The San Diego Police Department is tightening its belt. It's being forced to make tough choices to help overcome the city of San Diego’s $258 million budget deficit.
Families and community leaders who live in the city’s Northwestern neighborhoods immediately expressed shock when they read Mayor Todd Gloria’s draft budget proposal. A key part of that proposal includes shutting down SDPD’s Northwestern Division. Patrol officers would be based at other stations while supervisors would be reassigned to other areas of the city.
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WATCH HEREMany had serious public safety concerns for neighborhoods in Carmel Valley, Del Mar Heights, Sorrento Valley, Torrey Preserve, Torrey Highlands, North City and Black Mountain Ranch.
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SIGN UP The SDPD proposal would mostly empty its police station in Carmel Valley, transferring those officers to the Northeastern Division, which is based in Rancho Peñasquitos. That includes the following sworn officers:
- 22 patrol officers
- 11 supervisors
- 2 detectives
SDPD told us there wouldn’t be any change to the number of patrol officers that serve those Northwestern Division neighborhoods. Officers will simply report to a different police station. However, supervisors and detectives would fill vacant positions across the city, effectively reducing the total number of officer positions accounted for in the department’s budget.
Michelle Straus chairs the Carmel Valley Community Planning Group. She told us she started getting frantic calls, texts and emails from neighbors as soon as the draft budget went public.
Investigations
“To be honest, I didn’t really believe it could be true,” Strauss said. “How would you feel if you had to call 911 because someone was breaking into your home, and they didn’t respond quickly? That’s a frightening scenario.”
NBC 7 Investigates got data through a public records request that showed that the Northwestern Division was the second slowest to respond to “Priority Zero" police callouts for a nine-month stretch of time last year.
"Priority 0” is defined as an imminent threat to life, which could include an officer or person down, attempted suicide or a vehicle accident that dispatch doesn’t have any details about. The goal time for police response for a “Priority 0” callout is seven minutes.
The slowest division during that nine-month stretch in 2024 was Northeastern, which encompasses the largest geographic area and would be largely responsible for absorbing those transferred patrol officers.
San Diego Police Officers Association President Jared Wilson is fighting against the budget proposal.
“The primary job of local government is when you [call] 911, someone picks up and then they send someone to get to you. The police car, a fire truck and ambulance,” Wilson said. “And we are failing at that right now in the city of San Diego.”
Del Mar Union School Board Member Alan Kholos said he would hate to see officers in his community be stationed much further away.
“If I just think about our nine schools, they’re all about a mile or two from that police station,” Kholos said. “We had an incident last year where someone was stalking our younger female students. And because of the good work working with that team … they were able to crack the case.”
The city’s own draft budget proposal echoed these concerns, stating:
“The consolidation of the Northwestern Division may impact patrol response times and could weaken collaboration between police and residents in surrounding communities. Eliminating detective positions may hamper our ability to solve crimes in a timely manner and will lead to additional workloads for remaining staff.“
“I don’t see how closing down a police station will not impact public safety in this community,” Strauss said.
San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl defended the proposed cuts and said patrol officers weren’t going away, but simply would be based in different places and managed by different supervisors.
“I’m going to slide them over to the neighboring command who can absorb that workload, and we’re going to cut overhead positions to save $4 million,” Wahl said.
“In theory, that could work, but the reality is we’ve developed relationships with the patrol officers and the supervisory staff, and the further they get away from us geographically, we just lose touch,” Kholos said.
Chief Wahl also acknowledged the force had work to do to improve response times.
“That’s something that we need to watch citywide,” Wahl told us. “Our response times are above where they should be city-wide. That’s because of our staffing levels.”
The solution, he told NBC 7, is overtime.
“That overtime money is what allows us to maintain service levels and response times,” Wahl said.
While the SDPD’s total budget would technically get a boost of $29 million compared to the previous year, the overtime budget would be slashed by $3 million. The city’s top financial officer attributed most of the budget increase to previously negotiated pension payouts and salary raises.
“How they determined to make these cuts baffles me,” Wilson said. “Some tough decisions have to be made, we understand that. But this is the wrong decision.”
SDPD also says the police station in Carmel Valley will likely remain open. People would still be able to visit to report crime. The station will probably also continue to be home to the department’s Telephone Reporting Unit of roughly 21 officers and a little more than a dozen Retired Senior Volunteer Patrol people.
NBC 7 first got a tip about the proposed Northwestern Division closure two days before the mayor released his draft budget. We sent the city a public records request for copies of any memos between city officials and the police department about plans for this station.
But the city of San Diego denied our request, saying that disclosing that information to the public, “...Would chill the city's ability to have open and frank discussions about pre-decisional, deliberative matters.”
