Council Committee Continues Examination of Police Budget

The City Council’s Finance Committee will continue its discussion on the Police Department’s budget at 2 p.m. Thursday.

The Police Department has a more than $85 million budget, 234 sworn officers, and 120 civilian employees, including part-time workers. There are also 140 active volunteers.

According to a report to the council’s Finance Committee, $78.4 million of the department’s budget is dedicated to personnel costs.

The overall budget is based on a two-year effort to reorganize resources and restructure responsibilities around ways public safety services are delivered.

Beginning in 2018, staff determined there was an urgency to prepare for the future of policing, according to the city staff report.

“Through internal retreats and external engagements, challenges for 2020 were identified and became the basis for the reorganization,” the report states. “The timeliness of the 2020 reorganization prepared staff for the world pandemic and today’s global social movement for change.”

Through the restructuring process, focus has been trained on providing better equipment, remodeling the police building, replacing vehicles, and reducing litigation through improved delivery of training methods to include officer safety, wellness, community engagement, and communication. 

The department also wants to create a use-of-force sergeant in order to help reduce such incidents with specific types of applications, increase use of de-escalation techniques, employ better oversight, and create a civilian executive staff position. The department has already established a “Policing-101” forum, a chief’s advisory board, and social media platforms.

The Finance Committee has been revisiting the Police Department’s budget since July, after the council began looking at spending by category instead of by department, starting with the Police Department.

Members of the committee told Pasadena Now that the inquiries are not part of an effort to defund the police.

“We are talking about how we spend our money in general and there have been a lot of demands to reduce the Police Department’s budget,” Mayor Terry Tornek said in July.

Critics have called on the city to reduce the size of the Police Department by 20 percent and cut the department’s budget by 20 percent.

“There’s no discussion in the city of Pasadena, no serious discussion about defunding the Police Department,” Councilman John Kennedy, chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee, has said. “Maybe reallocation of resources, but defunding is fundamentally a nonstarter in Pasadena.”

Going forward, the Police Department is expected to struggle with recruitment and retention challenges due to increased vacancies.

The department will seek to improve outreach for recruitment to find applicants interested in policing and enhancing engagement with the community.

The department also wants to reinvest in technology, primarily a new database that will allow for an information collection system to comply with the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA). Under RIPA, police officers will be required to record the date, time, location, and duration of traffic stops. Police will also be collecting information on the gender, race, and ethnicity of a person stopped and providing the reason for the stop, among other information.