San Francisco whistleblower report indicates abundance of thugs, layabouts, and thieves on the city payroll -report

Nobody should be surprised that San Francisco, the city that's going downhill, has a lot of thugs and thieves on its public payroll.

That's what the city's annual whistleblower report of employee malfeasance has to show, according to the San Francisco Chronicle:

Sleeping on duty. Stealing city property. Hiring family members. A new whistleblower report detailed allegations that San Francisco city employees engaged in these inappropriate practices, among others, this year.

Every quarter, the San Francisco Controller’s Office publishes a detailed report on its whistleblower program. This quarter’s report — spanning from Jan. 1 to March 31, 2024 — showed there were 192 reports of improper behavior, misuse of funds, wasteful government practices or poor delivery of services by city employees, 174 of which have been resolved. Nearly a quarter of the closed investigations resulted in a city department or contractor taking corrective or preventive actions. 

The number of complaints is small compared to the number of city employees and contractors  — more than 35,000 people work for the city, as do thousands more contractors — most of whom work diligently and perform their duties appropriately.

Most of the complaints that were substantiated detail eyebrow-raising behavior by city employees. Data from the report shows that a vast majority of the whistleblower complaints came from five city departments, with the Department of Public Health — the city’s largest department — topping the list with 53 reports. The Municipal Transportation Agency had 19 reports, the Department of Public Works had 13, and the San Francisco Human Services Agency and the Police Department had 12 each.

The total number of reports per year has been trending upward for the past decade, but there was a considerable dip in the number of reports after the peak in 2022, according to data from the report.

Which is pretty disgusting when one considers that payrolls, while down 5% in the past five years (which may be linked to resident flight), according to its 2023 Workforce report, have seen salaries go up, up, up, with the average employee take-home package soaring 22% in just four years, topping all the other counties.

In 2018 the average hourly rate for all CCSF [City and County of San Francisco] employees w as $47.23 ($98,235 annually), which increased by 22 percent in 2022 to $57.51 ($119,626 annually ). According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, workers in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area had an average hourly wage of $41.63 in 2021. As a result, in 2022, CCSF employees had an overall average hourly rate 32 percent higher than other employees in San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward areas combined.

And what do they get for that extra 32% premium compared to that of other Bay Area cities (which likely are more highly paid than surrounding areas)? Better services?

No, just lots more criminals. The Chronicle hastens to add that most employees are honest and hardworking, but they presented no proof of that. It could have just as easily been that investigators refuse to investigate and workers engaged in the same activity are reluctant to snitch. The money part of the quote is that the criminality among city employees is going up. Is the quality of city services going up, too? Not if you ask anyone who lives there.

Here are some violations that were partly substantiated by the Controller's office, while the parts that weren't were simply "not proven."

  • One complaint said an employee driving a city vehicle nearly hit a member of the public and the employee then yelled obscenities at that person. While the investigation found the driver indeed almost hit a pedestrian, the probe could not find evidence that the employee yelled obscenities. The department counseled the employee in writing and reminded them of city vehicle policies, the report says. 

  • Another complaint said a city contractor inappropriately hired a family member to conduct mandatory training, a violation of the contract. The investigation found that the training was conducted by a family member, though the training wasn’t mandatory — simply encouraged. 

  • A manager let a worker sleep on the job while the worker was on call, and the manager allowed them to violate parking restrictions on multiple occasions. 

  • An investigation found that an employee had been verbally abusing staff on multiple occasions.

  • One manager claimed to be working from home on one occasion but was actually on vacation. 

So the more you pay them, the worse they behave, no doubt the result of having a lot of unearned income well beyond their worth in the free market. The natural result is an emerging entitlement mentality not unlike that of princelings. It's interesting that the largest number of violations were concentrated within just four departments, such as the Department of Public Works, whose agency head, Muhammad Nuru, went to jail for corruption, and who had been carrying on an affair with San Francisco's mayor, London Breed. That suggests a festering culture of corruption, if nothing else.

And this report mentions nothing of the carjacking crew on the city payroll, in this incident here.

The bottom line here, is that as the city goes downhill, so does its ruling elite. Apparently stealing, whether of time, resources, or actual money, is how things are done in that city, even as residents flee and the homeless multiply, buttressed by some very generous city handouts to the NGOs who enable them.

And as City Journal notes in a piece published a few years ago, it amounts to a blown windfall. The City should have had a gargantuan windfall based on the income it was taking in from Silicon Valley enterprises, but like Hugo Chavez and a barrel of oil, the bounty was quickly squandered.

We can see the same thing in the going-downhill quality of San Francisco's city employees, where money is flowing and the crooks are multiplying.

The rest of us can think of that next time a leftist suggests another spendathon for an expansion in the size of government.

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