SFPD to swear in 288th academy class amid staffing shortage

The San Francisco Police Department was preparing to swear in its 288th academy class after 26 weeks of training, another step in a rebuilding effort that has not yet closed the city’s police shortage. The recruits were headed next into field training, the phase that turns classroom instruction into street work, but they were still far from being fully developed officers.

That matters because San Francisco remained more than 500 sworn officers below the recommended minimum of more than 2,000. The department’s Field Training Program is POST-approved and is meant to bridge the academy and actual law-enforcement duties, followed by probation. In practical terms, that means residents should not expect an immediate fix in response times or a sudden wave of foot patrols from one class alone, even as each graduating group helps fill out missing slots.

Mayor Daniel Lurie tied the recruiting push to his Rebuilding the Ranks plan, which he launched on May 13, 2025 to address sworn staffing shortages in both SFPD and the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office. The city also recently signed a new police labor agreement that runs from July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2030. Lurie has said the department had seen its biggest hiring surge in six years and had recently welcomed its largest recruit class since 2017.

The numbers behind that surge showed a pipeline that was improving, even if it was still too small to erase the deficit quickly. In a Nov. 19, 2025 recruitment update, SFPD said it had received 3,645 entry-level applications in 2025, up 40% from 2024. The department said it had increased academy frequency to five classes a year and cut background-investigation timelines by 40%, with academy capacity set at 50 to 55 recruits per class.

Those gains were real, but incremental. The same update said Class 284 had 31 graduates and Class 285 had 31 graduates, while Classes 286 and 287 were still in progress. Class 288 was scheduled for December 2025 at the time, part of the department’s effort to keep multiple classes moving at once. SFPD had said three academy classes training simultaneously in January 2024 was the highest number of cadets in the pipeline at one time since before the pandemic.

Police Commission President Clay said at the April 8, 2026 commission meeting that Class 287 drew a large turnout and felt joyful and heartwarming. That kind of attention reflected what San Franciscans already understood at City Hall: the graduation numbers mattered less as ceremony than as staffing math, and the real test was whether the city could keep building toward enough officers to make a visible difference on the street.