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, which went 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.
The findings have sparked criticism over the city’s slow progress improving police operations, and raised concerns that rising police spending will squeeze out other parts of the budget. However, the San Jose Police Department’s defenders argue that backsliding is merely a symptom of challenges that largely fall outside the department’s power to control, such as the officer shortfall that has plagued the city for more than a decade.
“We have been on an endless quest to try to be more efficient, more effective,” Police Chief Paul Joseph said during the meeting. “It’s not like we’re not trying.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Tuesday’s meeting also gave some residents an opportunity to vent their frustrations about SJPD’s responsiveness.
“I see you talking about six- or eight-minute response times. More like 80-minute response times, if they respond at all,” one resident, who did not give his name, said during public comment. “When they show up it’s with anger — or nonchalance, which is even worse.”
Meanwhile, officials with the San Jose Police Officers’ Association have criticized the report, arguing it omits key context. They say San Jose police have come under increasing pressure from multiple fronts, including a mental health and drug crisis that has made police work more complex. In addition, they also point to the pension reform fight from a decade ago as one reason fewer officers are willing to join the city’s police ranks.
Association President Steve Slack also pushed back on concerns about the increasing overtime spending, arguing the money is going to address real public safety problems.
“Anyone saying too much is being spent needs to tell the public what police services they want cut — rape, robbery or assault investigations, tracking sex registrants, prevention programs?” Slack told San José Spotlight. “Being short staffed means overtime is a necessity to try and keep San Jose residents safe.”
During Tuesday’s meeting, Joseph pointed to other factors pushing up police overtime, such as increased reporting requirements for officers, as well as a shift toward police tactics that emphasize deescalation.
“I think that’s a win for everybody, but it is, in fact, time consuming,” Joseph said.
The report lays out several recommendations for improvements, most of which have won broad support from San Jose’s elected leaders and the police department’s top brass. Those include doubling down on reporting requirements to better track a variety of police initiatives, such as the department’s efforts to boost officer recruitment and retention. They also include stricter measures to ensure compliance with the city’s overtime request rules.
But the city auditor acknowledged these changes will only get San Jose so far, if it cannot grow its officer ranks.
“Until we really address some of the retention issues and the hiring issues, we’re going to continue to have overtime,” Rois said at the meeting.
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.
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.
District 5 Councilmember Peter Ortiz expressed concern over the city’s police overtime spending, but he said given widespread demands from residents for improved public safety, the extra hours spent on policing should be considered “essential work.”
“Our officers aren’t being predatory with these hours. They’re not wasting the public’s purse,” Ortiz said at the meeting. “These are services and resources that our constituents require in order to live in a safe neighborhood, and honestly we need more.”
Contact Keith Menconi at keith@sanjosespotlight.com or @KeithMenconi on X.
This story originally appeared in San José Spotlight.