Quick Take
A new report finds the Watsonville Police Department is understaffed and recommends civilian employees handle minor issues, freeing officers for more proactive community engagement and patrol duties.
The Watsonville Police Department lacks the manpower to proactively conduct traffic stops and foot patrols and needs to add more staff, according to a new report by a consulting firm that studied how the city’s police officers spend their time.
The study, conducted by Matrix Consulting Group, a San Mateo-based firm that specializes in assessing police departments across the country, found that Watsonville’s police department is understaffed, leading to a lack of “proactive time.” Rather than just responding to calls, proactive time means officers are using problem-solving skills and productively engaging with the community, like following up with residents after a call or foot patrol, the consultant wrote.
The consulting firm began studying the Watsonville Police Department in March 2024 after it was commissioned to fulfil an oversight requirement for Measure Y — a half-cent sales tax passed in 2020 to help fund police, fire and community services. The measure requires the city to conduct a third-party assessment of department needs every 10 years, which must be presented to the city council.
It’s important for law enforcement agencies to anticipate any problems that might arise within their communities and collaborate with residents to find solutions to those problems, Richard Brady, board chair for the consulting firm, told the city council last week.
“The important benchmark for us is that there should be roughly equal levels of reactive time, the calls for service response, as well as the proactive time,” said Brady. He noted in the presentation that police officers are stacking calls — or prioritizing some calls higher than others when there are more calls than officers available to handle them — which can also affect response times.
Most Watsonville police officers work a 10-hour shift, and the report found that officers spent about 32% of total employee hours responding to calls proactively. Brady recommends the department increase that to 45% of an officer’s time.
To help solve this issue, Brady and his team recommend the department send civilian police staff to respond to minor calls, such as parking complaints, theft and missing-persons reports. The report also recommended the police department add more traffic, patrol and training officers to its staff, reduce the number of captains, add more lieutenants and restructure units within the department.
“We’ve made great strides in hiring,” Watsonville Police Capt. Michael McKinley told the city council last week. There are two vacancies in the department right now, he said. The department also has 13 officers in training, who will help with filling some of those positions. McKinley added that the department is not asking for any additional funding to help with staffing.
The Matrix report also recommended the department hire 10 more officers and four civilian personnel by 2034 to keep up with the needs of the city as it continues to grow and still provide the same level of service to the community.
The call for more staff and better response times comes a week after the Santa Cruz Civil Grand Jury found that Watsonville police detain and transport more people for minor crimes, such as theft, trespassing and DUIs, than other agencies in the county. That report recommended the department to update its training materials and provide more training on the “cite and release method” to help reduce the number of people being arrested and taken to the police station.
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