Sacramento Bee: See how California cops are spending $50M on ‘wellness’: gyms, Himalayan salt, hormone therapy
The state legislature earmarked $50 million in the 2022 budget for “officer wellness” programs, with an eye toward improving the mental health of police, and documents show law enforcement has been spending that money on items that range from gym equipment to saunas and Himalayan salt.
You’re using the number for all employees when these are funds earmarked for officer wellness, and I see no indication from the reporting that someone like the janitor is getting to use the infrared sauna with Himalayan rock salt.
76,100 officers were in California in 2022 according to the Public Policy Institute of California, which would make the spending $657 per cop, or around $1.80 a day. Or $2.60 per work day if you assume 2 weeks vacation a year (most are getting more than that).
And while it’s all well and good to say “oh all employees deserve mental health programs,” are social workers getting any funding remotely close to this for their mental wellness? Are any of the other government employees? Because if not then that’s just an excuse for treating cops as a special class while draining even more resources away from areas that would actually benefit society.
If any government employee was driving around in a Lambo, then I would express some serious concern. I am sure there is some of that going on in some way and its just a matter of finding it.
TBH, I thought $430 was too low, personally. $657 is a bit better. All I was doing was pointing out that the wellness budget is still about a cup of coffee per cop per day.
When talking about large budgets, it’s a minimal expense. If a department pools their wellness bucks for a gym, exotic salt or even a bunny, whatever. It’s what wellness budgets are for. What’s worse, is that they must spend that budget if it’s like any other government budget program.
To your point about social workers, there is $30 billion earmarked for human services. If you itemized that spending, it would probably be worth another article about them that might look just as bad. Dunno.
Actually, I am positive there is much more waste than happens when it comes to any government contract for any service. You could probably round up hella more than $50MM to save and reallocate.
Almost all of that $30 billion is for providing social services for the most populous state in the nation, not jerking off social workers and telling them how special they are. Yes, obviously it costs more to run job training programs, child welfare agencies, etc for the entire state of California than it does to give 50 cops a sauna. It’s so wildly outrageous to compare that to the cost of an officer wellness program that it seems intentionally misleading.
Compared to cops? Based on what?
Compared to any government contract. They have notoriously bad, for any state, since time began. I could go into federal military waste and contract abuse, but that is off topic.
For the rest of the conversation, I am just going to cap this off and say that budgeting at the scale we are taking about is going to hit mismanagement somewhere in the chain. If people are concerned that money going to a wellness program is bad, then there may be much bigger issues for them to find across the entire spectrum.
If the state allocates budget for a specific program and that money must be spent, it doesn’t make sense to me to turn this into a “cops bad” conversation. There are plenty of other reasons to dislike police, but this reasoning is a weird stretch. It’s like blaming the crowd for a bad movie.
On that point, audit the entire system and find all the bad spending. Hire an external audit firm to do it and it should only be a few hundred million dollars for the state.
Your ass is not a source. If you want to claim that something with workers as underpaid and overworked as social services have more waste on social worker wellness programs than cop wellness programs do, put up or shut up.
What I said is that large budgets will likely have points of waste and mismanagement across the board. It’s inevitable and when we are talking about a budget as large as California’s. We can keep my personal experience with government contracts as anecdotal; totally fair.
And sorry, I am not doing a full audit of California’s budget right now. Regardless, this would be a conversation that needs to happen face to face as too many points are getting lost or misinterpreted.