San Jose police overtime hit $72M in 2025, audit shows

Despite years of effort to rein in spending on police overtime and reduce 9-1-1 call response times, San Jose continues to struggle on both fronts, according to a new report from the City Auditor’s Office.

The report, set to go before the City Council Tuesday, shows San Jose spent $72 million on police overtime between June 2024 and June 2025, marking a 53% increase from five years earlier. Meanwhile, the average response time for priority 1 calls — which involve immediate danger of loss of life or major property damage — has also gotten worse since 2020, and remains above the city’s target of six minutes.

While the report suggests these challenges are largely a symptom of the city’s longstanding struggle to recruit and retain enough police officers to fully staff its ranks, it also lays out several recommendations to do more with the San Jose Police Department’s existing force. Those include doubling down on reporting requirements to better track a variety of police initiatives, such as the department’s ongoing effort to boost recruitment. They also include stricter measures to ensure compliance with the city’s overtime request rules.

Among the report’s key findings, it noted a quarter of all hours worked by sworn staff was overtime.

“One-hundred twenty-four sworn staff worked over 1,000 hours of overtime in fiscal year 2024-25, which raises concerns about sustainability and officer wellness,” City Auditor Joe Rois said at a recent committee meeting reviewing the report.

A representative for the San Jose Police Officers’ Association was not available for comment.

All that overtime has contributed to SJPD’s ballooning annual budget, which reached $561 million in 2025. As of that year, 13% of the budget went to overtime expenses, up from 10% in 2020 when the overall police budget was $459 million.

These officer overtime hours were typically spent on administrative duties like filling out reports, Rois said. Often, officers carried out those hours without filling out proper documentation or gaining supervisor approval.

Raj Jayadev, founder of police watchdog group Silicon Valley De-Bug, called the ballooning overtime spending “egregious.”

“It’s alarming to hear of the tremendous amount of public dollars going to overtime, particularly in a period where city services are all getting slashed and cut,” Jayadev told San José Spotlight, referring to the city’s efforts to address a projected $56 million budget shortfall. “We give police a blank check to do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want to do it and we’ll let the rest of public services suffer in the wake of that.”

The auditor’s report also found the average response time to priority 1 calls remains at slightly more than eight minutes. SJPD only met the six-minute target 45% of the time. That’s worse than the findings of a prior audit examining response times in 2019 and 2020, which found a seven-minute response time.

The report’s recommendations seem to have won broad support from from the city’s elected leaders, as well as the San Jose Police Department’s top brass.

“The department agrees or partially agrees with all recommendations, and has either implemented or is in the process of implementing measures to address them, while maintaining necessary operational flexibility,” Police Chief Paul Joseph wrote in a memo responding to the auditor’s report.

This is not the first time San Jose has attempted to tackle the twin challenges of lengthy response times and excessive overtime spending.

The prior audit, carried out in 2021, came with 10 recommendations including adding more sworn officers, tracking calls that could be diverted to non-sworn staff and improving management of officer overtime. Of those, the city has met all but one, the most recent report found. That final recommendation calls for the city to identify cost savings by analyzing officer shift schedules as part of a larger effort to redraw the city’s police patrol districts by the end of this year.

But despite those advances, the city has lost ground on officer staffing.

As of the start of 2025, the city had 998 active sworn officers, excluding new recruits. That’s the lowest figure since 2018 and also far lower than the nearly 1,400 officers on the active duty roster in 2008, the highest staffing total for the department in the past 20 years.

While the number of budgeted officer positions has increased in recent years, rising to 1,172 as of 2025, increasing turnover has meant that a large portion of those positions have gone unfilled, the report found.

This shortfall has left San Jose with a lower officer per capita ratio than other large California cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.

But a memo written in response to the report’s findings — authored by Mayor Matt Mahan as well as Councilmembers Pamela Campos, David Cohen and Domingo Candelas — argued the auditor’s recommendations could help on many fronts, even as the city’s recruitment efforts continue to flounder.

“While intractable staffing issues are largely responsible for overtime, our budget environment and fiduciary responsibilities to our residents require a commitment to taking every action possible to limit overtime spending on police work, such as report writing and follow-up,” the memo said.

The San Jose City Council meets Tuesday at 1:30 p.m.

This story will be updated.

Contact Keith Menconi at [email protected] or @KeithMenconi on X.