File photo: Pasadena Police in-car camera footage provided by the City of Pasadena
Report shows $4,600,000 in police overtime spending and clear racial inequities in arrests.
By News Desk
Researchers from UCLA School of Law’s Criminal Justice Program (CJP) performed a forensic analysis of the publicly available Pasadena Police Department (PPD) spending records for 2015 to 2019 and found that the Department could have saved the police budget as much as $4.6M in overtime spending in 2019.
In the five-year time period, PPD increased overtime payments to its officers by 43%. As the report indicates, the $4.6 million saved could have enabled the City of Pasadena to increase housing services or funding to the Human Services and Recreation budget, both of which receive less funding than PPD.
The CJP report also analyzed the practice of “Other Pay” payouts by PPD. “Other Pay” is a catch-all term encompassing income to PPD employees for educational incentives, pay for special assignments, and other salary increases that are usually negotiated for and memorialized by collective bargaining agreements between police unions and city or county officials.
CJP found that in 2018, the union for PPD officers negotiated a change in how special assignment pay bonuses were to be calculated, which could lead to significant increases in how much special assignment pay PPD officers receive in the future. From 2015 to 2019, PPD increased its “Other Pay” distributions by 300%, further contributing to significant spending for PPD.
Arrest records
The CJP report also studied publicly available arrest records for PPD and found that it reveals clear racial and economic disparities.
While Black people comprised 9 percent of Pasadena’s population in 2019, just one of the years studied, they accounted for 28 percent of those arrested. Unhoused people made up over one-third of all arrests.
Leah Gasser-Ordaz, CJP’s Youth Justice Fellow who worked on the report, said:
We felt it was important to analyze both arrest and budget data in this report because it helps the public visualize how the police are spending their budgeted dollars.
The more a community knows about the efficacy of public safety programs, the more empowered they are to demand change if they feel it is warranted.
This report draws on information obtained in part from Transparent California, an online database providing public employees and retirees salary information, and from public records act requests fulfilled by PPD.
> For further information, access the UCLA Criminal Justice Program.
Source: CJP
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