The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to create Sheriff’s Office hiring incentive programs, redirect funds and personnel to alleviate jail staffing challenges, and develop additional hiring data in order to address overtime spending and staffing shortages at the sheriff’s department.
Although incentives like bonuses were not supported by Sheriff Bill Brown, the supervisors agreed that it was time to think outside of the box in order to fill positions.
The sheriff’s department currently has a 10 percent vacancy rate and is projected to have overtime costs in both law enforcement and jail custody branches reaching more than $17 million by the end of 2022—a historic rate for the Sheriff’s Office—according to county documents.
“With fewer staff overall, existing staff are required to work overtime to maintain fixed post levels required. This is not a new issue, although reasons for the vacancies have varied year to year,” a staff report said.
The department has been struggling to recruit and retain staff mainly because of internal challenges, competition with other counties, and public sentiment regarding law enforcement, the staff report said.
Brown said the report emphasizes the significant challenges the department, like other law enforcement agencies, is having with attracting and hiring candidates.
“We have seen a national narrative, a false narrative, that’s emerged in the wake of the George Floyd tragedy driven by people in the media and people who are agenda-driven to create this false notion that American policing is somehow overtly brutal, inherently racist, and hopelessly broken,” Brown said.
Second District Supervisor Gregg Hart said that this kind of rhetoric is not going to solve the issue of staffing shortages, but it will take creative solutions and the office to try something different in order to hire people.
“I’m not getting a sense of urgency,” Hart said. “We are hearing that rural crime is up and we want to be able to respond to that, and yet we have the highest number of vacancies recorded, the highest number of overtime recorded.”
He said it seemed like the Sheriff’s Office and the county have been repeating themselves in order to improve recruitment, and he emphasized the importance of trying something new like incentives.
“I was surprised you had concerns with the incentive structure, but not using that tool means that’s a tool that’s not available. It’s different from what we’ve been doing,” Hart said.
Justin Shroeder, representative for the sheriff’s union, said that incentives were a great idea, but offered words of caution.
“It’s a tough one because of course we want to incentivize that, but we have to incentivize our folks to stay as well. So if we are going to do new-hiring incentives we should do retention incentives as well,” Shroeder said during public comment.
The supervisors seemed interested in exploring this option as well but still wanted to encourage the Sheriff’s Office to try the incentive program, and if it doesn’t work, they can come back to the board for further discussion.
This article appears in Oct 20-27, 2022.