
• Longer wait times for 911 calls to be answered.
• A significant decrease in the number of robberies, sexual assaults and burglaries that detectives respond to after hours.
• Reduced patrols by officers, leading to fewer arrests.
• Longer waits for police response to “low priority” crimes such as home burglaries and car thefts.
Mayor Heather Fargo called the cuts “outrageous” and “unacceptable” and called on the City Council to address the changes Tuesday.
She announced she would take a 10 percent pay cut and called on the police chief, City Manager Ray Kerridge and every other city department head to do the same.
Police union chief Brent Meyer called the possibility of police layoffs “unfathomable.”
“You’re talking about people who have learned the city, know the community, know the people,” he said. “To take that away, moralewise, you’re driving a spike through those people.”
In a memo sent to Kerridge on Friday, Braziel said the service reductions will cut about $1.8 million from the police budget – but leave the department still $1.8 million short of what it needs to fulfill cuts mandated by this year’s citywide budget. The police budget was cut by 8 percent to help balance an overall budget shortfall of $58 million.
Detectives will still be brought in after hours on robbery, burglary and sex assault series, Braziel said. And he said if any of the cuts lead to drastic increases in crime, they’ll be changed.
The additional cuts are needed because 14 officers decided against taking voluntary buyouts earlier this year. Meanwhile, homicides in the city are on the rise, leading to more costly investigations, Braziel said.
He said the cutbacks would have the harshest effects on operations like report-taking, public counters and other nonemergency services.
“The Police Department will continue to respond to critical public safety needs,” Kerridge said in an e-mailed statement. “These are tough times and we have hard decisions to make.”
If further cuts are needed, the decisions will likely be even tougher, Braziel said.
“When you look hard at the budget, the only thing left to cut is bodies,” he said. “I’m going to push as hard as I can and say as a city we cannot afford to lay off any Police Department employees.”
Kerridge would not comment on the mayor’s proposal to take a pay cut, and Braziel did not return a call asking whether he would agree to the decrease. The mayor makes $111,106.
Fargo said there should be a public discussion on the cutbacks – most of which went into effect Sept. 16 – so “we can get real and get it done together and be smarter about this.”
“I don’t think it reflects the level of customer service we expect from our police chief and city manager,” Fargo said. “We keep saying it’s about getting the customer to success, but telling them we’ll call them back in the morning does not get the customer to success.”
Fargo said “our criminals don’t have hours, I don’t think the police should either.”
She questioned why the Police Department is having a difficult time cutting its budget when other departments have had to cut their spending by 20 percent.
Fargo blasted many of the cuts specifically, calling them “wishful thinking or fuzzy math.”
She said there were other things the department should consider cutting, like white collar crime investigations and “officers out on New Year’s chatting with each other.”
“This is incomplete and they need to go back and think it out some more,” she said.
Braziel acknowledged the severity of the cuts.
“We don’t want to do any of this stuff, nobody does,” Braziel said. “Not the community, in-house, nobody wants to do these things. But these are realities and without money, you can’t do certain things.”
Kevin Johnson, who is challenging Fargo in the November election, proposed freezing raises for the mayor and City Council in tough budget times and said Friday he hoped the mayor wasn’t using her salary cut “as a political game changer.”
“This is why we need new leadership and new ideas,” he said. “I think everyone should be outraged. You’re talking the difference between life and death in certain situations. If it comes down to picking up leaves one less day, the citizens of Sacramento are willing to make that sacrifice.”
The Police Department has taken other cost-saving measures, Braziel said. Cutbacks in overtime and other pay have slashed paychecks by up to 20 percent for most officers.
In 2007, the Police Department paid nearly $6.6 million in overtime, according to city salary records. The department’s overtime budget was more than $2.1 million.
The department also has cut 96 civilian positions this year and lost more than 80 officers since last summer.
Despite those cutbacks, Braziel said overall crime in the city continues to drop.
Braziel first proposed the latest round of cuts last month in a two-page memo he sent to Kerridge. The city manager, as well as Fargo and members of the City Council, asked for a more detailed outline on the cutbacks and their impact.
The revised six-page memo sent Friday was also distributed to the City Council, officials said.
Funding for the Police and Fire departments has become a divisive issue in the mayoral campaign.
Fargo has said she would prefer not to cut other city services in order to beef up the police and fire budgets, while Johnson is proposing increasing the city’s public safety budget by as much as $38 million.
Copyright 2008 Sacramento Bee