As the calendar turns to riot season in Los Angeles, the city of angels is looking at some hefty overtime bills for the hell (or “exuberance of the moment”) it’s going through. As of Monday, the anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests and accompanying riots as of Monday have cost taxpayers nearly $20 million, L.A. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo told KABC.
As CBS News reported last month, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which has assisted peacekeeping efforts in the city, is projecting more than a half-billion dollars in OT this fiscal year. That’s expected to hit a record and top last year’s overtime payouts of $458 million — thanks in large part to natural and manmade disasters and an exodus of deputies amid a morale crisis, sources told the Los Angeles Times.
Richard Pippin, president of the Assn. of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, told the newspaper that he’s never “seen things this bad” in 35 years.
“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.”
‘Not Sustainable’
Things have only gotten worse in recent days as law enforcement officials log long hours dealing with leftists gone wild, angry with the Trump administration for actually enforcing immigration law. Szabo told KABC that the LAPD has incurred $17 million in unplanned costs, $11 million of that in overtime. He estimates nearly $600,000 in damages to L.A. buildings, and to date a bill of $523,000 to clean up the mess left by protesters in the streets.
“Well, it is certainly not sustainable,” Szabo told the news outlet.
“It’s critical, as the mayor has said and members of the council have said, the city will maintain public safety. But this level of extraordinary deployment is very expensive, and it’s costing the taxpayers.”
It’s salt in the wounds of taxpayers in the nation’s second-largest city, still reeling from this past winter’s devastating wildfires that the UCLA Anderson Forecast projects could ultimately total as much as $164 billion in total property and capital losses.
“Already ravaged by wildfires earlier this year, the city is now dealing with violence toward law enforcement, incendiary devices, arson and more. And all of that is on the heels of years of seemingly endless, rolling Covid lockdowns under Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass,” a new report from government tracker OpenTheBooks states.
Said rolling lockdowns a few years back are still being felt in “shrinking revenue and thus staffing levels across the city,” leaving Los Angeles “in a unique financial and logistical position as it faces a summer of more disorder,” the report, “The Cost of Restoring Order In Los Angeles,” asserts.
More Than the President
The leftist-led city paid out a whopping $1.1 billion in extra government staff hours in 2024, the report found. That would cover L.A.’s $1 billion budget deficit.
OTB’s other findings show:
› The Los Angeles Police Department spent $265.5 million on overtime last year, a record.
› Five city employees made more than the $400,000 annual salary of the president of the United States — in overtime alone.
› Prior to 2024, no police officer had made more than $235,000 per year in overtime, but last year seven individuals surpassed the mark.
› 4,114 city employees outearned California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s salary of $242,295.
Not that L.A. city leaders are earning a pauper’s wage. While rank-and-file employees are raking in the highest earnings, Mayor Karen Bass made $328,394 last year, according to the report. Police Chief Jim McDonnell earns $450,000 a year, “$100,000 more than his predecessor and almost double the police chiefs in New York and Chicago,” OTB reports.
The top 10 paid employees are from the fire department or the Department of Water and Power, with a ompensation range of $610,295-$905,060, the report notes.
As OpenTheBooks reported earlier this year, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power came under fire in March when firefighters faced the devouring wildfires in Palisades and Altadena with empty hydrants.
‘Costs Are Set to Soar’
And like the sheriff’s department, the LAPD is seeing its law enforcement ranks shrink. According to OTB, the city budget request predicted L.A. will lose 150 officers next year, leaving 8,620 cops — the smallest force in 30 years. Los Angeles personnel department chief Dana Brown has blamed “onerous” and “archaic” civil service rules for the shortages.
As the report notes, the most recent data from the city controller shows a 17.5 percent job vacancy rate. Pre-pandemic, the vacancy rate was 11 percent. More than 2,000 workers in 2020 opted for early retirement under a payroll-thinning program.
It’s a perfect storm of financial disaster, and taxpayers are on the hook. OpenTheBooks CEO John Hall said as Los Angeles faces crisis moment after crisis moment, the city’s prior responses “threaten to disadvantage their current work.”
“Post-lockdown staffing shortages combined with arcane onboarding rules and big-time salaries have all conspired to create record-breaking overtime costs,” Hall told The Federalist. “As Los Angeles police, fire and other essential personnel go all hands on deck in response to rioting, costs are set to soar; that’s before we consider the estimated $134 million the federal government estimates we’ll spend deploying National Guard and other assets.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
