In Merced County, which stretches from the Sierra Nevada foothills west across vast acres of orchards and farmland, Sheriff Vern Warnke increasingly finds himself the sole law enforcement officer available to respond to a call for help.
Most recently, the department received a call from a woman regarding a domestic dispute, claiming her husband had a gun. With no deputies nearby, Warnke showed up at the scene, wearing his signature cowboy hat and badge hanging around his neck. He found a man pacing with a loaded gun tucked into his waistband and was able to defuse the situation.
“We didn’t have anyone to send, and me, as sheriff, I’m still a cop, I still love what I do,” Warnke said. “But we’re at the point where the sheriff and administration have to respond to the calls.”
Warnke has worked for the Merced Sheriff’s Office for 45 years and has been sheriff for a decade. So it’s with a heavy heart, he said, that he’s seen deputy vacancies climb to the point where he believes residents are in danger. In February, Warnke released a video that amounted to a cry for help, warning residents that the staffing shortage was now so severe that pleas for help could go unheeded.
“I’m fighting for the life of the sheriff’s office right now,” Warnke says in the video. “That means I’m fighting for your public safety. So friends, this is bad.
The office typically has 100 deputies handling patrol duties, but 20 of those positions are vacant. Of the 108 positions reserved for detention deputies working in correctional facilities, 23 are vacant. The investigation unit, budgeted as a team of 18 people, now has only eight. And the distribution has four vacant positions out of a workforce of 13 people.
Warnke said vacancies have multiplied in recent months and his calls for the county Board of Supervisors to increase its budget and give it control over how funds are allocated have gone unheeded.
At this point, only four deputies patrol nearly 2,000 square miles of the county during the day. A lieutenant and two sergeants provide dispatch shifts. If someone calls in sick, co-workers are asked to work beyond their 12-hour shifts. One dispatcher worked more than 700 hours of overtime in one year.
“Our correctional offices are understaffed and overworked. Our patrol deputies are understaffed and overworked. Our communications center with dispatchers – it could be to the point that when you dial 911, we don’t have anyone who can answer it,” Warnke said in the video. ” And this is not a joke. It’s not a threat. It is a fact.”
The struggle to fill the ranks of law enforcement is a challenge in many California communities, both urban and rural. The number of patrol officers per 100,000 residents is at its lowest level since at least 1991, according to a January report from the Public Policy Institute of California. The steepest declines occurred during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, PPIC researchers found, and levels have not recovered.
Last year, when about a third of its 88 sworn officer positions were vacant, the city of Alameda began offering police recruits a $75,000 sign-on bonus on top of regular pay. which starts at $110,000 per year. San Francisco and some East Bay cities followed suit, increasing officer pay and implementing signing and retention bonuses.
The Los Angeles City Council in August approved a four-year package of raises for officers that raised the starting salary to $86,000 and offered larger retention bonuses. But city officials said in April that they were still struggling to fill vacancies and would need to hire about 60 new officers per month to reduce the attrition rate.
Smaller municipalities that can’t compete with such extravagant deals have tried other retention methods, including free gym memberships and dry cleaning services. But rural counties, with smaller budgets, are often the losers in the recruitment battle. In 2022, the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office suspended daytime patrols due to staffing shortages.
Merced County, known as the gateway to Yosemite, has a larger budget than many rural counties because it encompasses both farmland and cities like Merced, which has a population of 90,000. The county’s annual budget for public safety has increased in recent years and devotes about $93.4 million to the sheriff’s office, according to county officials.
But Warnke said that hasn’t been enough to retain deputies, who are leaving for other counties despite Merced’s $10,000 signing bonuses. Top lawmakers in some neighboring counties earn at least $102,000, while Merced pays its top lawmakers $90,000.
The sheriff acknowledged that competition for salaries and bonuses creates a “vicious cycle.” The department experienced similar shortages during its first term, and deputies received a 20 percent raise in 2017. But here it faces the same problem.
“The problem is the county doesn’t seem to want to plan for the future. They put a bandage on something and think it will last a long time. And that’s not the case,” Warnke said.
County spokesman Mike North said the county proposed the Merced County Deputy Sheriff’s Association. an 8% increase, which the union refused. If an increase is ultimately approved, North said, funding would come from cuts at other agencies.
“Our goal is to close the pay gap between the Sheriff’s Office and other offices in the Central Valley, and our staff has already returned to the bargaining table with other public safety union groups,” he said. -he declared in a press release.
Warnke’s video and the concerns he expressed during public hearings sparked protests from residents worried about their safety. In 2022, Merced County had the highest reported homicide rate among the state’s counties with populations greater than 100,000, according to the California Department of Justice.
In March, the sheriff’s office launched an online reporting system to collect reports of nonviolent crimes, saying it simply didn’t have enough officers to respond to calls. Breaches of custody orders, vehicle theft and vandalism are among the crimes that can be reported online. Violent crimes can still be reported by telephone. Other law enforcement agencies have also turned to online systems to free up resources.
Merced County residents Becky and Jason Tucker say they can feel the shortage.
The couple filed a report with the sheriff’s office last summer, alleging a man committed forgery and damaged property on their farm. They said they were told the office had only one investigator handling agriculture-related crimes. That investigator, Becky Tucker said, was needed for homicide investigations, leaving their case open for months while the suspect was at large. He was ultimately arrested for alleged crimes in Kern County, where he is awaiting a court appearance.
“We’re concerned that if something happens on our property, we won’t have access to a deputy as far as response time,” she said.
The couple has since spent $6,000 on a security system.
North said 74 cents of every dollar in Merced County’s general fund goes to public safety and the board, taking into account various regulatory requirements, only has discretion over about 11 percent of the 1,000-year-old budget. 16 billion dollars. He said the county’s goal is to “maintain a sustainable budget that will not result in mass layoffs in the event of an economic downturn.”
And the sheriff’s office isn’t the only department in the county dealing with high vacancy rates. Marta Echevarria, a family services representative at the social services agency, said her department has 40 vacancies and the remaining workers are working 12-hour shifts. In December, she went to county officials to express her fears of becoming homeless as the costs of her rent and health insurance were skyrocketing.
“I hear (the sheriff) and it makes me so sad,” she said, “but at the same time it makes me so angry, because I’m like, ‘What about the rest of us?'”
A report released last year by the Bureau of Justice indicated that for a variety of reasons – including a tightening job market and increased national tensions over the role of police – law enforcement agencies across the country are facing a historic crisis in recruiting and retaining qualified candidates.
Rather than getting drawn into a competition for wages and bonuses — a competition that rural counties won’t win — the report recommends offering incentives that address young workers’ growing thirst for a better life balance professional and private life. Suggestions include more paid leave, increased family leave, flexible schedules and tuition reimbursement.
Warnke acknowledged that other counties, such as Fresno, offer take-home cars to deputies, while Madera offers lifetime medical benefits to those who stay more than five years and retire with the agency.
“These are things our county needs to get on top of,” he said. “They can’t do it for the entire county, but they certainly can do it for the sheriff’s office, the county’s critical agency.”
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