The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office spends $14,000 a year on a social media contract

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office signed up for a $14,000-a-year social media management platform in March, documents released through a Public Records Act request show.

The platform, Hootsuite, centralizes social profiles, facilitates scheduled posts and monitors trends; it also informs users about what posting times could lead to more likes, comments and reposts.

In its June budget proposal to the Board of Supervisors, the sheriff asked for $20,000 to pay for the service in the 2023-2024 fiscal year. The software, the law enforcement agency wrote, “would allow the Sheriff’s Office (SSO) to manage all social media accounts in one place.”

The contract between the county and Hootsuite, which was released to The Sacramento Bee, contains an option to renew the contract twice — each renewal would be for a one-year period.

Sgt. Amar Gandhi, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office, said the department asked the Board of Supervisors for $20,000 in June to fund a $14,000 subscription they agreed to in March because $20,000 was the original quote.

‘Service proposed by vendor is unique’

The Sheriff’s Office records detailed the reasons that the sheriff wanted to subscribe to the service.

In a document titled “Request for exception to competitive bidding (ETB) process and disclosure statement,” the Sheriff’s Office wrote, “We are monitoring eight different social media channels and a media team overseeing several bureaus in the department and their respective social media channels.”

The person who filled out the form, Nicole Limbird, checked a box next to two statements to describe why the Hootsuite subscription should not be subject to a competitive bidding process: “The requested product has unique design/performance specifications or quality requirements that are not available in comparable products,” and “Service proposed by vendor is unique; therefore, competitive bids are not available or applicable.”

The price quote from Hootsuite said the $14,000-a-year plan supports five users, 35 profiles, and “Unlimited Boost Post Spend which automatically boosts top performing content and schedule (sic) boosted posts to reach new audiences in a single, secure campaign workflow.”

Hootsuite’s ability to monitor trending topics, Gandhi said, “would potentially allow us to address issues the community may have that may have otherwise gone unanswered.”

Small part of budget

The $20,000 appropriation is a tiny fraction of the law enforcement agency’s budget.

Sacramento County appropriated $697 million to the Sheriff’s Office for the current fiscal year. The Board of Supervisors conducted a survey to help set funding priorities for the county, and respondents said homelessness was a top concern for new and enhanced services. The new Department of Homeless Services and Housing receives $59 million in appropriations — operating with about 8% of the sheriff’s budget.

On April 21, after the contract with Hootsuite went into effect, the Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook to hit home one of Sheriff Jim Cooper’s issues: A 2016 state law that decriminalized “prostitution” for children under 18 because those children would, instead, be considered victims of human trafficking.

Cooper also brought this up at a Board of Supervisors’ budget hearing in June, though it was unclear how his bid to recriminalize children doing sex work was tied to the budget request.

Cooper, the Facebook post said, is “demanding that SB357 and SB1322 be repealed so that law enforcement can have additional tools that will allow them to rescue sex-trafficking victims.” The video had 18,000 views on Oct. 6.

Engagement on more recent posts from the Sheriff’s Office Facebook has been relatively high, though not as high as the featured post about making it possible to levy prostitution charges against children again. An Oct. 3 post about a high-risk search warrant that led to an arrest had 42 comments and 14 shares as of Oct. 6.

Emails released to The Bee show that on Sept. 21, 2020, the Sheriff’s Office canceled a subscription to a service called X1, which is a tool that helps collect social media activities and their associated metadata as evidence that can potentially be used to prosecute someone.