Major funding for Kpbs Evening Edition has been made possible in part by Bill Howe family of companies providing San Diego with plumbing, heating, air restoration and flood services for over 40 years.

Call one 800 Bill Howe or visit Billhowe.com.

And by the Conrad Prevbys Foundation.

Darlene Marcos Shiley and by the following.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Maya Trabulsi.

The San Diego Police Department has for years struggled to retain officers and hire new ones.

The result?

Its overtime budget ballooned.

Kpbs investigative reporter Scott Roth says some officers work so much overtime that they're now the highest paid city employees.

It also raises safety concerns for officers and the public.

San Diego's police chief for many years made the most money in the department, but something changed about a decade ago.

Cops were leaving the department and those vacancies weren't being filled.

So officers started working more overtime.

A lot of overtime, like thousands of hours of overtime.

Paul Parker is the former executive director of San Diego's Civilian Police Oversight Commission.

He worked as a police officer and death investigator for decades.

That I don't understand unless you're on some kind of special assignment.

But even then, thousands of hours of overtime seems to be, excessive.

Take, for example, Officer Jason Costanza.

A Kpbs investigation found he worked over 3000 hours of overtime in 2023, the year with the most recently available data.

That's equivalent to adding another full time job, plus another part time job on top of his regular police duties.

For Parker, that's a red flag.

I can speak from experience.

When you work, excessive number of hours and 19 hours seems to be complete or excessive.

But when you're working 14 16 hour days and then you put a couple of those days back to back, or maybe every other day you're working 14 to 16, you're exhausted.

You're absolutely exhausted.

Costanza had to work very long hours to hit that overtime total.

We're talking 17 hour shifts, sometimes 19 hour shifts, with short breaks in between.

He earned over $400,000 in 2023, the majority of it from overtime pay.

That made him the city's highest paid employee.

A Kpbs analysis of department data found Costanza was among several officers who earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime pay in recent years, and it's mostly the same group year after year.

The department's skyrocketing overtime budget is one concern.

There's also the issue of officer well-being and public safety.

You have to consider that these folks are armed, and they're tasked with making split second decisions to save their lives and the lives of the members of the community.

There's research to back up these concerns.

Studies and audits show fatigued officers are more likely to face complaints from civilians, and overtime can result in more use of force incidents.

Officers who are particularly tired are, they're less able.

They're less likely to de-escalate.

They're, you know, they're they're they're less able to kind of manage crisis encounters or interact with people who might be impaired in some way.

Lois James is director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University, Spokane.

James has worked with police departments around the country.

She understands that overtime gives departments flexibility, but relying on it too much can cost cities more money in the long run.

It's what we call the fatigue tax.

It's easy for it to get into this vicious spiral.

Working tons of overtime can lead to burnout, which means officers taking sick leave or time off, which means more shifts to fill.

There's also the public safety risk of fatigued officers making mistakes on duty that can result in costly lawsuits or settlements.

San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl says he isn't bothered by the huge amounts of money officers are making in overtime.

They put in a tremendous amount of hours.

They earn the money that they've made.

And, you know, they're committed to to putting in their time.

And he pushed back on the notion that excess overtime increases the risk of negative interactions between his officers and the public.

I don't think that the right way to answer that is to give you a yes or no.

I think there's so many factors that depend.

Wahl says he isn't aware of any complaints against the officers working the most overtime hours if they're not out there being respectful.

Treating people right, making good decisions, then they're going to be pulled back from from working overtime.

But the chief says he is open to imposing some limits on overtime.

We do need to have some guardrails in place.

He supports capping shifts at 16 hours with a required eight hour break.

He also supports mandating one day off a week, but those changes would need to go through what's called a meet and confer process with the police officers union, which can take months.

In the long term, Wahl says the department needs to redouble its efforts at hiring and recruiting new officers.

Scott Rodd, Kpbs news.

Tune in tomorrow to hear more from the Chief of Police about the department's plan to change its overtime policy, as the city grapples with a huge budget deficit.

Tonight, clear skies out there for us as temperatures fall to about 60 degrees in the city and across the area, we're looking at a pretty quiet night and a mild one at that.

Two with the clear skies, very minimal marine layer impacting us.

We will have a little bit more of that as we go into the upcoming weekend.

We'll be talking more about how things will be changing for us in the days ahead.

In the forecast ahead.

Today, the family of Ashley Babbitt agreed to settle their wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government for $5 million.

Babbitt was shot and killed during the riot at the US Capitol on January 6th of 2021.

The lawsuit alleged Babbitt was, quote, ambushed by Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Bird, who shot her without any warnings or commands.

Babbitt was climbing through the broken window of a barricaded door to the House Speaker's lobby when she was shot.

Bird told NBC news he pulled the trigger as a last resort.

The Justice Department did not pursue criminal charges against bird.

Capitol police also said he would not face internal discipline.

The department of Homeland Security is terminating protections for thousands of Afghan refugees, effective on July 12th.

Kpbs video journalist Matthew Bowler says many Afghans living in San Diego are now at risk of being sent back to a country that is still under Taliban rule.

Desperate Afghan civilians were fleeing for their lives about three and a half years ago.

Many were granted temporary protected status, or TPS, to stay in the United States.

It's a special form of deportation protection for people from countries experiencing war or other dangerous conditions.

Now, the Trump administration may be sending those refugees back to Afghanistan.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said, quote, Afghanistan has had an improved security situation and it's stabilizing economy no longer prevent them from returning to their home country.

In an interview on Kpbs Radio's Midday Edition, Sean Vandiver from the San Diego based organization Afghan Evac says that during Trump's first term, the president appeared to be very supportive of Afghan refugees.

I thought that surely President Trump would protect this bipartisan, beloved effort to help allies who've stood beside us.

And what I thought was an unintended consequence.

It seems like it's a deliberate strategy to throw our wartime allies under the bus and cause real, irreparable harm to our veterans community.

Vandiver says about 200,000 Afghans have resettled in the United States since 2021.

An estimated 11,700 Afghan nationals in the U.S.

currently hold TPS, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Matthew Boehler, Kpbs news.

And you can hear the full interview with Sean Vandiver from Afghan Evac on today's Kpbs Midday Edition.

You can listen@kpbs.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to end temporary protected status for thousands of Venezuelans in the U.S.. The High Court released the order today with only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noting dissent.

It potentially exposes 350,000 Venezuelan migrants to deportation.

The Homeland Security Department has not commented on the Supreme Court's order.

Investigators are searching for answers today as to what caused a Mexican naval ship to crash into the Brooklyn Bridge this weekend, killing two people.

The vessel was on a global goodwill tour heading to Iceland when it collided with the iconic New York landmark.

Maribel Gonzalez has the latest.

New Yorkers strolling the Brooklyn promenade stunned as a Mexican naval training ship slams into the Brooklyn Bridge until the boat actually hit the bridge.

We didn't.

I don't feel like anyone discerned the danger us of the situation.

Flavio Moreira was walking with his family Saturday night and caught it all on camera.

Yeah, it hit it.

And, there was a, like, a little bit of commotion on board the ship.

Two Mexican crew members lost their lives and more than 20 were injured.

A senior official says the captain told investigators he lost steering after the rudder stopped working.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum shared her condolences with the families of those killed.

She says Mexican authorities will conduct their own investigation.

Meanwhile, investigators with the U.S.

National Transportation Safety Board are in New York, where the ship's data recorders expected to reveal crucial information.

We will be looking into three main areas while we're on scene.

First, being the crew and the operation of the crew, the vessel and the condition of the vessel, and finally the environment.

And that includes the weather.

As for the bridge, it's back open after a temporary closure.

Information that there was not any major damage to the bridge.

I'm Maribel Gonzalez, Kpbs news.

And you may remember this very same Mexican tall ship visited San Diego almost exactly one year ago.

Last May.

It was docked at B Street pier and open to the public for tours.

San Diego was its first stop on a training cruise that would take it to three continents.

At the time, the ship had visited 228 ports and 73 countries since its commissioning.

The owners of Hillcrest Restaurants say they are losing customers because of a salmonella outbreak at another restaurant with a similar name.

The owners of Aladdin Hillcrest told our media partner KGTV that they have no connection to Aladdin cafe in Clermont, where more than 100 probable and confirmed cases of salmonella poisoning have been reported.

A Latin Hillcrest owner says he bought the restaurant from the owners of the Claremont Cafe 21 years ago, and he says he kept the name but changed almost everything else, including the menu, since the salmonella outbreak in Claremont.

He says sales have dropped by nearly 50%.

Was it frustrating for your employees?

Yeah.

When you have less business, it means they make less tips.

And for the cooks, they have to cut their hours.

So it's affecting everybody from then.

You know, it was my own.

I have nothing to share with them.

And he says he's hopeful customers will realize the difference between the two restaurants and business will return to normal.

Ports across the country are facing a dramatic slowdown in cargo, but they could see the exact opposite in a matter of weeks.

Cargo leaving China for the US will now carry a drastically lower tariff rate, compared to the 145% tariff that was in place for six weeks.

Ivan Rodriguez reports on the potential impact.

It was a dramatic de-escalation in the brewing trade war between the US and China.

Now, experts say retailers will likely front load more cargo during the pause and work against the clock to bring in inventory before things change again.

A little over a week ago, the Port of Seattle had zero ships docked.

But things are already looking different.

Looking out over the bay right now.

We saw container ships and you got a grain vessel at anchor right now.

And, Yeah.

So we're we're pretty busy right now.

For the next 90 days, cargo leaving China and entering the U.S.

will carry a 30% tariff rate instead of the previous 145% tariff.

Ryan Caulkins, commission vice president for the Port of Seattle, predicts retailers are going to take advantage of the lower tariff, which means U.S.

ports are likely to get busier.

We anticipate that by mid-summer that we're going to see a surge, we're going to need to staff up significantly.

Retailers made a similar move before the first wave of tariffs took effect in April.

Stockpiling imports in March.

We've seen in our business roughly a 30 to 40% decrease in volumes coming out of China into the US.

A large part of that, if not the entirety, is a result of most shippers pressing the pause button.

The expectation is that that pent up supply will now make its way back into the supply chain, and hence back into our organization.

Caulkins says the whipsaw environment is anything but ideal for business.

We really prefer to have really steady certain trade relations so that we can manage more optimally.

This is this is not a great scenario for us.

Even though we are talking about a significantly lower tariff rate, Caulkins says 30% is still very high and that those taxes will need to be passed on to the consumer in some way.

In Atlanta, Ivan Rodriguez.

The Trump administration is threatening 40% cuts to the National Institutes of Health.

The NIH is the world's premier biomedical research agency, and sends millions of dollars to San Diego facilities like the Salk Institute and UC San Diego, as Kpbs reporter Alexander Nguyen shows us, local leaders say these cuts will undo years of medical research.

All of my research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Sara van Dijk is a second year PhD student at UC San Diego.

She says she got into biomedical research after donating a kidney to her father at 19.

That was actually my first experience being in any sort of academic medical setting.

It was at the Mayo Clinic and I got to see so many cool processes, how all these different doctors and researchers came together to create this surgery that is so revolutionary and can save so many lives.

But now her education and career as a researcher are uncertain.

My outlook as a future career researcher is looking bleak.

That's because the Trump administration is calling for cuts to the NIH, calling the agency too big and unfocused.

The institutes are the largest funder of cancer research, which is the second leading cause of death in the US.

UC San Diego vice chancellor for research Corinne Peek-Asa says the cuts have real consequences.

The university is looking at staffing cuts and shuttering clinical trials for potential new cures.

But more importantly, new researchers are looking elsewhere to start the research.

We are watching our young investigators go to industry or to other countries.

We have a workforce that we can't build up, and we have a pipeline of discoveries that we can't afford to interrupt.

It's no secret that San Diego is a biomedical research hub, as evidenced by this long list of institutions affected.

It's about three pages long.

But the real danger isn't the loss of funding or the brain drain, but years of medical research.

There are a pipelines of biomedical suppliers in the industry that are impacted by us stopping this research.

All of the experiments that might have the next groundbreaking discovery are stopped in their tracks.

San Diego County Supervisor Tara Larson Remer is introducing a board resolution on June 3rd, asking Congress to restore these cuts.

As for Van Dijk, she is considering finishing her education elsewhere.

I'm actually a dual citizen of the Netherlands, so that's a place I've been potentially looking, and they've invested a lot of, funding into their research program, so it's definitely a possibility.

Alexander Nguyen, Kpbs news.

Nearly two thirds of Americans with Alzheimer's are women.

Kpbs health reporter Heidi DeMarco says a UC San Diego study is trying to find out why and whether lifestyle changes could help prevent it.

Women, inflammation and Tau study is tracking how lifestyle factors like sleep quality, diet and activity might drive up inflammation and how it may be linked to Alzheimer's disease.

Along with how maybe sex hormones like estrogen and and testosterone might impact that too.

We might be able to understand how best to intervene to improve things which will actually have a cognitive benefit to women.

Sarah Banks is a neuropsychologist who is co-leading the study.

So far, the early data found that how women sleep may be a risk factor, that sleep apnea is this under-recognized, highly treatable component that might be driving some of the some of the sleep, some of the memory problems in Alzheimer's disease.

A surprising 70% of women in the study had undiagnosed sleep apnea.

Aaron Sunderman is a cognitive neuroscientist who co-leads the study.

She says that sleep disruption can lead to higher levels of tau in the brain, especially in women with a genetic risk for Alzheimer's.

Tau pathology is a buildup of abnormal tau protein that leads to the memory deficits that we see in Alzheimer's disease.

Women tend to have more tau, and we are trying to understand why.

And we think inflammation might be a culprit.

A family History of Dementia and Alzheimer's made joining the study personal for 76 year old Sharon Lee.

I eat pretty well and I try to exercise, just not my body, but also my brain, you know, do new things and, you know, keep active.

Participants commit to multiple clinic visits over two years.

They do imaging.

They do blood draws, lumbar puncture, cognitive testing.

Participants get health feedback, a cognitive score, and a copy of the brain scan.

The researchers hope their findings can lead to better prevention, especially if everyday habits like sleep, diet or exercise turn out to play a big role.

They are looking for 50 more women over 65 to join.

We hope to get a diverse group of women in that reflect the population, so that our results can help to generalize to not just one specific demographic group, but to women in general.

It's a commitment, but one that researchers say could unlock answers for generations to come.

Heidi DeMarco, Kpbs news.

Many new college graduates looking for work right now are having a difficult time securing a job, but there are things that candidates can do to stand out.

Jenn Sullivan sits down with a career expert to discuss tips on how to get hired.

Graduation is an exciting time for students, as many close the chapter on their education and get ready to find their first job out of college.

It's really important for them to treat looking for their next opportunity like a full time job.

Brandi Britton is a career expert at the recruiting firm Robert Half.

She says this can be a challenging time for graduates trying to find a job.

In the numbers show that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently released their unemployment data and found nearly 6% of recent college graduates were unemployed.

That's about two percentage points higher than the national unemployment rate.

Individuals who are willing to go on site for positions are flexible with what their starting salary is.

Are being considered for some of the most opportunities.

Robert Half recently conducted a survey about hiring and found 71% of Gen Z respondents said getting noticed and securing an interview is their biggest challenge.

Let everyone know that you are looking for work.

Britton also recommends working with a mentor.

Utilize your school's career services.

Connect with alumni in the field you want.

Enter and highlight your experiences in college to show relevant skills before an interview.

She recommends you should always research the company and ask questions.

Consider contract work.

That's a great way for new grads to get additional skills.

Career experts estimate it can take college graduates 3 to 6 months to get hired.

So be patient.

For consumer watch, I'm Jenn Sullivan.

At least 16 students in the San Diego Unified School District have destroyed their school issued laptops as part of a TikTok challenge.

Kpbs education reporter Katie Anastas says the district is asking families for help to stop what it calls a troubling trend.

It's called the Chromebook Challenge, and it involves sticking sharp objects like paperclips or pencil LED into the USB ports of Chromebooks.

It can cause the laptops to spark or smoke.

The district's student school board members urged their classmates not to participate.

In a message to the district.

Morse High School senior Joseph Cruz wrote, quote, it's wasteful, dangerous, and everyone loses.

I'm highly advising my classmates to not join in on this careless trend.

We're better than this.

San Diego Unified students are issued new Chromebooks in second, sixth, and ninth grade.

The district says at least 16 students from three different schools have destroyed their computers by participating in the challenge.

The district says Chromebooks cost about $450 each to replace, and that discipline was handled by each school.

Katie Anastas, Kpbs news.

Some pretty quiet weather as we go through this week, which means you can probably get out.

Enjoy it fairly well.

There is a limited marine layer for us.

It's why we've kept kind of a warm pattern here right through the middle of the week.

So while we do have some areas of the low clouds, is not as present as we can often see this time of year.

Meanwhile, as you work your way into the weekend, I know it's a big holiday weekend for most.

Our temperatures will be fairly seasonable for this time of year.

May of course, and as we trend into the start of June, I do think we'll see a gradual warming trend.

But overall, I don't think there is anything too extreme for us.

Ultimately, tonight, pretty quiet out there.

Couple of marine clouds, but not a lot.

60 degrees for the low in the city as you work your way towards Borrego Springs.

We're at 62.

52 in Escondido and El Cajon.

Coming in at 57.

High pressure, keeping the southwestern US dry and quiet.

Really not much going on across the entire region for some of our desert communities.

It does start to get a little hot here, especially as you work your way even farther inland.

So those numbers trending up and up.

You can see Borrego Springs 100 for the day as we head into tomorrow.

Meanwhile, in the city will hit 77.

Go to Oceanside 78.

Some sunshine out there for just about all.

As I said, that marine layer very limited.

So it's going to be pretty bright throughout much of the day.

We're so used to the gray as we get through this time of year and then heading into the June gloom, but you can tell that marine layer makes more of an impact through Friday and Saturday.

And that's when our temperatures come back to where we want to be this time of year in the lower 70s for our coastal communities.

So the trend is down after we go through about Wednesday and Thursday for most locations, we're close to 90 in our Inland communities, at least in the upper 80s here with lots of sunshine before we fall into Friday and Saturday back into the lower 80s, even mid 70s for Saturday.

Beautiful start to the weekend and for our mountain communities.

Memorial day starts in the upper 60s.

You can see that fall though, at least for Friday.

Back to the lower 60s.

Desert communities, the triple digits on the board.

In fact, the 105 range for Wednesday and Thursday before we start to come back down into the 90s for Kpbs news, I'm AccuWeather meteorologist Melissa Constanzer.

I'm Amna Nawaz tonight on the News Hour.

Former President Biden says he's been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer.

A look at what his diagnosis means.

That's coming up at seven after Evening Edition on Kpbs.

And here's a look at what we're working on for tomorrow in the Kpbs newsroom.

NPR's Morning Edition examines the connections between climate change and extreme weather.

This comes during a tornado season that has seen several large outbreaks.

And Kpbs Midday Edition has an interview with a transgender military member.

As the Trump administration orders an end to transgender service in the armed forces, you can find tonight's stories on our website, kpbs.org.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Maya Trabulsi.

Good night.

Major funding for Kpbs Evening Edition has been made possible in part by Bill Howe, family of companies providing San Diego with plumbing, heating, air restoration and flood services for over 40 years.

Call one 800 Bill Howe or visit Bill howe.com.

And by the Conrad Prebys Foundation.

Darlene Marcos Shiley And by the following.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.