Tell your Supervisor: Support the Charter Amendment measure to repeal the SFPD arbitrary minimum!
San Francisco Board of Supervisors
Find your SF Supervisorial district here and your Supervisor’s contact info here.
The Board of Supervisors is considering proposing a Charter amendment to repeal the Charter’s arbitrary requirement of 1,971 full-duty SFPD officers. This proposed ballot measure has passed out of committee, and is now being considered by the full Board. If the full Board ultimately passes it, it’ll be on our ballot this October–November.
Call or write to your Supervisor and ask them to support the measure so police staffing can be changed to reflect the City’s needs!
Talking points
Here are some talking points from which to build your comment.
An arbitrary number provides no flexibility to adapt to changing needs of the City.
The arbitrary minimum number came from a consent decree that was entered in 1979 and lifted in 1998. It has no relevance to the City today.
No reform or abolition is possible as long as the City is mandated by the Charter to employ this many sworn officers, with all the compensation that the POA contract requires.
We could civilianize traffic enforcement, like Berkeley is considering.
We could civilianize outreach to unhoused San Franciscans who rightly do not trust the cops who have brutalized them for years.
We could expand the unarmed Street Violence Intervention Program.
We could cut the SFPD budget in half and undo the last twenty years of police budget bloat, and free up over $350 million for the School District, for HSH, for numerous other departments that have received cuts in the current interim budget.
The City is obligated by the Charter to civilianize as many positions as it can, but is also obligated by the Charter to maintain nearly 2,000 full-duty sworn officers, which has led in practice to a phenomenon of “reverse-civilianization” documented in the Board’s March 1998 “Phase II” report. That report described sworn officers performing clerical work that could be moved to civilian staff if it wasn’t for mandatory sworn officers filling those seats.
At last week’s Rules Committee meeting, you all heard about numerous incidents of way too many cops arriving on scenes involving only one or two people.
We simply have too many cops. Even if you think we need some cops, we have more than we need. It’s time to reduce the size of SFPD.
Please continue to support this measure and get it on this year’s ballot.
Background
We have a deep dive with all the details, but the short version is this:
The City Charter requires the SFPD to employ no fewer than 1,971 full-duty sworn officers. There is no way around it; this is an absolute requirement.
The origin of the requirement—and the number—was a consent decree that the City entered in 1979 to settle a discrimination suit. We think, based on some language in that decree, that the number was the number of officers allocated in the SFPD budget around that time.
The number got enshrined in the Charter in 1994, when voters passed Proposition D. Thus, even though the consent decree ended in 1998, this hard requirement still cements a huge chunk of the City’s budget in employing sworn SFPD officers.
No matter your position on what to do about policing, we can all agree that this Charter provision needs to go. The City has had more cops than it actually needs for more than two decades, and the City needs the flexibility to explore non-violent alternatives to policing.
We already have a Street Violence Intervention Program; what if we grew its funding by cutting SFPD’s? Berkeley is looking at civilianizing traffic enforcement; what if we did that here? Numerous City departments have taken cuts while SFPD’s budget just keeps growing; what if we reversed that?
We can’t do any of that until this hard minimum of an arbitrary number is removed from our Charter.
The Charter can only be amended by the voters, so the exact same process that put the requirement into the Charter is now underway to take it out. The Supervisors are developing a measure that they’re working to get onto the ballot this October–November. It was last considered at the July 9 Rules Committee, as we live-tweeted; they’re considering it again on July 13.
The measure would replace the hard minimum of an arbitrary number with a process for the Chief of Police and the Police Commission to advise the Board of Supervisors on what staffing levels should be. The Board is then free to implement that advice or do something different. And even Chief Scott has said police should not bear the burden of so many of the City’s problems.
Let’s start building the future of our City—a future in which we build real public safety by investing in our community.
The first step is getting this measure on the ballot and passing it. Let’s make it happen!