As talks heat up for a new labor contract between San Antonio and its police union, activists are sounding the alarm that the city isn’t doing enough to rein in what they call officers’ rampant abuse of overtime earnings.
Some San Antonio police personnel are raking in $100,000 to $200,000 annually in overtime pay alone, according to documents obtained by the Current. In some cases, those payments double or nearly triple their yearly salaries.
The San Antonio Police Department is also routinely shooting past its overtime budget, sometimes by tens of millions of dollars, records show. For the 2024 fiscal year, the department spent double what it originally budgeted for overtime — hitting $34 million.
The data cited in this report was compiled by local police accountability activist group Act 4 SA, which obtained the records from SAPD through an open records request and organized it according to overtime earnings. The Current hasn’t independently verified its contents.
“The fact that we as an organization have already done the research and have a list of demands … and council members don’t … is shocking and very scary,” said Ananda Tomás, organizer with Act 4 SA.
“And I think that people need to pay attention to that and call on their elected leaders to focus on this contract because we’re going to be locked in for the next four years,” Tomás added.
SAPD officials didn’t dispute the overtime numbers the Current presented to them in the documents.
“Overtime in a major city police department is a necessary component for operations,” the department said in a statement provided in response to this story. “SAPD overtime pay is excluded from the calculations that determine pension amounts, [so] increased overtime does not increase pension payments.”
While SAPD did provide additional data to the Current about the number of officers it’s hired over the past few years, it didn’t directly address Act 4 SA’s allegations of overtime abuse.
The San Antonio Police Officers Association (SAPOA), the union representing department employees, didn’t respond to the Current’s request for comment on concerns that workers are abusing overtime rules.
Top cops
Act 4 SA’s overtime analysis spreadsheet — which includes hire dates, job titles, fiscal 2024 salaries, overtime and other data points — shows that the top 15 overtime earners in SAPD last year collected annual salaries ranging from $72,780 to $100,092.
However, in a separate column, additional overtime earnings for that same group of personnel ranged from $91,501 to $130,495 over the same year. A separate column for additional benefits, including pay for training and other skills, tacks on as much as $76,134 to each officer’s earnings.
This means that the highest overtime earner in SAPD, who’s also the cop with the highest salary on the spreadsheet, raked in $345,817 in total annual compensation.
To put it in perspective, that SAPD employee’s gross earnings for the year amount to that of San Antonio’s mayor and most of city council combined. The total even approached the 2024 salary of the city manager, one of the highest-paid city employees, at $374,400.
The aforementioned top-earning SAPD employee isn’t the chief or another member of the department’s highest management levels but a sergeant. The average income in Texas for police sergeants is approximately $91,000, according to ZipRecruiter.
The next two highest earners on the spreadsheet — a detective and a rank-and-file officer — each earned around $120,000 in overtime last year, amounting to total compensation of around $300,000 each.
But it doesn’t end there. The total compensation for hundreds of rank-and-file cops listed on the spreadsheet was around $200,000 due to overtime, and many exceeded that number.
In the spreadsheet, 11 of the 20 cops earning the highest amounts in overtime were hired in the 1990s or before, making them force veterans and likely close to retirement. In the top 20 of the highest overtime earners, a total of 17 were hired before 2010.
Tomás said she’s waiting on a response to an open records request asking for the names and badge numbers of the supervising officer or officers who have signed off on all the overtime.
“The reason being that if it’s the same people again and again, and it’s the same supervising officer that’s being unfair and approving overtime for some but maybe not for other officers that they don’t have a relationship with, that’s also a problem within the department,” Tomás said.
Paying more, fighting less crime
In total, SAPD earmarked nearly $21 million for overtime in the 2025 fiscal year. However, it remains to be seen how much it actually spent to cover those costs.
The prior year, the department doubled its adopted overtime budget of $17.7 million, paying out a total that exceeded $34.4 million, records show.
Meanwhile, the force continues to hire more officers, even as statistics show crime declining in San Antonio.
The city’s overall crime rate dropped by 13% for the first 11 months of 2025 compared to the prior year, according to a KSAT report based on data presented by SAPD Chief William McManus to a City Council committee in December.
While SAPD reported 143,529 crimes from January through November of 2024, it tallied just 124,314 during the same period in 2025.
Violent crimes dropped by 9% over that period, while homicides decreased 17%. Human trafficking declined by 31.3% and kidnappings by 50%. Sex offenses also went down, dropping 7.6%.
“Nothing but good news, as far as the crime stats go,” McManus told council members at a December council meeting, according to the KSAT report.
So, if crime is down, why does San Antonio keep adding more officers to the force while piling overtime onto others?
District 3 Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran, who served on SAPD for seven years, told the Current it could be due, at least in part, to an outside analysis the city commissioned on its police staffing.
In 2023, the city hired Weiss Consulting to conduct a staffing analysis of SAPD. The study identified a shortage, which the department has since endeavored to fill.
The study determined SAPD was short 360 officers, which the department confirmed with the Current in a written statement. According to an SAPD spokesperson, the first officer was added in early 2024, and as of early 2026, the department has hired 205 new officers.
Additionally, the SAPD spokesperson said 412 employees have voluntarily left the force from fiscal 2023 to the present, though those positions are “constantly being filled by new cadet classes,” she added.
On March 12, City Council members Marina Alderete Gavito (District 7), Misty Spears (District 9), and Marc Whyte (District 10) filed a resolution asking the city manager to prioritize the hiring of 65 additional officers in the fiscal 2027 budget, saying they’re needed to meet the needs outlined in the 2023 staffing study.
New union contract
The debate over new hires and accountability groups’ concern about excessive overtime come as the city works to hash out a new labor contract with its police union.
Those talks began in January and are expected to conclude Oct. 1, right after the late-September retirement of Chief William McManus. The plan is for the resulting labor contract to serve as an exultant bookend to a decades-long career for the chief, Act 4 SA’s Tomás said.
SAPOA wants to raise base pay for officers from $62,916, mirroring similar increases in base pay in other Texas cities. According to a press release laying out its demands, SAPOA says Austin officers earn a base pay of $70,644, whereas those in Dallas earn $75,397. Meanwhile, the SAPD employees’ Houston counterparts earn $75,000 and those in Laredo get $69,308.
In contract negotiations, the union’s key goals include seeking 3% annual wage increases and a $5 hourly wage increase over three years. SAPOA also wants an increase in city Health Savings Account contributions and monthly pay for Field Training Officers.
However, discussions about putting a cap on overtime pay haven’t yet come up in contract negotiations, Tomás said.
Public safety risks
Beyond excessive overtime pinching taxpayers, Tomás makes the case that it creates tired cops — which becomes its own problem.
“There are studies that show that officers that are working overtime — consistently working overtime — they’re more likely to be named in lawsuits, they’re more likely to damage city properties, such as crashing a vehicle,” Tomás said. “They’re more likely to have complaints against them, to have racial bias, to use excessive force. And that’s a literal safety issue — not just for us, but those officers.”
Indeed, Washington State researchers found that inadequate sleep may heighten pre-existing implicit biases. When 80 officers in a 2017 study slept less, they demonstrated a stronger association between Black Americans and weapons, according to the analysis.
A study of the Phoenix Police Department published in Police Quarterly compared officers working 10-hour shifts with those who worked 13 or more hours. The number of complaints made against the 13-hour group was significantly higher than for the 10-hour officers.
A 2017 audit of the King County Sheriff’s Office in Washington also found an association between overtime and a litany of personnel problems. Working just one extra hour of overtime per week increased the likelihood an officer would be involved in a use-of-force incident by 2.7% the following week and increased the odds of ethics violations by 3.1%.
Further demonstrating the risks of police overtime, a 2023 report by the New York City Department of Investigation found that officers working the average amount of overtime one day — which amounts to four additional hours — were drastically more likely to be involved in an incident the following day.
The New York report also found that such officers were 18% more likely to suffer a workplace injury, 20% more likely to be involved in an incident where force is used either by or against an officer and 36% more likely to be the subject of a substantiated misconduct complaint.
“The first thing is to develop some policies that do limit overtime and that do address the risk of negative policing outcomes and fatigue,” New York DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber said of recommendations to remedy the problem, according to a CBS News report.
‘Milking their calls’
Regardless of the public safety issues at stake, Tomás said she doubts all of the SAPD officers in her group’s spreadsheet are really putting in as many overtime hours on field and duty assignments as they’re being paid for.
“I do think that it’s a possibility that there’s fudging of numbers,” she said. “I also don’t think it’s all patrol time. You’re telling me that these officers who are getting older, physically — they’re in their 50s, they’re in their 60s — are spending all of this time patrolling the streets?”
Tomás said her organization has put in a separate open records request to SAPD asking it to provide details on the field assignments of officers raking in the most overtime. However, the SAPD officials passed that request to the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who will make a ruling whether the department is legally required to fulfill it.
Councilwoman Viagran told the Current it was “well known” during her time on the force that officers took calls and did paperwork after their shift in an effort to rack up more overtime.
“We called it ‘milking their calls’ — so finding a reason to stay over because they hadn’t completed the report within their shift,” Viagran said. “And that’s where we need to work with the supervisors, work with the union to say that this is not acceptable, this is not appropriate, and what is their stance to address this issue?”
Viagran said technological deficiencies might also be to blame for work inefficiencies that lead certain individuals to rack up overtime. However, she noted she hasn’t worked on the force in 10 years and doesn’t know the department’s current technological limitations.
At the negotiating table
Approximately 90% of SAPD’s overtime budget comes from the union’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with the city.
However, Tomás said, as she’s met with City Council over the ongoing contract negotiations, its members don’t appear to be aware of the extent of the overtime issue.
“I can tell you right now that every council member I have talked to literally had no idea about this,” Tomás said.
So far, she hasn’t seen councilmembers come up with their own directives or demands to bring this issue or others to the negotiating table, even though contract talks are well underway.
“And that’s a problem. That’s a serious problem,” Tomás said.
Viagran admits she’s been fairly hands-off in the negotiating process and hasn’t made any recommendations of her own. Instead, she’s relying on city staff to navigate the discussions and keep her updated.
“We’re getting briefings, and I’m not sure what is going on there,” she said.
Tomás suggested councilmembers call for an independent audit of police overtime spending before the contract is finalized. Such a move would likely delay negotiations, but Tomás said it’s information council should have already been armed with at the onset of discussions.
Viagran told the Current that rather than an independent audit, she would like the police to conduct an internal investigation and self-report on overtime distribution. Further, she said she would rather get through contract negotiations first before looking into overtime concerns with the incoming chief.
However, Tomás said the time for transparency — and leverage to make a change — is now.
“If our City Council members, who are supposed to direct city staff, don’t have the full picture of the millions and millions of dollars that are going towards overtime or to our police department, or that are controlled by the contract, how can we negotiate in full faith?” she added.
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