Santa Rosa police chief raises alarm over short staffing, low morale in officer corps

Santa Rosa’s police department is understaffed, suffering from low morale and struggling to deal with critical public perception of law enforcement, the city’s top officer, Chief Ray Navarro, told council members and administrators this week in a wide-ranging discussion about public safety priorities in the coming year.

Navarro said mandatory overtime needed to fill key shifts and sustain service levels has strained his ranks over the past several years, during which officers have had to respond to numerous emergencies, including the October 2017 firestorm.

Department members also are recoiling, he said, from a nationwide outcry over cases of police brutality and racial injustice. Large protests this summer in Santa Rosa saw dozens of demonstrators arrested — mostly local residents on misdemeanors offenses — and resulted in injuries to at least seven people who have filed legal claims against the city.

“I’ll be completely honest with you — our morale is very low,” Navarro said Monday at a City Council subcommittee dedicated to public safety issues. He sounded an appeal for stronger public embrace of his department and the city’s sworn officers.

“They feel that there’s a lack of support for the work that they do,” Navarro said.

Santa Rosa is home to about 175,000 residents, up 20,000 since the mid-2000s, with a dip of several thousand people after the October 2017 firestorm. Staffing levels at the Police Department have not kept pace with the city’s growth, according to internal studies, which found that the city will need at least 11 more officers by 2022 and six more emergency dispatch personnel than are currently in service.

The city has a quarter-cent sales tax that generates about $10.4 million annually for public safety budgets, including police and firefighting services. The Police Department’s annual budget is about $66.4 million.

Still, City Hall has struggled in recent years to balance the overall budget, amid rising staff costs, a series of multimillion dollar disaster responses and more recently, depressed sales tax revenue due to economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The city has cut four sworn officers and eight civilian roles from the Police Department since 2018. Attrition is also a problem, with at least eight more officers expected to retire next year, Navarro said. Santa Rosa is competing with numerous other California cities to attract new police recruits and lure veteran officers from other agencies, he said.

As a result, the Police Department has the same number of officer positions as it did a decade ago, according to city staffing data.

“The perception of law enforcement right now — it’s very difficult to hire or have people come in as a new officer,” Navarro said.

Vice Mayor Victoria Fleming questioned the severity of the staffing struggles. She noted that Santa Rosa hasn’t launched a police academy class since February — before the onset of the pandemic — and indicated the city should wait until next July’s academy class to gauge whether there’s been a substantial change in interest in the Santa Rosa Police Department among aspiring officers.

"I think at this point in time, it’s just very difficult to know for new applicants,“ Fleming said.

She also asked Navarro for data to back up his assertion of low morale. The chief said that while he had not a conducted a formal survey, his analysis was based on interviews he’d had directly with officers as well as feedback from union officials.

Navarro’s presentation Monday included a slide that broke down factors affecting police into four categories: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

One of the points in the threats category was “public perception of policing,” raising the ire of several community members Monday who criticized the framing as a “threat.”

“Public perception of police is not the problem. It’s an effect of the problem,” said community member Michael Titone. “The problem is the things that police have been doing that have been given themselves a bad reputation. The public is just responding to those things.”

Navarro said Tuesday the “threat” categorization was part of a standard analysis and that the so-called threats on his list are “potential issues to watch out for and proactively address and not necessarily physical threats.”

“The negative perception of law enforcement, local or nationwide, impacts community trust in police departments,” Navarro said Tuesday in an email. “It has the potential to negatively impact recruiting efforts and budgets, which we have seen throughout the country. It could make it more difficult to recruit a diverse workforce and can overshadow the great work done on a daily basis by police. All of this impacts morale.”

The department’s response to street protests in late May and early June in the aftermath George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has led to at least seven claims filed against the city for injuries. Four were from projectile devices police fired at protesters, two from tear gas and one from the use of a baton.

The city has settled one of those claims, paying $200,000 in late October to a Healdsburg man who was shot in the groin with a solid projectile and had to have emergency surgery to remove a ruptured testicle.

Santa Rosa also has hired outside consultants to provide a high-level overview of the city’s response to the protests as well as a more focused inquiry into use of force incidents, with both reports due in the next two or three months. The independent police auditor post that would normally be charged with such inquiries has been vacant for almost two years.

The City Council has given short shrift to calls to defund Santa Rosa’s police department but has been more open to another request of protesters and critics: to deploy mental health experts and social service providers into the field for police calls involving homeless residents, mental health crises and substance abuse.

A model of that program was pioneered by Eugene, Oregon more than 30 years ago. Santa Rosa expects to provide a description of the duties and cost involved in a similar program by February, Capt. John Cregan said on Monday.

Council members on the subcommittee, including Fleming, John Sawyer and Mayor Tom Schwedhelm, voiced support for launching the program as quickly as possible.

“It’s going to be great for the public safety part of our organization and also the community,” said Sawyer. “As soon as we can get up and running, the better off everyone will be.”

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @wsreports.