A new Times of San Diego investigation by Dorian Hargrove revealed that San Diego Police Officer Jason Costanza earned $285,741 in overtime in 2025 alone, equal to 144% more than his annual salary. From 2021 through 2025, Costanza collected more than $1.28 million in overtime pay by itself, making him the city’s top overtime earner over that period. Officer Anthony Bueno collected $209,936 in overtime in 2025 and $949,143 over five years, while Officer Stephen Rocha earned more than $209,000 in overtime last year and $882,332 over the same five-year period. In total, SDPD paid $47.7 million in overtime in 2025, only slightly below the prior year’s total.
Those numbers are not a rounding error. They are a portrait of a department that has converted chronic dysfunction into a compensation model. City officials describe the overtime as a staffing necessity, but after years of the same explanation, the distinction between “temporary staffing gap” and permanent budget strategy has collapsed. When one officer can earn more than a quarter-million dollars in overtime in a single year, the public is not looking at a staffing emergency. It is looking at a system.
The overtime revelations land at the worst possible moment for Mayor Todd Gloria, whose proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget would give the San Diego Police Department more than $700 million, a more than $15 million increase over the current year, while his administration pursues devastating cuts elsewhere. The city’s own draft police budget acknowledges added support for parking enforcement staffing because citywide parking changes are “significantly increasing” the number of locations, days and hours requiring enforcement. It also references support for an e-citation parking enforcement program, meaning the same administration that says it must cut cherished civic programs is expanding the machinery used to ticket residents more efficiently.
That is the real story beneath the overtime numbers. San Diego is not merely underfunded. It is misprioritized.
Gloria’s budget proposes to nearly eliminate an $11.8 million arts and culture grant program, leaving only $2 million in a separate account, even as roughly 200 arts and culture organizations depend on that funding to provide public programming, education and free events. In recent reporting, the proposed dismantling of December Nights was framed as part of the same governing pattern: City Hall claims it cannot find roughly $1.5 million to preserve a 47-year-old Balboa Park tradition drawing hundreds of thousands of people, while continuing to approve hundreds of millions for policing and enforcement infrastructure.
The contrast is grotesque. San Diego can find money for police overtime. It can find money for parking enforcement. It can find money for e-citations. It can find money for public liability payouts after police violence. It can find money for pensions and benefits. But when the subject is artists, museums, libraries, parks, recreation centers or the civic traditions that make San Diego feel like a city rather than a revenue machine, residents are told to accept austerity.
SDPD’s defenders will say much of the overtime is unavoidable. They will point to staffing shortages, special events, DUI grants, Padres games, traffic enforcement, collision investigations and reimbursable assignments. Some of that is true. But explanations are not absolution. A city with a structural deficit cannot casually accept a police overtime culture where dozens of officers clear six figures in extra pay and then tell everyone else to sacrifice.
What makes the overtime explosion even harder to defend is that many of SDPD’s own performance metrics appear worse today than they were more than a decade ago, despite enormous increases in police funding over that same period.
Buried within the City of San Diego’s adopted budget documents are departmental Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, that track operational benchmarks including response times, staffing outputs and service levels. A comparison between older city budget documents and more recent reports suggests that several core performance metrics have either stagnated or deteriorated even as police budgets have ballooned into the hundreds of millions annually.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore. San Diegans are repeatedly told the city must increase police funding because public safety is the highest priority, because staffing shortages are dire, and because overtime is essential to maintaining service levels. Yet residents continue experiencing slower response times, reduced proactive policing visibility and a growing sense that basic quality-of-life enforcement has become either hyper-selective or entirely absent depending on the neighborhood.
The broader pattern extends well beyond SDPD. Across City Hall, taxpayers are being asked to pay substantially more while often receiving diminished services in return. But policing stands out because of the sheer scale of the spending involved. SDPD’s budget has climbed dramatically over the past decade through salary increases, overtime, pension obligations, specialized enforcement units and technology investments, yet city leaders rarely force a public reckoning over whether residents are actually receiving proportional value in return.
Instead, San Diego appears trapped in a cycle where worsening staffing metrics justify larger police budgets, larger budgets normalize extreme overtime, and extreme overtime becomes politically untouchable because officials fear being labeled “anti-police” if they ask difficult questions about efficiency, deployment or accountability.
At some point, taxpayers are entitled to ask a blunt question: if the city is spending vastly more on policing than it did a decade ago, why do so many measurable outcomes appear worse?
It is also misleading to treat overtime as separate from the city’s broader personnel-cost crisis. SDPD’s own budget page notes that salary and benefits are shaped by labor agreements, that all city employees are enrolled in the San Diego City Employees’ Retirement System, and that pension payments fluctuate based on economic conditions and the number of members in retirement. Overtime may not be pensionable in the same way base salary is for many employees, but taxpayers still face the same two-headed beast: enormous cash payouts today and long-term retirement obligations tomorrow. San Diego is paying heavily on both ends of the employment cycle.
That pension reality matters because police spending is never just the number printed beside “Police Department” in the annual budget. It is the salaries, overtime, benefits, healthcare, pension contributions, legal defense costs, settlements, workers’ compensation, administrative leave, internal investigations and the enormous opportunity cost of choosing enforcement over prevention. Every dollar diverted into this machine is a dollar not spent on libraries, youth programs, recreation, cultural access, mental health response, street repairs, housing support or community-based violence prevention.
That pension reality matters because police spending is never just the number printed beside “Police Department” in the annual budget. It is the salaries, overtime, benefits, healthcare, pension contributions, legal defense costs, settlements, workers’ compensation, administrative leave, internal investigations and the enormous opportunity cost of choosing enforcement over prevention. Every dollar diverted into this machine is a dollar not spent on libraries, youth programs, recreation, cultural access, mental health response, street repairs, housing support or community-based violence prevention.
The results do not justify the expense. In December, the City of San Diego agreed to pay $30 million to the family of 16-year-old Konoa Wilson, who was shot and killed by an SDPD officer while running from gunfire at downtown’s Santa Fe Depot. The Associated Press reported that the settlement is among the largest police-killing settlements in U.S. history and that body camera and surveillance footage showed Wilson fleeing a gunman when he encountered Officer Daniel Gold, who shot him without warning as he ran past.
That settlement will not be paid by the officer. It will be paid by the public.
Taxpayers also recently funded a $25,000 settlement with Nicholas Hoskins, a Black driver whose passenger-side window was smashed by an SDPD officer after he repeatedly asked what probable cause justified a vehicle search. Hoskins was arrested and cited for resisting arrest, but he was never prosecuted. The city admitted no liability, as cities almost always say, but the money still left public hands.
Meanwhile, SDPD remains entangled in internal scandal. A 20-year veteran officer, Tyler Cockrell, sued the city earlier this year alleging retaliation, harassment and failure to promote him, while also claiming that the department protected his ex-wife because of alleged ties to Chief Scott Wahl. The lawsuit includes allegations involving overtime privileges, internal favoritism and high-level misconduct inside the department.
Taken together, these are not isolated controversies. They describe an institution that consumes extraordinary public resources while repeatedly generating public liabilities.
The most damning part is that City Hall’s answer is not to rethink the model. It is to feed it.
Gloria has repeatedly presented himself as a pragmatic budget steward forced into painful choices. But his choices reveal his values. When the city faces deficits, he reaches for arts funding, library hours, recreation programming, public events and parking fees. When SDPD presents its needs, the conversation begins from the assumption that policing must be preserved, expanded or insulated from the same level of pain inflicted elsewhere.
That is not fiscal responsibility. It is political cowardice dressed up as budgeting.
The city’s parking agenda makes the contradiction even clearer. Under Gloria, San Diego has doubled down on parking revenue, expanded enforcement and pursued new citation infrastructure while ordinary residents absorb the costs. Last week’s SanDiegoVille article detailed how the administration’s parking policies have already damaged Balboa Park institutions, discouraged attendance and produced less revenue than projected, all while the city continues looking for new ways to make residents pay more to access public spaces. Now the police budget itself acknowledges that expanded parking enforcement requires more staffing and more technology.
This is what the city has become under Gloria: cut the arts, ticket the public, fund the police, blame the deficit. And when journalists try to cover the consequences, SDPD has made that harder too.
In February, SDPD abruptly discontinued its longstanding Media Identification Card and parking placard program, eliminating a practical tool that helped working reporters, photographers and videographers cover breaking news, emergency scenes and police activity in real time. The department’s own termination notice said it had reviewed “practices, applicable law, and the evolving media landscape,” but the practical effect was obvious: less standardized access, more officer discretion and more friction for independent media.
The UCSD Guardian reported that no alternative government-issued credentialing system was introduced after SDPD ended the program. The San Diego chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists also publicly objected to the discontinuation, warning that the decision would affect working journalists and press access.
That matters because press access is not a luxury. It is one of the few remaining checks on a police department that increasingly asks the public to trust its own version of events. Removing a longstanding credentialing and placard system while encouraging reporters to follow SDPD’s social media channels for updates is not transparency. It is narrative control.
The pattern is impossible to ignore. The department receives hundreds of millions of dollars. Individual officers collect extraordinary overtime. Taxpayers pay settlements when things go catastrophically wrong. The city expands parking enforcement to squeeze more money out of residents. Arts and civic life are cut. Media access is narrowed. And Gloria calls it responsible governance.
It is not.
A functioning city does not balance its budget by starving the institutions that create public life while protecting the department that generates some of its most expensive legal liabilities. A serious mayor would demand hard answers from SDPD before approving another increase.
That settlement will not be paid by the officer. It will be paid by the public.
Taxpayers also recently funded a $25,000 settlement with Nicholas Hoskins, a Black driver whose passenger-side window was smashed by an SDPD officer after he repeatedly asked what probable cause justified a vehicle search. Hoskins was arrested and cited for resisting arrest, but he was never prosecuted. The city admitted no liability, as cities almost always say, but the money still left public hands.
Meanwhile, SDPD remains entangled in internal scandal. A 20-year veteran officer, Tyler Cockrell, sued the city earlier this year alleging retaliation, harassment and failure to promote him, while also claiming that the department protected his ex-wife because of alleged ties to Chief Scott Wahl. The lawsuit includes allegations involving overtime privileges, internal favoritism and high-level misconduct inside the department.
Taken together, these are not isolated controversies. They describe an institution that consumes extraordinary public resources while repeatedly generating public liabilities.
The most damning part is that City Hall’s answer is not to rethink the model. It is to feed it.
Gloria has repeatedly presented himself as a pragmatic budget steward forced into painful choices. But his choices reveal his values. When the city faces deficits, he reaches for arts funding, library hours, recreation programming, public events and parking fees. When SDPD presents its needs, the conversation begins from the assumption that policing must be preserved, expanded or insulated from the same level of pain inflicted elsewhere.
That is not fiscal responsibility. It is political cowardice dressed up as budgeting.
The city’s parking agenda makes the contradiction even clearer. Under Gloria, San Diego has doubled down on parking revenue, expanded enforcement and pursued new citation infrastructure while ordinary residents absorb the costs. Last week’s SanDiegoVille article detailed how the administration’s parking policies have already damaged Balboa Park institutions, discouraged attendance and produced less revenue than projected, all while the city continues looking for new ways to make residents pay more to access public spaces. Now the police budget itself acknowledges that expanded parking enforcement requires more staffing and more technology.
This is what the city has become under Gloria: cut the arts, ticket the public, fund the police, blame the deficit. And when journalists try to cover the consequences, SDPD has made that harder too.
In February, SDPD abruptly discontinued its longstanding Media Identification Card and parking placard program, eliminating a practical tool that helped working reporters, photographers and videographers cover breaking news, emergency scenes and police activity in real time. The department’s own termination notice said it had reviewed “practices, applicable law, and the evolving media landscape,” but the practical effect was obvious: less standardized access, more officer discretion and more friction for independent media.
The UCSD Guardian reported that no alternative government-issued credentialing system was introduced after SDPD ended the program. The San Diego chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists also publicly objected to the discontinuation, warning that the decision would affect working journalists and press access.
That matters because press access is not a luxury. It is one of the few remaining checks on a police department that increasingly asks the public to trust its own version of events. Removing a longstanding credentialing and placard system while encouraging reporters to follow SDPD’s social media channels for updates is not transparency. It is narrative control.
The pattern is impossible to ignore. The department receives hundreds of millions of dollars. Individual officers collect extraordinary overtime. Taxpayers pay settlements when things go catastrophically wrong. The city expands parking enforcement to squeeze more money out of residents. Arts and civic life are cut. Media access is narrowed. And Gloria calls it responsible governance.
It is not.
A functioning city does not balance its budget by starving the institutions that create public life while protecting the department that generates some of its most expensive legal liabilities. A serious mayor would demand hard answers from SDPD before approving another increase.
Why are the same officers repeatedly topping overtime charts? What fatigue risks are created by this much extra work? Why are sworn officers being used for duties that could be civilianized? How much overtime is tied to enforcement activity that exists primarily to raise revenue? How many officers involved in lawsuits, settlements or sustained complaints continue receiving overtime? What reforms has the department implemented that would have prevented the Konoa Wilson shooting, the Hoskins stop, or the next multimillion-dollar payout?
Those questions should be asked publicly, repeatedly and aggressively. Instead, San Diego gets budget theater.
The mayor’s defenders will say public safety is the city’s core obligation. But public safety is not synonymous with unlimited police spending. Public safety is a teenager not being shot in the back while running from danger. Public safety is a Black driver not having his window smashed because he asked a constitutional question. Public safety is a journalist being able to reach a scene without begging for ad hoc permission from the very agency being covered. Public safety is a city where young people have libraries, recreation centers, arts programs, public festivals and accessible parks.
By that measure, San Diego is not buying public safety. It is buying enforcement, liability and control.
The overtime scandal is not just about Officer Costanza or any other individual officer. It is about a city government that has normalized a police compensation and liability structure so bloated that it now competes directly with the civic life San Diegans are being asked to give up. It is about a mayor who can find money for police expansion while telling artists, librarians, families and cultural workers that the cupboard is bare. It is about a department that insists it values transparency while making independent access harder. It is about taxpayers being forced to finance a system that too often fails them, injures them, bills them, tickets them, settles with them and then asks for more.
San Diego does not have a money problem as much as it has a priorities problem.
Mayor Todd Gloria’s budget makes clear what City Hall is willing to protect. The police department gets increases. Parking enforcement gets staffing. Citation systems get upgrades. Pension and benefit obligations continue. Settlements are paid from public funds. Everyone else is told to make do with less.
That is not leadership. That is surrender to the most expensive bureaucracy in the city.
And San Diegans are paying for it twice: once at the meter, and again when the bill comes due.
Those questions should be asked publicly, repeatedly and aggressively. Instead, San Diego gets budget theater.
The mayor’s defenders will say public safety is the city’s core obligation. But public safety is not synonymous with unlimited police spending. Public safety is a teenager not being shot in the back while running from danger. Public safety is a Black driver not having his window smashed because he asked a constitutional question. Public safety is a journalist being able to reach a scene without begging for ad hoc permission from the very agency being covered. Public safety is a city where young people have libraries, recreation centers, arts programs, public festivals and accessible parks.
By that measure, San Diego is not buying public safety. It is buying enforcement, liability and control.
The overtime scandal is not just about Officer Costanza or any other individual officer. It is about a city government that has normalized a police compensation and liability structure so bloated that it now competes directly with the civic life San Diegans are being asked to give up. It is about a mayor who can find money for police expansion while telling artists, librarians, families and cultural workers that the cupboard is bare. It is about a department that insists it values transparency while making independent access harder. It is about taxpayers being forced to finance a system that too often fails them, injures them, bills them, tickets them, settles with them and then asks for more.
San Diego does not have a money problem as much as it has a priorities problem.
Mayor Todd Gloria’s budget makes clear what City Hall is willing to protect. The police department gets increases. Parking enforcement gets staffing. Citation systems get upgrades. Pension and benefit obligations continue. Settlements are paid from public funds. Everyone else is told to make do with less.
That is not leadership. That is surrender to the most expensive bureaucracy in the city.
And San Diegans are paying for it twice: once at the meter, and again when the bill comes due.
Originally published May 11, 2026.
