Deputies Work Extra to Meet City Contract : Staffing: An error left the sheriff’s station owing the city 800 work shifts. The catch-up effort will cost $150,000 in overtime pay but is reducing crime, officials say.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies are working thousands of hours of overtime in West Hollywood to cover a deployment error that left the department 800 shifts short of its contractual obligation to the city, The Times has learned.

The Sheriff’s Department, which provides police services in West Hollywood, discovered the shortfall in April and has been racing to make up the difference before its $9.2-million contract with the city runs out today, the last day of the fiscal year.

Capt. Clarence Chapman, the commanding officer in the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station, estimated that it will cost the department as much as $150,000 in overtime pay to reduce the shifts owed from 800 down to 150, a figure he said would be more acceptable to West Hollywood officials.

But even if the department is unable to reduce the number of shifts owed by that much, City Manager Paul Brotzman said he is confident that an agreement can be worked out.

“We were being billed for services that we were not getting,” said Brotzman, who discussed the problem with department officials last month. “But the department will address the issue, and if they haven’t met the obligation, we will continue to work with them and they will continue to work with us.”

The problem is that the West Hollywood station is understaffed, law enforcement and city officials said. Budgeted for 129 sworn officers, it has 114 available for duty.

“It appears that there was an error in communication as to what the minimum deployment for the station should be,” said Commander Mark Squiers, Chapman’s supervisor.

Squiers and Chapman insisted--and Brotzman agreed--that despite the understaffing, enough deputies have always been available to provide an adequate level of public safety in the city.

Sheriff’s Department officials say the mistake was discovered in a department audit in April. About the same time, the station’s commander, Capt. Rachel Burgess, was transferred to Marina del Rey, and Chapman was shifted from Marina del Rey to West Hollywood.

The transfers were made quickly and without public announcement, giving rise to speculation among some deputies that they were linked to the deployment error. Burgess and Chapman say, however, that there was no connection and that the transfer was routine.

Upon arriving in West Hollywood, Chapman quickly implemented a program designed to reduced the number of “contract minutes” owed to the city.

An April 24 memo from the station’s scheduling sergeant urged deputies to pitch in and shoulder the additional burden regardless of who was to blame for the error.

“As you all know, the station is down on contract minutes,” the memo said. “At this point it is no longer an issue to point the finger at who or what caused this problem. What is very, very important is that everyone take this problem seriously and not think of it as an ‘Admin’ problem.”

A moratorium on all time off was declared. Some deputies began working 16-hour shifts, and detectives were ordered to report in uniform for weekend duties. Warnings were issued that anyone found using sick time as vacation would be disciplined.

One deputy, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said some of his colleagues have accumulated as much as 96 hours of overtime in a month, the maximum allowed by the department.

“Some deputies have doubled their salaries, bringing home $3,000 to $4,000 a paycheck,” the deputy said. “We are drowning in overtime--but on the other hand, we are not getting any time off.”

Chapman said some of the overtime shifts have been used to set up a “hustler abatement” team to crack down on prostitution and street crime in the city’s troubled east end--something residents have been demanding for years.

“We took a problem and turned it into an opportunity,” he said.

The team, which varies in strength but at times consists of as many as 10 deputies on overtime duty, has been responsible for 150 arrests during its 11 weeks of operation, including an undercover operation in which shooting erupted and a deputy and suspect were wounded. Many of the arrests involve people wanted in misdemeanor or felony cases.

City Councilman Sal Guarriello said he was unaware of the department’s staffing problems, but said the extra shifts seemed to be making a difference.

“What I have noticed is that the crime has cleaned up quite a bit,” he said.

The under-deployment is the second time in less than a year that the city has encountered difficulties with its sheriff’s contract. Brotzman complained last year that parking citations had dropped from a monthly average of 16,000 to about 9,500--a decline that would cost the city $3 million if it continued for a year. An audit was ordered, changes were made in the management of the parking enforcement operation, and now the monthly average is about 19,000.