OPINION

By Dave Price

Editor of the Daily Post

The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office is in crisis, according to a confidential memo Sheriff Christina Corpus sent to her staff on Friday.

There are over 100 open positions in her department, and she is frustrated that many of the remaining positions do not fill these gaps with overtime.

“We cannot continue to run the prison with too few staff,” she says, calling on her deputies to work more overtime.

She points out that the county’s payroll department found that “106 employees do not meet minimum overtime requirements or work significant overtime without meeting essential correctional needs. This is unacceptable,” Corpus wrote.

Redwood City Prison has become a deadly place. Since Corpus took over in January 2023, five inmates have died either from drugs or by suicide, and now there are calls for an outside, independent investigation.

Corpus notes in its memo that “one staff member was hospitalized due to exposure to a dangerous drug and that confrontations with the incarcerated population are increasing.”

She says she has 60 officers in training. We’ll see how many are actually sworn in.

Prison safety should be a concern for all of us. Even though most people don’t intend to be locked up, police make mistakes all the time and put the wrong people in prison. And what about your children or friends? Do we want to put any of them in a prison where they could die?

Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays in the Daily Post