Chronicle Editorial Board – excerpt
Would you wait a year to get hired for a job? If you want to become a San Francisco sheriff’s deputy, that’s exactly what the city expects you to do
How much time would you give a company to hire you after applying for a job?
For the right opportunity, most people try to be as patient as possible. But could you afford to wait a year? Would you?
It’s safe to say that any company that expects its applicants to sit around idly twiddling their thumbs for that long is in for disappointing results. If you want to become a San Francisco sheriff’s deputy, twiddling your thumbs is exactly what the city expects you to do.
According to San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, getting applicants through his office’s background check process can take between four to five months. Then you have to add San Francisco’s notoriously glacial civil service hiring process on top of that, which takes an average of 255 days according to a June report from the Civil Grand Jury. Miyamoto told the editorial board that recent efforts have been made to allow both processes to occur simultaneously, but there’s still an overwhelming wait.
In 2023, 1,214 people who applied to be sheriff’s deputies met the minimum qualifications for the job and were invited to take the written test. There’s a big drop-off. Only 485 showed up to take it, and 350 passed. From there, candidates have to pass a physical ability test, get interviewed and answer test questions via video, spread out over three weeks. Starting next year, the department plans to roll those into one day to speed up the process, but it doesn’t end there. Background checks and psychological evaluations are conducted, along with training regiments, before a deputy can be put on duty…
Contrary to the online rhetoric, the police department hasn’t been defunded. We’re spending more than ever on police; it’s going to overtime. The department’s open positions are budgeted, we just can’t fill them…
Indeed, the new jail annex is being explicitly reserved for inmates with behavioral health issues. Had city public health staffing levels been sufficient, perhaps many of these folks would have gotten treatment before their alleged crimes, and we wouldn’t need to open an annex…
As we suspected, it is not hte Mayor or the Supervivosr’s fault, or a matter of money, but, the out of step HR hiring practices that are to blame for hte shortage of police and sheriff’s and pretty much everyone else who is not elected or appointed to a poistion at SF City Hall. How will the candidates running for office deal with this problem? How do other citeis handle their hiring programs?