The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spent $458 million on overtime during the last fiscal year, a ballooning figure that department officials say is driven by rising vacancy rates, increasing labor costs and expanding responsibilities.
County data show that the number of new deputies hired each year plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic and has not fully recovered. At the same time, the number of deputies leaving the department rose, only returning to pre-pandemic levels last year.
With more people leaving the department than joining it, by March 1,461 of the agency’s roughly 10,000 deputy jobs sat empty, and an additional 900-plus were held by people out on leave. Those who remain are left to pick up the slack, sheriff’s officials say, some working dozens of hours of forced overtime each month. Last year, department data show, deputies worked more than 4.3 million hours of overtime.
“I cannot tell you how proud I am of our employees stepping up to the plate,” Sheriff Robert Luna told The Times in a recent interview. “This is not on them. They are literally doing the work of thousands of more employees who are not available.”
Richard Pippin, president of the Assn. of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, the union that represents rank-and-file deputies, worried about the effect on public safety.
“In 35 years, I’ve never seen things this bad. Deputy morale is at rock bottom due to all the forced overtime,” he told The Times. “Operations, training, and recruitment are all suffering due to this crisis. Anyone who has ever had to call 911 knows what short staffing can mean during an emergency.”
With a budget proposal for the next fiscal year that includes no cost-of-living raises for county employees, Pippin said he feared the situation could grow worse.
Yet some oversight officials and attorneys question whether the department really needs to hire more deputies or require so much grueling overtime. There are far fewer inmates to care for in the jails than there once were, and inspectors have repeatedly found jailers sleeping on the job or watching movies and inappropriate videos, as The Times has previously reported.
Melissa Camacho, an American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California senior staff attorney, represents inmates in two long-standing class-action lawsuits over conditions and abuse in the department’s jails. She suggested the agency needs an outsider view of its staffing levels, especially in county lockups.
“There’s a reluctance to close certain positions, even when they may not be required,” she said. “They’ve been in desperate need of an external audit of their staffing for a long time.”
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Though some internet critics have faulted Luna for the staffing crisis, a closer look at the numbers shows the problem has been years in the making.
In 2019, according to department data, sheriff’s officials hired 814 new deputies. The following year, that figure plunged as the country reeled from the pandemic, the police killing of George Floyd and the racial reckoning that followed. Across the country, law enforcement agencies struggled to bring in new officers. According to the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, recruiting dipped nearly 20% nationally by the end of 2020.
In Los Angeles, hiring bottomed out in 2021, when county data show only 81 new deputies joined the department.
At the same time, the number of people leaving law enforcement rose. Nationally, one of the big drivers of that change was resignations, which the Police Executive Research Forum found rose more than 60% from 2019 to 2022.
In L.A., the exodus peaked in 2022, when county data show more than 600 deputies left the department. Most of those departures were a steady stream of retirements, exacerbated by a spike in resignations that year.
As a result, the Sheriff’s Department shrank. In January 2021, there were 9,937 sworn deputies. But by the start of this year, there were 8,785 — a nearly 12% drop. That’s a sharp contrast to small and medium-size departments, which the research forum found now employ more officers overall than they did at the start of 2020.
According to Luna, large departments have struggled more to staff up because they often aren’t able to offer the hefty hiring bonuses and other incentives that smaller departments with more meager staffing needs can use to attract and retain officers.
In the case of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, even at its 2021 peak, the agency was several hundred deputies short of being fully staffed — and that figure has since gone up. By last month, after accounting for the more than 900 people on various types of leave, 23% of the force was in effect unavailable.
With fewer people able to work, the department’s overtime costs skyrocketed.
In the 2020-21 budget year, the department spent $180 million on overtime, according to county records. That figure rose to $297 million the following budget year, and $397 million the year after that before reaching $458 million last budget year.
But the increase in overtime costs far outpaced the rise in vacancies, a discrepancy the department attributed in part to the fact that in 2021 the county eliminated 586 deputy positions. Even though those jobs were gone, in many cases the work still had to be done — usually by deputies working overtime. As Luna explained, “The responsibilities of everything that we’re doing did not shrink.”
Instead, the department said, new policies and laws have expanded the scope of its responsibilities. Body-worn cameras, which the agency began using in 2020, created additional work for deputies, who suddenly needed to spend time reviewing video footage before they could write incident reports. A state law to combat racial profiling required better data tracking, which meant deputies had more paperwork to do every time they pulled over someone, officials said.
In the jails, consent decrees from several long-standing lawsuits aimed to improve oversight, but they have also kept deputies busier by requiring the department to offer inmates more out-of-cell time, document uses of force better and monitor conditions more closely.
And on the streets, the return to pre-pandemic norms meant deputies had more work to do — directing traffic at sports games, patrolling again-crowded public spaces and working security at newly built event venues, among other tasks.
“A lot of people think the deputies love the overtime, but for seven or eight out of every 10 deputies I talk to, their No. 1 issue is that the mandatory overtime is killing them,” Luna said. “People are working 6, 8, 10 or 12 mandates per month, and that’s not sustainable.”
One deputy, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly and feared retaliation, said the constant possibility of forced overtime made it hard to schedule even basic tasks and errands.
“You can’t plan any sort of normal life,” the deputy said. “Your shift could be 5 [a.m.] to 1 [p.m.], so you make plans to pick your kids up or a doctor’s appointment, and then at 10 [a.m.] you get told you can’t leave.”
In some cases, the department’s staffing problems have sparked lawsuits. Last year, the city of Lancaster sued the county, saying the Sheriff’s Department was making an “illegal profit” by assigning fewer deputies to Lancaster than the city had paid for — and then making up the difference by forcing those deputies to work overtime.
The case is still pending, as is a lawsuit filed by the family of slain Deputy Ryan Clinkunbroomer, accusing the department of forcing their son to work so much overtime that he was too fatigued to stay alert and avoid threats — including one from the gunman who killed him near the Palmdale sheriff’s station.
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Yet, in recent months, there have been signs of a shift. Resignations have steadily decreased since Luna took office, and officials said hiring has begun to rebound since the department brought on a marketing firm to draw in more applicants.
In its request for the upcoming budget year, which begins in July, sheriff’s officials asked for money to fund four more classes at the sheriff’s training academy.
By the end of 2025, the department anticipates hiring at least 410 new deputies, which would be the most hires in a single year since before the pandemic.
In the meantime, the sheriff and his team are evaluating how to scale back the workload for those who remain, possibly by dialing back the scope of the agency’s services and figuring out which tasks don’t need to be handled by sworn deputies.
“We have to put deputies in patrol, in custody, in investigations,” Luna said, “but what else do we do that we can shelve temporarily until we get healthy? We’re going to have to make some tough decisions.”
To Inspector General Max Huntsman, the county watchdog, that sort of recalibration seems long overdue.
“Really, if you want to ethically and lawfully run a governmental entity, you cannot produce more product than the staff you have,” he said.
Previously, Huntsman recommended the department shutter its Risk Management Bureau, which he said has been silencing whistleblowers and downplaying misconduct. In an interview with The Times this week, he suggested the department could also downsize its information bureau — which he said “puts out basically PR stories” — and assign more people to handle public records requests.
And he suggested the department could reduce its jail staffing needs by releasing some people if jailers are not able to provide a constitutionally adequate level of care.
“I have said over and over that the staffing levels are insufficient in the jails,” he told The Times. “We have repeatedly identified negative outcomes that are the result of insufficient staff, and I think what we need to do is accept the fact that we’re not succeeding in our mission and stop trying to pretend we are.”
