President Trump’s foray this week into the fire rebuilding process in Pacific Palisades has been met with confusion and rolled eyes from local officials who say he’s now railing against projects that have never even been proposed.
Trump said Thursday he planned to stop a low-income housing project from being developed in Pacific Palisades. His promise, made during a Cabinet meeting, marked the second time this week he has weighed in on local housing issues in the fire-scarred Palisades.
“They want to build a low-income housing project right in the middle of everything in the Palisades, and I’m not going to allow it to happen,” Trump said. “I’m not going to let these people destroy the value of their houses.”
The comments left politicians around Los Angeles and California scratching their heads: what low-income housing project was the president referring to?
Both Councilmember Traci Park and Mayor Karen Bass said they did not know of a major, low-income housing project coming to the Palisades.
“There are no plans to bring low-income housing to the Palisades,” Bass said in a phone interview with The Times on Thursday from Washington, D.C. “It’s not true. There couldn’t possibly be a project that neither the councilmember nor the mayor would have any knowledge of.”
Trump also took aim at Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday as he announced an executive order to “preempt” the city’s permitting process to make it easier for fire victims to rebuild.
The order, if implemented, would allow residents to self-certify to federal authorities instead of going through city bureaucracy for permits.
Bass said Thursday that she would welcome an executive order that would bring the insurance and banking industries together to help Angelenos whose houses burned down get more significant insurance payouts and longer-term mortgages.
The Governor’s Office also said they had no idea what low-income housing project Trump was referring to on Thursday.
“The president of the United States is a bumbling idiot and has no idea what he’s talking about,” said Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for Newsom. “This narrative that Gavin Newsom is trying to build high-density, low-income housing in the Palisades and turn them into ‘Newsomvilles’ is absurd.”
Gardon said the state is providing resources for developers to rebuild below-market-rate housing that was destroyed in the Palisades fire, which tore through the beach-side enclave in January 2025, killing 12 and destroying thousands of homes and structures.
In July, the governor committed $101 million to help rebuilding efforts of “affordable multifamily rental housing in the fire-devastated Los Angeles region.”
The financing was for areas affected by both the Palisades and Eaton fires.
The program allows affordable housing developers to apply for financing and prioritizes projects that are near wildfire burn areas, ready for immediate construction.
The program required the developments to remain affordable for more than a half-century to receive the funding.
Trump did not specify Thursday whether he was speaking about the July announcement or about a specific project.
“That was money that went to the L.A. area for the four communities impacted by the fires to help developers to rebuild low-income mixed-use housing that was destroyed by the fires,” Gardon said.
Maryam Zar, a Palisades resident, said that many in the Palisades feared a new project on the site of a Shell gas station that developer Justin Kohanoff said he wanted to build into an eight-story, 100-unit, low-income building.
Kohanoff’s father, Saeed Kohanoff, declined to comment beyond saying the family has no immediate plans to develop the property.
The Trump administration did not immediately specify what low-income housing project, if any in particular, the president was speaking about.
For months after the Palisades fire, many who had lost their homes eagerly awaited the Los Angeles Fire Department’s after-action report, which was expected to provide a frank evaluation of the agency’s handling of the disaster.
A first draft was completed by August, possibly earlier.
In one instance, LAFD officials removed language saying that the decision not to fully staff up and pre-deploy all available crews and engines ahead of the extreme wind forecast “did not align” with the department’s policy and procedures during red flag days.
Instead, the final report said that the number of engine companies rolled out ahead of the fire “went above and beyond the standard LAFD pre-deployment matrix.”
Another deleted passage in the report said that some crews waited more than an hour for an assignment the day of the fire. A section on “failures” was renamed “primary challenges,” and an item saying that crews and leaders had violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.
Other changes in the report, which was overseen by then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva, seemed similarly intended to soften its impact and burnish the Fire Department’s image. Two drafts contain notes written in the margins, including a suggestion to replace the image on the cover page — which showed palm trees on fire against an orange sky — with a “positive” one, such as “firefighters on the frontline,” the note said. The final report’s cover displays the LAFD seal.
The Times obtained seven drafts of the report through the state Public Records Act. Only three of those drafts are marked with dates: Two versions are dated Aug. 25, and there is a draft from Oct. 6, two days before the LAFD released the final report to the public.
No names are attached to the edits. It is unclear if names were in the original documents and had been removed in the drafts given to The Times.
The deletions and revisions are likely to deepen concerns over the LAFD’s ability to acknowledge its mistakes before and during the blaze — and to avoid repeating them in the future. Already, Palisades fire victims have expressed outrage over unanswered questions and contradictory information about the LAFD’s preparations after the dangerous weather forecast, including how fire officials handled a smaller New Year’s Day blaze, called the Lachman fire, that rekindled into the massive Palisades fire six days later.
Some drafts described an on-duty LAFD captain calling Fire Station 23 in the Palisades on Jan. 7 to report that “the Lachman fire started up again,” indicating the captain’s belief that the Palisades fire was caused by a reignition of the earlier blaze.
The reference was deleted in one draft, then restored in the public version, which otherwise contains only a brief mention of the previous fire. Some have said that the after-action report’s failure to thoroughly examine the Lachman fire reignition was designed to shield LAFD leadership and Mayor Karen Bass’ administration from criticism and accountability.
Weeks after the report’s release, The Times reported that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the burn area on Jan. 2, even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch. Another battalion chief assigned to the LAFD’s risk management section knew about the complaints for months, but the department kept that information out of the after-action report.
“A full understanding of the Lachman fire response is essential to an accurate accounting of what occurred during the January wildfires,” Bass wrote.
Fire Chief Jaime Moore, who started in the job last month, has been tasked with commissioning the independent investigation that Bass requested.
The LAFD did not answer detailed questions from The Times about the altered drafts, including queries about why the material about the reignition was removed, then brought back. Villanueva did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for Bass said her office did not demand changes to the drafts and only asked the LAFD to confirm the accuracy of items such as how the weather and the department’s budget factored into the disaster.
“The report was written and edited by the Fire Department,” the spokesperson, Clara Karger, said in an email. “We did not red-line, review every page or review every draft of the report. We did not discuss the Lachman Fire because it was not part of the report.”
Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, told The Times that she reviewed a paper copy of a “working document” about a week before the final report was made public. She said she raised concerns with Villanueva and the city attorney’s office over the possibility that “material findings” were or would be changed. She also said she consulted a private attorney about her “obligations” as a commissioner overseeing the LAFD’s operations, though that conversation “had nothing to do with the after-action” report.
Hudley Hayes said she noticed only small differences between the final report and the draft she reviewed. For example, she said, “mistakes” had been changed to “challenges,” and names of firefighters had been removed.
“I was completely OK with it,” she said. “All the things I read in the final report did not in any way obfuscate anything, as far as I’m concerned.”
She reiterated her position that an examination of missteps during the Lachman fire did not belong in the after-action report, a view not shared by former LAFD chief officers interviewed by The Times.
“The after-action report should have gone back all the way to Dec. 31,” said former LAFD Battalion Chief Rick Crawford, who retired from the agency last year and is now emergency and crisis management coordinator for the U.S. Capitol. “There are major gaps in this after-action report.”
Former LAFD Asst. Chief Patrick Butler, who is now chief of the Redondo Beach Fire Department, agreed that the Lachman fire should have been addressed in the report and said the deletions were “a deliberate effort to hide the truth and cover up the facts.”
He said the removal of the reference to the LAFD’s violations of the national Standard Firefighting Orders and Watchouts was a “serious issue” because they were “written in the blood” of firefighters killed in the line of duty. Without citing the national guidelines, the final report said that the Palisades fire’s extraordinary nature “occasionally caused officers and firefighters to think and operate beyond standard safety protocols.”
The final after-action report does not mention that a person called authorities to report seeing smoke in the area on Jan. 3. The LAFD has since provided conflicting information about how it responded to that call.
Villanueva told The Times in October that firefighters returned to the burn area and “cold-trailed” an additional time, meaning they used their hands to feel for heat and dug out hot spots. But records showed they cleared the call within 34 minutes.
Fire officials did not answer questions from The Times about the discrepancy. In an emailed statement this week, the LAFD said crews had used remote cameras, walked around the burn site and used a 20-foot extension ladder to access a fenced-off area but did not see any smoke or fire.
“After an extensive investigation, the incident was determined to be a false alarm,” the statement said.
The most significant changes in the various iterations of the after-action report involved the LAFD’s deployment decisions before the fire, as the wind warnings became increasingly dire.
In a series of reports earlier this year, The Times found that top LAFD officials decided not to staff dozens of available engines that could have been pre-deployed to the Palisades and other areas flagged as high risk, as it had done in the past.
One draft contained a passage in the “failures” section on what the LAFD could have done: “If the Department had adequately augmented all available resources as done in years past in preparation for the weather event, the Department would have been required to recall members for all available positions unfilled by voluntary overtime, which would have allowed for all remaining resources to be staffed and available for augmentation, pre-deployment, and pre-positioning.” The draft said the decision was an attempt to be “fiscally responsible” that went against the department’s policy and procedures.
That language was absent in the final report, which said that the LAFD “balanced fiscal responsibility with proper preparation for predicted weather and fire behavior by following the LAFD predeployment matrix.”
Even with the deletions, the published report delivered a harsh critique of the LAFD’s performance during the Palisades fire, pointing to a disorganized response, failures in communication and chiefs who didn’t understand their roles. The report found that top commanders lacked a fundamental knowledge of wildland firefighting tactics, including “basic suppression techniques.”
A paperwork error resulted in the use of only a third of the state-funded resources that were available for pre-positioning in high-risk areas, the report said. And when the fire broke out on the morning of Jan. 7, the initial dispatch called for only seven engine companies, when the weather conditions required 27.
There was confusion among firefighters over which radio channel to use. The report said that three L.A. County engines showed up within the first hour, requesting an assignment and receiving no reply. Four other LAFD engines waited 20 minutes without an assignment.
In the early afternoon, the staging area — where engines were checking in — was overrun by fire.
The report made 42 recommendations, ranging from establishing better communication channels to more training. In a television interview this month, Moore said the LAFD has adopted about three-quarters of them.
On her first day in office, Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness.
The declaration allowed the city to cut through red tape, including through no-bid contracts, and to start Inside Safe, Bass’ signature program focused on moving homeless people off the streets and into interim housing.
On Tuesday, nearly three years after she took the helm, and with homelessness trending down two years in a row for the first time in recent years, the mayor announced that she will lift the state of emergency on Nov. 18.
“We have begun a real shift in our city’s decades-long trend of rising homelessness,” Bass said in a memorandum to the City Council.
Still, the mayor said, there is much work to do.
“The crisis remains, and so does our urgency,” she said.
The mayor’s announcement followed months of City Council pushback on the lengthy duration of the state of emergency, which the council had initially approved.
Some council members argued that the state of emergency allowed the mayor’s office to operate out of public view and that contracts and leases should once again be presented before them with public testimony and a vote.
Councilmember Tim McOsker has been arguing for months that it was time to return to business as usual.
“Emergency powers are designed to allow the government to suspend rules and respond rapidly when the situation demands it, but at some point those powers must conclude,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
McOsker said the move will allow the council to “formalize” some of the programs started during the emergency, while incorporating more transparency.
Council members had been concerned that the state of emergency would end without first codifying Executive Directive 1, which expedites approvals for homeless shelters as well as for developments that are 100% affordable and was issued by Bass shortly after she took office.
On Oct. 28, the council voted for the city attorney to draft an ordinance that would enshrine the executive directive into law.
The mayor’s announcement follows positive reports about the state of homelessness in the city.
As of September, the mayor’s Inside Safe program had moved more than 5,000 people into interim housing since its inception at the end of 2022. Of those people, more than 1,243 have moved into permanent housing, while another 1,636 remained in interim housing.
This year, the number of homeless people living in shelters or on the streets of the city dropped 3.4%, according to the annual count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The number of unsheltered homeless people in the city dropped by an even steeper margin of 7.9%.
The count, however, has its detractors. A study by Rand found that the annual survey missed nearly a third of homeless people in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — primarily those sleeping without tents or vehicles.
In June, a federal judge decided not to put Los Angeles’ homelessness programs into receivership, while saying that the city had failed to meet some of the terms of a settlement agreement with the nonprofit LA Alliance for Human Rights.
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, said the end of the emergency does not mean the crisis is over.
“It only means that we must build fiscally sustainable systems that can respond effectively,” she said. “By transitioning from emergency measures to long-term, institutional frameworks, we’re ensuring consistent, accountable support for people experiencing homelessness.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
Tamara Wallace has resigned as the mayor of South Lake Tahoe after her recent admission that she stole money from a church where she worked as an administrator.In a letter to local media earlier this month that included the confession, Wallace said she had been recovering from a suicide attempt and reflecting on the traumatic experiences in her life. She said she aimed to pay back “every cent I have taken.”The El Dorado County district attorney said it was investigating the stolen funds and Wallace’s confession.Wallace submitted her resignation on Monday night, which was effective immediately, the city said. In her letter, Wallace also urged South Lake Tahoe Pro Tem Cody Bass to resign, following his recent arrest. Bass was arrested on Sept. 25 in connection with an alleged assault and threats at a bar where he had been banned. Deputies reviewed surveillance footage and determined Bass was the aggressor. He’s charged with misdemeanor assault, trespassing and harassment.In a previous statement to KCRA 3, Bass said, “I can guarantee my community I did nothing wrong, I believe in due process, bring on the trial.”The city of South Lake Tahoe said its next council meeting is set for Oct. 21. The agenda will include a “council reorganization to select a mayor and mayor pro tem” and “methods for filling the vacant city council seat,” the city said.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
In a letter to local media earlier this month that included the confession, Wallace said she had been recovering from a suicide attempt and reflecting on the traumatic experiences in her life. She said she aimed to pay back “every cent I have taken.”
The El Dorado County district attorney said it was investigating the stolen funds and Wallace’s confession.
Wallace submitted her resignation on Monday night, which was effective immediately, the city said.
In her letter, Wallace also urged South Lake Tahoe Pro Tem Cody Bass to resign, following his recent arrest.
Bass was arrested on Sept. 25 in connection with an alleged assault and threats at a bar where he had been banned.
Deputies reviewed surveillance footage and determined Bass was the aggressor. He’s charged with misdemeanor assault, trespassing and harassment.
In a previous statement to KCRA 3, Bass said, “I can guarantee my community I did nothing wrong, I believe in due process, bring on the trial.”
The city of South Lake Tahoe said its next council meeting is set for Oct. 21.
The agenda will include a “council reorganization to select a mayor and mayor pro tem” and “methods for filling the vacant city council seat,” the city said.
Former L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner is planning to announce a challenge to Mayor Karen Bass in the 2026 election, arguing that the city has failed to properly respond to crime, rising housing costs and the devastating Palisades fire.
Beutner, a philanthropist and former investment banker who lives in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, would become the first serious challenger to Bass, who is running for her second and final term.
Beutner said in an interview Saturday that city officials at all levels showed a “failure of leadership” on the fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead.
The inferno seriously damaged Beutner’s house, forcing him and his family to rent elsewhere in the neighborhood, and destroyed his mother-in-law’s home entirely.
“When you have broken hydrants, a reservoir that’s broken and is out of action, broken [fire] trucks that you can’t dispatch ahead of time, when you don’t pre-deploy at the adequate level, when you don’t choose to hold over the Monday firefighters to be there on Tuesday to help fight the fire — to me, it’s a failure of leadership,” Beutner said.
“At the end of the day,” he added, “the buck stops with the mayor.”
A representative for Bass’ campaign declined to comment.
Beutner’s attacks come days after federal prosecutors filed charges in the Palisades fire, accusing a 29-year-old of intentionally starting a New Year’s Day blaze that later rekindled into the deadly inferno.
With the federal investigation tied up, the Fire Department released a long-awaited after-action report Wednesday. The 70-page report found that firefighters were hampered by poor communication, inexperienced leadership, a lack of resources and an ineffective process for recalling them back to work. Bass announced a number of changes in light of the report.
Beutner, a onetime advisor to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, could pose a serious political threat to Bass. He would come to the race with a wide range of experiences — finance, philanthropy, local government and even the struggling journalism industry.
Although seven other people have filed paperwork to run for her seat, none have the fundraising muscle or name recognition to mount a major campaign. Rick Caruso, the real estate developer whom Bass defeated in 2022, has publicly flirted with the idea of another run but has stopped short of announcing a decision.
Bass beat Caruso by a wide margin in 2022 even though the shopping mall mogul outspent her by an enormous margin. Caruso has been an outspoken critic of her mayorship, particularly on her response to the Palisades fire.
Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said he believes that Beutner would face an uphill climb in attempting to unseat Bass — even with the criticism surrounding the handling of the Palisades fire. However, his entry into the race could inspire other big names to launch their own mayoral campaigns, shattering the “wall of invincibility” that Bass has tried to create.
“If Beutner jumps in and starts to get some traction, it makes it easier for Caruso to jump in,” Guerra said. “Because all you’ve got to do is come in second in the primary [election], and then see what happens in the general.”
Earlier Saturday, The Times reported that Beutner’s longtime X account had featured — then quickly removed — the banner image “AUSTIN for LA MAYOR,” along with the words: “This account is being used for campaign purposes by Austin Beutner for LA Mayor 2026.” That logo was also added and then removed from other Beutner social media accounts.
Beutner’s announcement, which is currently planned for Monday, comes in a year of crises for the mayor and her city. She was out of the country in January, taking part in a diplomatic mission to Ghana, when the ferocious Palisades fire broke out.
Upon her return, she faced withering criticism over the city’s preparation for the high winds, as well as Fire Department operations and the overall emergency response.
In the months that followed, the city was faced with a $1-billion budget shortfall, triggered in part by pay raises for city workers that were approved by Bass. To close the gap, the City Council eliminated about 1,600 vacant positions, slowed down hiring at the Los Angeles Police Department and rejected Bass’ proposal for dozens of additional firefighters.
By June, Bass faced a different emergency: waves of masked and heavily armed federal agents apprehending immigrants at car washes, Home Depots and elsewhere, sparking furious street protests.
Bass’ standing with voters was badly damaged in the wake of the Palisades fire, with polling in March showing that fewer than 20% of L.A. residents gave her fire response high marks.
But after President Trump put the city in his cross hairs, the mayor regained her political footing, responding swiftly and sharply. She mobilized her allies against the immigration crackdown and railed against the president’s deployment of the National Guard, arguing that the soldiers were “used as props.”
Beutner — who, like Bass, is a Democrat — said he voted for Bass four years ago and had come to regret his choice.
He described Los Angeles as a city “adrift,” with unsolved property crimes, rising trash fees and housing that is unaffordable to many.
Beutner said that he supports Senate Bill 79, the law that will force the city to allow taller, denser buildings near rail stations, “in concept.”
“I just wish that we had leadership in Los Angeles that had been ahead of this, so we would have had a greater say in some of the rules,” he said. “But conceptually, yes, we’ve got to build more housing.”
Beutner is a co-founder and former president of Evercore Partners, a financial services company that advises its clients on mergers, acquisitions and other transactions. In 2008, he retired from that firm — now simply called Evercore Inc. — after he was seriously injured in a bicycling accident.
In 2010, he became Villaraigosa’s jobs czar, taking on the elevated title of first deputy mayor and receiving wide latitude to strike business deals on Villaraigosa’s behalf, just as the city was struggling to emerge from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Slightly more than a year into his job, Beutner filed paperwork to begin exploring a run for mayor. He secured the backing of former Mayor Richard Riordan and many in the business community but pulled the plug in 2012.
In 2014, Beutner became publisher of the Los Angeles Times, where he focused on digital experimentation and forging deeper ties with readers. He lasted roughly a year in that job before Tribune Publishing Co., the parent company of The Times, ousted him.
Three years later, Beutner was hired as the superintendent of L.A. Unified, which serves schoolchildren in Los Angeles and more than two dozen other cities and unincorporated areas. He quickly found himself at odds with the teachers union, which staged a six-day strike.
The union settled for a two-year package of raises totaling 6%. Beutner, for his part, signed off on a parcel tax to generate additional education funding, but voters rejected the proposal.
In 2022, after leaving the district, Beutner led the successful campaign for Proposition 28, which requires that a portion of California’s general fund go toward visual and performing arts instruction.
Earlier this year, Beutner and several others sued L.A. Unified, accusing the district of violating Proposition 28 by misusing state arts funding and failing to provide legally required arts instruction to students.
He also is immersed in philanthropy, having founded the nonprofit Vision to Learn, which provides vision screenings, eye exams and glasses to children in low-income communities.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced Sunday that Los Angeles police will increase patrols around houses of worship after a deadly shooting earlier in the day during services at a Michigan church.
Five people were killed, including the shooter, and authorities say it is possible there are more.
L.A. has thousands of houses of worship, including hundreds of storefront churches, according to the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture.
“This type of violence is reprehensible and should have no place in our country,” Bass said in a statement posted on social media.
Sometime around 10:25 a.m. Sunday, 40-year-old Thomas Jacob Sanford drove a vehicle through the front doors of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc Township, exited the vehicle and started shooting, according to preliminary information released by local authorities.
Hundreds of congregants were inside, including many who shielded children, authorities said.
Grand Blanc Township Police Chief William Renye said at a news conference that Sanford was shot and killed by law enforcement officers at 10:33 a.m. in the church parking lot.
Renye said 10 gunshot victims were transported to hospitals, including two who died. Seven are in stable condition while one victim remains in critical condition.
Sanford is believed to have also intentionally set the church on fire, Renye said.
After authorities entered the burned church, they found two more bodies. Renye said there may be others; authorities are aware of others not yet accounted for.
After authorities killed Sanford, law enforcement officers searched multiple nearby churches regarding bomb threats, said Lt. Kim Vetter of the Michigan State Police. Vetter declined to say whether the churches searched were all LDS or other denominations and faiths.
The Los Angeles Police Commission has forwarded the names of three finalists for LAPD chief to Mayor Karen Bass — but like much else about the search process, the identities of the front-runners have been kept a secret.
The announcement came as the commission returned from closed session at the end of a special meeting Wednesday. Commission President Erroll Southers said the board had “discharged its duties as set forth in the city charter…and will be forwarding a list of recommended candidates to the mayor,” according to a recording of the meeting.
He then made a motion to adjourn the meeting, without further comment. The brief announcement went largely unnoticed outside the commission, which did not issue a news release or otherwise publicly announce the decision.
The move brings the city one step closer to ending what has been a months-long search for what is widely considered one of the most high-profile and challenging jobs in law enforcement. The post has been vacant since February, when former Chief Michel Moore retired.
Under the city charter, the commission — a five-member civilian body that acts like a board of directors for the LAPD — is required to select three finalists for Bass to consider. But if the mayor is unsatisfied with the choices, she can ask commissioners to send additional names or continue the search. Whomever she picks will then need to be confirmed by the full City Council.
Bass has declined through a spokesman numerous requests for comment from The Times about her priorities for chief, and she did not reschedule an earlier interview about the topic that she had canceled.
Zach Seidl, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said in a text message there was “[n]othing to share about the search at this time other than the Mayor is continuing to work with urgency on this search and her work to make LA safer.” He did not respond to a follow-up question about whether the mayor had started considering the finalists.
Wednesday’s announcement squares with a previous timeline given by commissioners, who said they hope to finish evaluating what could be dozens of candidates and offer Bass their top three suggestions by the end of August.
That hasn’t stopped fevered speculation among LAPD rank-and-file and command staff about who their next leader will be.
There were at least 25 applicants for the job.
Among the outside executives who received second interviews, according to sources, were Jim McDonnell, a one-time LAPD assistant chief and former Los Angeles County sheriff; former Houston and Miami chief Art Acevedo; and Robert Arcos, a former LAPD assistant chief who works for the L.A. County district attorney’s office. A high-profile former chief from a West Coast department was also said to have applied, but that name has never been confirmed.
Those entries, confirmed by multiple sources, add another dynamic to what many consider a wide-open race to be the city’s next top cop.
The department veterans who received second interviews, sources said, are: Assistant Chief Blake Chow, who oversees LAPD special operations; Deputy Chief Emada Tingirides, commanding officer of the department’s South Bureau; Deputy Chief Donald Graham, who heads the Transit Services Bureau; Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, head of the Detective Bureau; and Cmdr. Lillian Carranza of the Central Bureau.
Finding the city’s next police chief is one of the most closely watched decisions made by any mayor.
Bass and commissioners have in recent months embarked on a citywide listening tour to canvass residents, officers and business owners about what they want to see in the next chief. The mayor has also made regular visits to police roll calls across the city.
During the community forums, many attendees pushed for the selection of an insider who is attuned to policing in a city as vast and diverse as L.A.
Others talked about the importance of picking someone who understands the complicated history between the department and the communities it policies. And yet, unlike in other recent chief searches, a growing number of people within the LAPD are pushing for an outside candidate to breathe new life into the organization.
The process has been shrouded in an unusual level of secrecy.
Although the names of candidates have occasionally been withheld to protect the identities of those working in other cities, officials this time have also declined to reveal how many people applied for the position, only saying that the number was “more than 25.” Sources have since told The Times that the number was more than 30.
In the absence of information, the search has been the subject of almost daily rumors inside the department. A LinkedIn post by a former LAPD sergeant-turned-policing consultant went viral after it claimed to reveal a list of semi-finalists. Among those named in the post was Anne Kirkpatrick, the current police commissioner in New Orleans, who quickly issued denials of any interest in the LAPD job.
At stake is the chance to lead the country’s third-largest local police force at a crucial time in its history. Whoever gets the job will be inheriting a wary department eager for clear leadership and a city worried about crime and the use of force.
One of the key questions facing Bass is whether an outsider would be better at introducing reforms in the organization, rather than someone who has come up through the ranks here and already understands the political and labor landscape.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the powerful bargaining body for the city’s rank-and-file officers, has not publicly staked out its position on the insider-outsider debate.
One of Moore’s former assistant chiefs, Dominic Choi, was picked as interim leader. Moore has stayed on as a consultant on the chief search, and Choi has said he will not seek the job permanently.
More risk management than crime-fighting, the job of running the LAPD — a vast, multibillion-dollar organization with more than 10,000 employees that operates under an intense microscope — involves balancing demands that are often at odds:
Even though violent crime numbers have started to level out, with the exception of robberies, anxiety over public safety remains high among many Angelenos; the number of police shootings has also increased, raising concerns from the Police Commission. Meanwhile, any new leader, particularly one from the outside, will be expected to be a quick study and hit the ground running.
Prognosticators have said Bass’ selection will indicate a lot about what direction she thinks the department is headed. Picking someone from within the organization to follow in Moore’s footsteps would signal that the mayor is looking to continue some of the reforms he started but would stop short of the wholesale changes that some have called for.
Choosing an outside candidate would signal that the mayor is seeking a new direction for the department, some observers say. The city has hired only two outside chiefs in the past 75 years: Willie L. Williams and William J. Bratton. Both selections followed seismic scandals: the Los Angeles uprising in 1992 and the Rampart scandal of the late 1990s that saw more than 70 police officers implicated in unprovoked shootings, assaults and evidence-planting.
Experts say the LAPD job is one of the toughest in law enforcement.
Any serious candidate will have to have a proven track record as an experienced leader. The chief must be comfortable speaking extemporaneously — and often in front of cameras — about the work of the police department through the progressive lens of the city’s elected leaders, including the mayor and City Council.
Whoever gets the job will need to navigate through many challenges at once, while dealing with the myriad issues confronting the city, including homelessness and the fentanyl crisis.
The next chief will also have to recruit and inspire a new generation of officers, some of whom weren’t even born when the department was forced to undergo sweeping changes in the wake of the Rampart scandal and who grew of age in the Black Lives Matter era.
The Olympics and the World Cup also loom as security challenges in coming years. Others are keen to see how the next chief will tackle a much-maligned discipline system that, depending on whom one asks, either lets too many bad cops off or has been weaponized to favor the well-connected.
In March, the city hired the Northern California-based headhunter Bob Murray & Associates to conduct the nationwide chief search — the same firm that helped pick Bratton more than two decades ago.
Joel Bryden, a vice president for the firm, said he could not discuss the search, referring questions to city officials.
“It’s our hard and fast rule,” said Bryden, one of the two main recruiters on the chief search. “We at least have kept everything confidential even though leaks have occurred, some accurate, and some not.”
Mayor Karen Bass has vetoed a proposed ballot measure to rework the disciplinary process at the Los Angeles Police Department — a step that could result in its removal from the Nov. 5 ballot.
In her veto letter to the City Council, Bass said the proposal, which would have allowed the police chief to fire officers accused of committing serious misconduct, “risks creating bureaucratic confusion” within the LAPD.
Bass said the proposal, which also would have reworked the composition of the department’s three-member disciplinary panels, provided “ambiguous direction” and “gaps in guidance.”
“I look forward to working with each of you to do a thorough and comprehensive review with officers, the department, and other stakeholders to ensure fairness for all,” she wrote. “The current system remains until this collaborative review is complete and can be placed before the voters.”
Bass issued her veto during the council’s summer recess, when meetings are canceled for three weeks. The deadline for reworking the language of the ballot proposal has already passed, City Clerk Holly Wolcott said.
“If the council does not override the veto or take any action, the measure will be pulled from the ballot,” Wolcott said in an email.
The council’s next meeting is scheduled for July 30. Whether it can muster 10 votes to override the mayor’s veto is unclear.
By issuing the veto, Bass effectively sided with top LAPD brass, who warned last month that the proposal would create a two-tier disciplinary system, with some offenses resulting in termination by the chief and others heading to a disciplinary panel known as a Board of Rights.
The mayor’s appointees on the Board of Police Commissioners also criticized the ballot proposal, saying they felt excluded from the deliberations. At least one commissioner voiced concern about the proposal’s creation of a binding arbitration process to resolve cases where an officer files an appeal of his or her termination.
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez expressed similar worries, arguing that binding arbitration would lead to more lenient outcomes for officers accused of serious wrongdoing. Soto-Martínez, who voted against the proposal last month, had also argued that the range of offenses that would lead to termination by the police chief was too narrow.
An aide to Soto-Martínez said Tuesday that his boss supports the veto.
Councilmember Tim McOsker, who spearheaded the ballot proposal, said he is “deeply disappointed” with the mayor’s action, arguing that it threatens the most significant reform of the LAPD’s disciplinary system in more than two decades.
If the council fails to override the veto, the next opportunity for major reform would not occur until the 2026 election, McOsker said.
“What this veto would do is put us back in the status quo for at least two years,” he said in an interview.
McOsker said he is still looking at the options for responding to the mayor’s veto. During the council’s deliberations last month, four council members — Soto-Martínez, Nithya Raman, Eunisses Hernandez and Curren Price — backed a proposal to seek additional changes to the ballot measure.
Soto-Martínez took aim at the decision to let a police chief fire officers for some offenses but not others, saying it would create “ambiguity” in the disciplinary system.
That proposal was defeated on a 9 to 4 vote. Had it passed, it would have effectively killed the ballot measure for this year’s election, since the deadline had passed for making extensive changes.
The proposal vetoed by Bass had been billed as a way to undo some of changes brought by Charter Amendment C, a ballot measure approved by voters in 2017, which paved the way for all-civilian disciplinary panels at the LAPD.
The ballot proposal would have reworked the system, ensuring that each panel would have have two civilian members and one commanding officer.
Representatives of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents about 8,800 rank-and-file officers, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Last month, the union issued a statement saying the ballot proposal struck “the right balance” on disciplinary issues, ensuring that officers who are terminated by a chief have access to an appeal process with binding arbitration.
After an initial round of interviews, the number of contenders to be the next Los Angeles police chief has been narrowed to about 10 names, according to multiple sources familiar with the nationwide search.
The pared-down list is divided between department veterans and outsiders, including several who have deep ties to Southern California law enforcement.
Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell, right, at a mayoral campaign event for Rick Caruso, center, in 2022. At left is former LAPD chief William J. Bratton. McDonnell, a one-time LAPD assistant chief, is said to be among the candidates for police chief.
(Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)
Among them is Jim McDonnell, a one-time LAPD assistant chief and former Los Angeles County Sheriff, whose name has circulated around LAPD headquarters and City Hall for months as a possible candidate. His entry, confirmed by at least three sources, adds another dynamic into what is considered by many to be a wide-open race to be the city’s next top cop.
The sources agreed to speak to The Times on the condition their names not be used because the search process is supposed to be confidential.
The department veterans who received second interviews, according to sources, are: Assistant Chief Blake Chow, who oversees LAPD special operations; Deputy Chief Emada Tingirides, commanding officer of the department’s South Bureau; Deputy Chief Donald Graham, who heads the Transit Services Bureau; Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, head of the Detective Bureau; and Cmdr. Lillian Carranza of the Central Bureau.
LAPD Deputy Chief Emada Tingirides speaks at an event in August.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton speaks at a news conference in April.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
LAPD Capt. Lillian Carranza during a news conference at police headquarters in 2018.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
The outside candidates who are also scheduled to be interviewed are former Houston and Miami chief Art Acevedo and Robert Arcos, a former LAPD assistant chief who works for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. Two female policing executives from outside agencies are also said to have received second interviews.
Art Acevedo, former police chief of Miami, Houston and Auston, speaks during a protest near Capitol Hill in Washington in June 2022.
(Susan Walsh / Associated Press)
LAPD Deputy Chief Robert Arcos at an inspection of officers in 2017.
(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
Recruiters are scheduled to conduct another round of interviews with the 10 or so contenders behind closed doors over the next few weeks, according to the sources.
The process has been shrouded in an unusual level of secrecy.
Although the names of candidates have occasionally been withheld to protect the identities of those working in other cities, officials this time have also declined to reveal how many people applied for the position, only saying that the number was “more than 25.” Sources have since told The Times that the number was more than 30.
At stake is the chance to lead the country’s third-largest local police force at a crucial time in its history. Whoever gets the job will be inheriting a wary department eager for clear leadership and a city worried about both crime and the use of force.
One of the key questions facing Mayor Karen Bass is whether an outsider would be better at introducing reforms in the organization, rather than someone who has come up through the ranks here and already understands the political and labor landscape.
Bass and members of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners have embarked on a citywide listening tour to canvass residents, officers and business owners about what they want to see in the next chief. During the public forums, many attendees pushed for the selection of an insider who is attuned to policing in a city as vast and diverse as L.A.
Others talked about the importance of picking someone who understands the complicated history between the department and the communities it policies. And yet, unlike in other recent chief searches, a growing number of people within the LAPD are pushing for an outside candidate to breathe new life into the organization.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the powerful bargaining body for the city’s rank-and-file officers, has not publicly staked out its position on the insider-outsider debate.
The search began with the February retirement of former Chief Michel Moore. One of his former assistant chiefs, Dominic Choi, was picked as interim leader. Moore has stayed on as a consultant on the chief’s search, and Choi has said he will not seek the job permanently.
More risk management than crime-fighting, the job of running the LAPD — a vast, multibillion-dollar organization with more than 10,000 employees that operates under an intense microscope — involves balancing demands that are often at odds: Violent crime such as homicides and robberies are up from this time last year; the number of police shootings has also increased, raising concerns from the Police Commission, the department’s civilian watchdog. Meanwhile, any new leader, particularly one from the outside, will be expected to be a quick study and hit the ground running.
The pool of contenders is more diverse and generally less experienced than in the recent past. At least four women are rumored to have made the cut, and all but two candidates are people of color. A woman has never been in charge in the LAPD’s long history. Nor has there ever been a Latino chief, in a city and department that are both now more than half Latino.
Commission officials have insisted publicly that race and gender will not be deciding factors in the selection process. Commission President Erroll G. Southers and the body’s other members have repeatedly said they are focused on picking the most qualified candidate instead of “checking any boxes.”
Southers declined to comment through a spokesperson.
Prognosticators have said Bass’ selection will say a lot about what direction she thinks the department is headed. Picking someone from within the organization to follow in Moore’s footsteps would signal that the mayor is looking to continue some of the reforms he started but would stop short of the wholesale changes that some have called for.
Choosing an outside candidate would signal that the mayor is seeking a new direction for the department, some observers say. The city has hired only two outside chiefs in the past 75 years: Willie L. Williams and William J. Bratton. Both selections followed seismic scandals: the Los Angeles uprising in 1992 and the Rampart scandal of the late 1990s that saw more than 70 police officers implicated in unprovoked shootings, assaults and evidence-planting.
The two current contenders with the most experience are both outsiders. After starting his career with the LAPD, McDonnell left to take the police chief job in Long Beach before a successful run for L.A. County Sheriff. He has worked at USC for the past few years, alongside Southers. Acevedo once served as California Highway Patrol chief for the Los Angeles Basin, before being tapped to be top cop for Austin, Houston, Miami and, most recently, Aurora, Colo.
The second round of interviews marks a key step in the months-long search. City officials initially said the hire would be finalized by late August or early September, but that timeline could stretch into the fall.
Bass will hire the next chief, choosing from nominees provided by the commission and an outside hiring firm. The deadline to apply closed late last month; initial interviews with candidates started a few days later.
Bass has repeatedly said that the feedback she receives will factor into her decision.
City Councilmember Tim McOsker said he understands the need for discretion around the search process, much like when, as a young City Hall staffer, he took part in the nationwide search that led to the hiring of Bratton. At the same time, he said, he thinks it’s important that Bass lays out her expectations before picking a chief, which is “one of the most important, and politically loaded decisions for a mayor.”
He pointed to the letter Bass sent the Council before her reappointment of Moore, in which she listed her expectations, from reducing violent crime to boosting community policing and holding officers accountable. McOsker said he thought the mayor should be equally clear about what she wants in the next chief.
The mayor’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Experts say the LAPD job is one of the toughest in law enforcement.
Any serious candidate will have to have a proven track record as an experienced leader. The chief must be comfortable speaking extemporaneously — and often in front of cameras — about the work of the police department through the progressive lens of the city’s elected leaders, including the mayor and City Council.
Whoever gets the job will need to navigate through many challenges at once, while dealing with the myriad issues confronting the city, including homelessness and the fentanyl crisis.
The next chief will also have to recruit and inspire a new generation of officers, some of whom weren’t even born when the department was forced to undergo sweeping changes in the wake of the Rampart scandal and who grew of age in the Black Lives Matter era. Others are keen to see how the next chief will tackle a much-maligned discipline system that, depending on whom one asks, either lets too many bad cops off or has been weaponized to favor the well-connected.
The violent protest Sunday at a synagogue has prompted Mayor Karen Bass to say Los Angeles should consider rules governing demonstrations and the wearing of masks by those protesting.
Bass on Monday did not offer a proposal but said the city needed to look at the issue — including “the idea of people wearing masks at protests.” A number of pro-Palestinian protesters had their faces covered Sunday.
The mayor, at an afternoon news conference, also said she was seeking city and state funding for additional security measures at places of worship in the city. Hours after the clashes, she ordered the LAPD to increase patrols in the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson area where the protest occurred and at religious venues.
Masks have been a part of many pro-Palestinian and some pro-Israeli protests over the war in Gaza, including on college campuses.
When a mob attacked a pro-Palestinian camp at UCLA in May, it was difficult to identify suspects because many wore masks that hid their identities. Police said they would use technology that captures facial images and outlines and compares them with other photos on the internet and social media to put names to faces.
It is unclear how the government could restrict mask use at protests.
During the 2020 George Floyd protests, some health officials urged demonstrators to wear masks to protect against COVID-19. Although coronavirus cases have fallen dramatically since then, masks can still offer protection, especially to those who have underlying health problems.
Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was considering a mask ban on the New York subway, saying she was concerned about people with face masks committing antisemitic acts.
“We will not tolerate individuals using masks to evade responsibility for criminal or threatening behavior,” Hochul told reporters at a news conference. “My team is working on a solution. But on a subway, people should not be able to hide behind a mask to commit crimes.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams supported the idea, telling reporters that “cowards cover their faces.”
Some civil liberties advocates opposed the idea.
“Mask bans were originally developed to squash political protests and, like other laws that criminalize people, they will be selectively enforced — used to arrest, doxx, surveil, and silence people of color and protesters the police disagree with,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement, according to the Associated Press.
North Carolina has also been talking about a mask ban, citing Gaza war protests. But there has been pushback from some health professionals and people with underlying health problems.
One North Carolina resident told the Washington Post: “I’ve thought I should wear masks with something printed on it like ‘immune deficient’ or ‘cancer patient.’ But we should not have to do that.”
There have been no formal proposals in Los Angeles, and it’s unclear whether the City Council would support the idea.
But a local Anti-Defamation League official expressed support Monday for a mask restriction. Jeffrey Abrams, the ADL’s Los Angeles regional director, stood on stage alongside Bass at the afternoon news conference and said the city needed to do more to protect the community.
“Just as Mayor Bass said, we need to look at every available legal tool, as the city attorney looks at existing anti-masking laws in the state of California,” Abrams said.
The Sunday protest was condemned by top officials including Bass, President Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
A pro-Palestinian protester gets in a car surrounded by pro-Israeli counterdemonstrators near Adas Torah synagogue Sunday.
(Zoë Cranfill / Los Angeles Times)
The protest began Sunday afternoon at the Adas Torah synagogue in the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood but eventually spread into nearby areas over several hours. Fistfights broke out between pro-Palestinian demonstrators — who said they were protesting an event at the synagogue promoting the sale of stolen Palestinian land — and supporters of Israel.
“Yesterday was abhorrent, and blocking access to a place of worship is absolutely unacceptable,” Bass said Monday. “This violence was designed to stoke fear. It was designed to divide. But hear me loud and clear: It will fail.”
“Intimidating Jewish congregants is dangerous, unconscionable, antisemitic, and un-American,” the president said in a statement. “Americans have a right to peaceful protest. But blocking access to a house of worship — and engaging in violence — is never acceptable.”
The law enforcement sources said the event was advertised in Friday’s issue of the Jewish Journal promising to provide information on “housing projects in all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Israel.” “Anglo” is a direct translation from Hebrew meaning “English-speaking.” The ad does not specify where in Israel the real estate is.
Protest fliers posted on social media said, “Our Land Is Not For Sale,” and condemned “land theft,” according to an Instagram post from the Southern California chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.
Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations office in Los Angeles, said the site of the demonstration was chosen not because it was in front of a synagogue but because of the event it was hosting.
The protest “was in response to the blatant violations of both international law and human rights from agencies that seek to make a profit selling brutally stolen Palestinian land as the Israeli government continues its eight-month-long genocidal campaign and ethnic cleansing in Gaza,” he said in a statement.
“Elected officials and the mainstream media have politicized this incident as religious discrimination as opposed to a human rights issue,” Ayloush added.
Rabbi Hertzel Illulian, founder of the JEM Community Center in Beverly Hills, arrived at Adas Torah on Sunday to worship during afternoon prayer and was confronted by a group yelling into megaphones. Some synagogue visitors were blocked from going inside, he said.
“We could not pray well because these people outside were screaming,” he said.
Karen Garcia, Richard Winton, Hannah Fry, Nathan Solis
A federal judge wants an independent accounting of homelessness programs in Los Angeles — including Mayor Karen Bass’ signature Inside Safe initiative.
The alliance said it wants the city to pay it $6.4 million in monetary sanctions.
Carter, who has not yet issued a ruling or spelled out the parameters of such an audit, raised concerns about how public money to fight homelessness is being spent. He requested a more detailed accounting of the work performed by nonprofit homeless service providers — including those participating in Inside Safe, which has been moving unhoused Angelenos into hotels, motels and other facilities.
“Which provider is producing results out there?” he asked. “We have no benchmark, and we have no accountability at this point. It’s just as simple as that.”
Carter also asked whether City Controller Kenneth Mejia has the authority to audit homeless programs run by the mayor’s office. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who advises the mayor and council, testified that the controller could not but said there are other ways the city can conduct audits.
Mejia disputed that notion Friday, telling the judge on the second day of the hearing that his office can audit mayoral programs.
“When it comes to a city program, especially those housed under elected officials, we have disagreements with the mayor and the city attorney’s office, but we believe there’s nothing in the charter that prohibits the mayor or the City Council from voluntarily submitting themselves to an audit, so we disagree.”
Hours later, Mejia announced on X that he is launching a “focused audit” on Inside Safe, which received $250 million in this year’s city budget.
Bass, who is in France with a delegation of city officials examining preparations for the Olympics, could not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Michele Martinez, special master for Carter, said Bass and City Council President Paul Krekorian had spoken to the judge and offered an independent auditor chosen by the court and paid for by the city.
Mejia said he intends to follow through with his audit.
“Our office welcomes an external, independent auditor to aid in that ongoing litigation,” he said in a statement to The Times. “However, the issues at play in the federal litigation are specific and unique to that case. As the City’s Chief Auditor, it is my responsibility to bring transparency and accountability to specific components of Inside Safe.”
The L.A. Alliance, a group of businesses and residents, alleges that the city repeatedly missed deadlines and negotiated in bad faith over terms of a settlement agreement to shelter at least 60% of people living on the streets in each council district.
Elizabeth Mitchell, the group’s attorney, said the city promised last March that it would come into compliance and provide the alliance with plans to build beds and address homeless encampments in each district.
“We were promised … that if we held off bringing this to the court for just six months, that they would have a full evaluation of each district. That, to my knowledge, has never been done,” Mitchell said. “Even the numbers that were finally agreed upon by the council members were not fully vetted.”
Scott Marcus, chief assistant city attorney, said the city did not breach the agreement when it comes to bed creation but that it did fail to communicate with the alliance when it sought a citywide program to clean up encampments, as opposed to doing so district by district.
“We could have done a better job keeping the alliance in the loop and communicating with them when our circumstances changed,” Marcus said.
Carter said he would delay a ruling while city officials and lawyers for L.A. Alliance discuss details of the audit and Bass is abroad.
However, the judge said he plans to rule that the city acted in bad faith.
The demands for increased oversight of homeless services are not limited to Mejia and the judge. On Friday, the council voted to seek a separate performance evaluation of services being provided to the city by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who drafted the proposal and sits on the homelessness committee, said the city provides tens of millions of dollars each year to that city-county agency.
“We have all known that LAHSA can be opaque at times and, frankly, downright deceptive in terms of how they secure funding from this city,” he said.
Va Lecia Adams Kellum, LAHSA’s chief executive officer, said she looks forward to the assessment.
“I welcome the passage of the motion from Councilmembers Blumenfield and [Monica] Rodriguez,” she said, “and look forward to working with the city on developing a framework that provides greater insight into program performance.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
When Mayor Karen Bass laid out her budget proposal for the Los Angeles Police Department last year, she had big plans for rebuilding the size of that agency’s workforce.
The mayor’s budget called for the LAPD to end the 2023-24 budget year with about 9,500 police officers — a target that would require the hiring of nearly 1,000 officers over a 12-month period.
Now, a new assessment from City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo — the city’s top budget analyst — shows the department is falling well short of its staffing goal. By June 30, the end of the fiscal year, the department is expected to have 8,908 officers, according to Szabo’s projections.
That would leave the LAPD with its lowest sworn staffing levels in over two decades.
Szabo’s report, issued Tuesday, is likely to fuel calls for the council to scale back the LAPD’s hiring goal. Even before it was released, some at City Hall had begun arguing that the annual budget calls for hundreds of officer positions that have little to no chance of being filled.
“I do not think 9,500 is realistic,” Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez said Wednesday. “We can’t be in denial about this. It is not realistic. And the reason it’s not realistic is because … people who are entering the workforce do not want to be police officers.”
Soto-Martínez has long argued for the idea of shifting certain duties out of the LAPD and into agencies with unarmed responders. He asked for the LAPD’s 12-month hiring projections last month, just as the council began the process of cutting an as-yet-unknown number of civilian city positions — part of a larger effort at reining in a budget shortfall.
Meanwhile, police staffing is continuing its year-to-year slide.
The LAPD had about 10,000 officers in 2019, the last full year before COVID-19. In June 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd, the City Council voted to scale back the deployment to about 9,750.
Bass took office in 2022. By the time her first budget went into effect, the number of officers had fallen to 9,027. In an attempt to reverse those trends, she negotiated a four-year package of pay increases and higher starting salaries.
That deal, approved in August, is now a major contributor to the city’s budget shortfall, which could reach as much as $400 million in the coming fiscal year.
De’Marcus Finnell, a spokesperson for Bass, said Wednesday that the salary agreement with the police officers’ union is producing results, helping to spur recruitment and lower attrition.
“According to conversations with LAPD, retirement rates could’ve been much higher if we hadn’t taken the action we did,” Finnell said in an email.
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who voted against the salary agreement last year, has been offering a different assessment, calling the police contract financially irresponsible. Raman, now running for reelection with support from the mayor, has repeatedly warned that the police raises will leave the city with insufficient funds for other government programs.
“I thought that the size of the raise would be so much that it would create significant budget deficits going forward,” she told an audience last month, adding: “So far, the data has proven me correct.”
Others on the council say they still support the police raises.
Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, in an interview, said attrition has “slowed significantly” at the LAPD since the contract was approved. The contract, she said, is “doing what we needed it to do.”
Bass, as part of her budget, had been hoping to hire 780 new officers during the current fiscal year. She also had been looking to bring 200 retirees back to the department.
So far, only 15 retirees have come back, Szabo said.
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The decrease in LAPD staffing is producing at least one benefit — cutting costs in the city budget.
The city’s financial analysts are currently projecting an $82-million shortfall in the LAPD’s sworn salary account this year. Had the department had been successful in reaching the mayor’s hiring goals, that number would have grown to more than $118 million, Szabo said in his report.
Meanwhile, some categories of crime continue to fall.
Homicides have decreased by nearly 6% compared with the prior year, according to LAPD figures covering the period ending Jan. 27. Burglaries decreased by nearly 7% over the same time frame.
Other types of crime are on the rise. Assaults have gone up by 12% compared to the same period last year, according to LAPD figures. The number of shooting victims is up 29% so far this year.
Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced Friday that he will step down as head of the LAPD at the end of February, after which time the city and department officials will begin the process of finding a new leader to take over one of the most unique and challenging jobs in law enforcement.
At a news conference with Mayor Karen Bass, Moore said he was proud of his career at the department and choked back tears.
“During my tenure, I know I’ve made mistakes and missteps,” Moore said. “But I’m also confident that my work has seen success across a broad spectrum of topics unmatched by any other law enforcement agency in this country.”
Bass praised Moore and thanked him for his work, saying he made the decision to leave recently.
“Chief Moore let me know that his timeline was moving up to spend more time with his family,” Bass said. “This means, of course, that the police commission will have to appoint an interim chief and a nationwide search will be conducted now because his timeline was moved up and that was unexpected.”
Bass said she had asked Moore to “serve in a consulting capacity to assist an interim chief,” and that he had agreed to the offer.
Moore has endured a series of department controversies in recent months, including a string of officer misconduct incidents and a whistleblower complaint that alleged that two detectives were ordered to investigate Bass shortly after her election. Moore vehemently denied the allegations.
Before his reappointment in January 2023 to a second five-year term as the city’s top cop, Moore said he would serve for two or three years before turning the department over to a new chief ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games.
Moore said at the time he wanted more time to finish the job he started when he took over the department in 2018. Moore said he wanted to continue reforms on use of force and diversity and avoid a “haphazard” transition before the Olympics, which are set to start soon after his full second term would have expired. He said he would spend the next few years laying the groundwork for a succession plan.
Bass reappointed Moore to a second five-year term over the concern of critics who argued that the scope of scandals that have plagued the department during his tenure reflected a poor track record for any leader.
Moore’s backers say the department has embraced reforms in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other flash points from 2020, including expanding community outreach efforts and placing new limits on pretextual traffic stops that Moore said “undermined public trust and confidence but also added little merit from a law enforcement standpoint.”
The LAPD has gotten more diverse under his watch, Moore said. He has also defended his record of promoting female officers, pointing out a series of recent appointments of female officials, including one to deputy chief.
The latest LAPD data indicate that crime is trending downward, and Moore had enjoyed the public support of Bass and the Police Commission. In recent months, though, the department has been roiled by allegations that one of Moore’s assistant chiefs surreptitiously tracked an officer with whom he’d been romantically involved, and a scandal involving gang unit officers suspected of thefts and illegal stops.
The episodes renewed questions about management and oversight of the nation’s third-largest police department.
Then last month, two detectives in the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division filed complaints alleging they were ordered to investigate Bass, possibly at Moore’s behest. The claims are being investigated by the inspector general’s office.
Moore denied the allegations, telling The Times: “I have no such knowledge of any alleged investigation nor would I initiate any such investigation.”
The 63-year-old Moore secured the police chief’s job in 2018 after nearly four decades with the LAPD, rising through the ranks and becoming known for his statistics-driven policing approach. He was at the helm at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a marked rise in violent crimes and homicides in L.A., as elsewhere. Last year, however, there was a drop in violent crimes and homicides, a decline that has continued through most of 2023.
Moore pledged a more compassionate approach to policing following his appointment by Mayor Eric Garcetti. Early in his tenure, he weathered severe criticism for his handling of mass demonstrations in Los Angeles over the deaths of Floyd and other Black Americans killed in police custody. Officers were repeatedly accused of using heavy-handed tactics against protesters who took to the streets.
Moore has also faced the challenge of running a department that is several hundred officers short of its allotted strength of 9,500 officers, a gap that made it harder to keep police on the streets.
Bass, who took office in December 2022 after campaigning on the promise of bringing more police accountability and transparency, said previously she believed Moore shared her desire to see the department improve its recruitment of “reform-minded” officers and change how it responds to calls involving the mentally ill.
But Moore’s leadership has come into question as several of his top commanders and closest confidantes have become caught up in scandals. One assistant chief retired under a cloud of suspicion, after being caught having sex with a subordinate in a government car.
Another LAPD captain was found to have leaked confidential details of a sex crime victim and her police report to the alleged perpetrator, then CBS head Les Moonves.
In 2022, a jury awarded a female Los Angeles police commander $4 million in damages for a sexual harassment lawsuit against the city over a nude photograph that was doctored to look like her and shared around the department.
In 2021, a botched fireworks explosion by the department’s bomb squad leveled a South L.A. neighborhood. Moore faced withering criticism over the incident. Last July, he issued a statement promising to improve the department.
“This neighborhood is resilient, and we will continue the work of repairing our relationship with this community we have sworn to protect and serve,” Moore said.
Times legal affairs reporter Kevin Rector contributed to this report.
For as long as people have watched tents take over sidewalks and RVs deteriorate under freeways, politicians have been making promises about solving homelessness in Los Angeles.
And for just as long, those same politicians have been breaking them.
This is undoubtedly why, back in March, as Mayor Karen Bass was approaching her first 100 days in office, only 17% of Angelenos believed her administration would make “a lot of progress” getting people off the streets, according to a Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll. Far more — 45% — predicted just “a little progress” would be made.
I was thinking about this deep well of public skepticism while listening to Bass, all smiles in a bright green suit on Wednesday morning, enthusiastically explain why the progress she has actually made is a reason for renewed optimism.
Flanked by members of the L.A. City Council outside a school in Hollywood, she announced that her administration had, in its first year, moved more than 21,694 people out of encampments and into interim housing. That’s an increase of 28% over the final year of former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration, taking into account the work of various government programs, including Bass’ signature one, Inside Safe.
In addition, the majority of those directed to motel and hotel rooms, congregate shelters and tiny homes have decided to stay, rather than head back out onto the streets.
“We have tried to set a new tone in the city. This is an example of that new tone. Forty-one people used to sleep here, and now it’s clear,” Bass said Wednesday over the shrieks of schoolchildren. “Students and parents don’t need to walk around tents on their way to school, and the Angelenos who were living here do not need to die on our streets.”
It was a convincing message, backed up by a thick packet of numbers distributed to reporters at City Hall a few hours later.
But numbers are funny. They can be crunched in many ways and interpreted to mean many different things.
As my Times colleague David Zahniser pointed out, all of the people who now live in interim housing are still considered homeless by the federal government. And while Bass had originally thought most of them would be there for only three to six months, it’s now looking more like 18 months to two years. Permanent housing is that scarce.
So, numbers-wise, don’t expect a decline in the next annual homelessness count, which is scheduled for January. There might even be an increase, thanks to the expiration of pandemic-era tenant protections. As of the last count, there were more than 46,000 unhoused people living in the city, mostly in encampments.
But again, numbers are funny. They tend not to mean half as much as what people see and experience for themselves, just like the disconnect between public perceptions of crime and actual crime data.
So, when Bass declares at a news conference that “we have proved this year that we will make change,” and she talks about the encampment that used to be where she’s standing, and all the encampments that her administration has cleared, even if a few more tents have popped up down the street, skeptical Angelenos just might believe her.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s not such a bad thing.
“What I see most powerfully is increased hope,” Va Lecia Adams Kellum, chief executive of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, told reporters on Wednesday. “Hope among the folks who are living in those encampments who had given up and [thought] they’ll always live in that level of despair. Hope that the community now believes that we could possibly get out of this terrible crisis.”
Kellie Waldon, 54, cries near what’s left of her encampment, left, as Skid Row West is dismantled under the 405 Freeway along Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles in October. Waldon was hoping to receive housing through the city’s Inside Safe program, like others in the encampment had. “You get your hopes up and you don’t know what to believe,” Waldon said.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Hope is a thing difficult to quantify, especially among people who have been homeless for years, and have suffered so much and have been let down so often by government.
I’ve talked to some who took a chance and decided to leave their tents and RVs, and are now thrilled to be in a motel room with a door, running water and air conditioning. Others have had it with curfews and jail-like rules, and are getting tired of waiting on promised permanent housing.
I’ve also talked to those who have been booted out of interim housing for one reason or another, and are back on the streets. They are feeling hopeless, like many cash-strapped Angelenos who are on the verge of an eviction.
But peak hopelessness? That’s what we saw on the first days of December.
At a hastily called news conference, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced that officers were searching for a man who had fatally shot three homeless people — one sleeping on a couch in an alley and another while pushing a shopping cart.
“This is a killer preying on the unhoused,” Bass said.
Moore and Bass didn’t know then, but their suspect, Jerrid Joseph Powell, had already been arrested by Beverly Hills police after a traffic stop in which his $60,000 BMW was linked to a deadly follow-home robbery.
Police have yet to elaborate on Powell’s alleged motive, but Bass brought up the horrific case several times on Wednesday — and with good reason. Violence and acts of cruelty against people living on the streets are increasingly common not just locally, but nationally.
Advocates blame this trend of nastiness on the pandemic-era surge in homelessness, particularly in unsheltered homelessness, and the subsequent spike in interactions between housed and unhoused residents. Fear and frustration can lead to dehumanization and that, in turn, can lead to violence, said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.
“I do really worry that it’s become normalized in public discourse to speak about people experiencing homelessness as, like, a problem for those who are not homeless — as opposed to fundamentally a massive societal failure that’s left usually older, vulnerable people terrified and totally unprotected,” she told me. “And I do think that there is a connection, like the more we dehumanize people, the less protected they are.”
Stephanie Klasky-Gamer has watched this happen in real-time as president and CEO of L.A. Family Housing. The seeming permanency of encampments, and the trash, fires and unsanitary conditions they often generate, have led to what she describes as widespread impatience.
“I don’t mean big, systemic impatience, like ‘I wish we could end homelessness faster,’” she said. “It’s the ‘I’m just sick of seeing you in front of me’ kind of impatience.”
On some level, she gets it, though. As does Kushel. As do I.
“It has to be OK to say, ‘Yeah, this sucks that I’m walking my kids to school and I’m walking over people in tents,’” Kushel told me. “But there has to be a way to hold that with being able to recognize how we got to this position and also how we’re going to get out. And to sort of restore [our] collective humanity.”
For Klasky-Gamer, this has meant focusing on what has changed since Bass became mayor.
“I know how much good is getting done,” she told me. “The frustration I may feel at seeing the tent every day I turn the corner, at least I can temper it knowing that 10 people yesterday moved into an apartment. These three people haven’t. But these 10 did.”
RVs in an encampment along West Jefferson Boulevard near the Ballona Wetlands in Playa del Rey in 2021.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
The mayor has told me many times that getting people off the streets isn’t just a humanitarian imperative — and, as a serial killer reminded us, a safety imperative. It’s also a demonstration to a fed up public that progress is possible.
“What distresses Angelenos the most are encampments. That’s where people were dying on the street,” Bass told reporters. “And to me, what was clear, was that we come up with a way to get people out of the tents.”
Some will dismiss that. They’ll insist that all her administration is doing is reducing visible homelessness to score easy political points. And that instead of doing the hard work of actually helping L.A.’s most vulnerable residents get back on their feet, the mayor is hiding them so that they’ll be forgotten and abandoned in interim housing.
In this city, defined by its haves and have nots, I understand the cynicism and skepticism. But that’s why what Bass does next, namely expanding and stabilizing the city’s crumbling supply of permanent housing, will matter even more than what she has done thus far.
“We’ve got to somehow make people believe again that this is solvable,” Kushel told me, “and it is solvable.”
Hope can be elusive. But Annelisa Stephan was looking for it anyway when she came to the Ballona Wetlands on a recent Saturday morning.
She and more than 100 other volunteers — many of them from the nearby neighborhoods of Playa Vista and Playa del Rey — had descended on the Westside ecological reserve to dig holes, spread soil, and put in plants and trees.
Just a few months ago, RVs had been parked here along Jefferson Boulevard, bumper to bumper in a sprawling encampment that dozens of unhoused people had come to call home.
They built a close-knit community, looking out for one another and mourning one another after deadly fires. But they also decimated the Ballona Wetlands’ freshwater marsh with everything from battery acid to trash to human waste, and scared off nearby residents who once walked the trails.
And then one day, after almost three years, the encampment was gone, replaced by concrete barricades and metal fencing. The residents were mostly sent to interim housing and the RVs were mostly towed away.
“It’s like, hard to know what to think or feel,” Stephan told me. “I’m happy that the land is being stewarded, but just sad about the suffering that so many people face.”
She lamented the “fervent, anti-homeless mania” that she has heard from some of her neighbors.
“It’s just been really a painful time,” Stephan said.
Not far away, L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park, whose Westside district includes the Ballona Wetlands and got elected on promises to aggressively crack down on homeless encampments, was more circumspect.
“At the end of the day, everybody wants the same thing, which is to get folks off the streets and into safe settings and connected to the help that they need,” she said. “There’s a lot of different points of view about how we get there. And I think that’s where a lot of the conflict and the division lie.”
She paused, as traffic whizzed by on Jefferson Boulevard.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Tuesday appointed Carolyn Webb de Macias as chief of staff, succeeding Chris Thompson, who held the powerful post for less than a year.
Webb de Macias is a former senior advisor to former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and also worked for then-City Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas.
She also worked in the U.S. Department of Education as an appointee of President Obama, and as USC’s vice president of external relations, according to Bass’ office.
“I’ve known Carolyn for years and I know Los Angeles has benefited from her work for even longer than that,” Bass said in a statement. “Carolyn is thoughtful, skilled, dedicated and the right person for the job. I’m grateful she has agreed to join our team as we continue our work to move Los Angeles forward.”
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In a statement, Webb de Macias said she was “thrilled to work with Mayor Bass in executing her vision of improving the quality of life for all Angelenos.”
Webb de Macias, 75, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Her LinkedIn profile said she serves on the boards of the water company Cadiz Inc. and Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit founded by Villaraigosa.
Thompson, Bass’ chief of staff since December, is returning to the private sector, Bass’ office said. A Bass spokesman declined to comment on his new job.
Thompson previously served as senior vice president of governmental relations for LA28, the private group putting on the Olympic Games. He had agreed to stay away from any Olympics issues at the city for a year out of concern about the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Early on the morning of Oct. 12, David Mays woke up in the Chevrolet he had been living in for two years, knowing this day would be different.
Safe Parking L.A. had been a blessing, providing a covered space in a downtown garage, with on-site security and access to a bathroom. That was better than sleeping on the street with one eye open.
But Mays had been hobbled by the discomfort of sleeping in the driver’s seat for months on end, and the 69-year-old caregiver had developed health concerns of his own. His legs were stiff, swollen and sore, complicating his hope of returning to work. And he was beginning to doubt promises that his wait for a place of his own would end despite the best efforts of Demi Dominguez, his Safe Parking case manager, to get him indoors.
David Mays gives Demi Dominguez, his Safe Parking L.A. case manager, a hug of support after signing papers for his new apartment.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
And then it happened. Dominguez learned in late summer of a possible slot for Mays at a soon-to-open apartment building in East Hollywood. The Wilcox was to be managed by The People Concern, a homeless services nonprofit, with on-site supportive services for adults 62 or older –- one of the fastest-growing segments of the state’s vast unhoused population.
Mays drove to the Wilcox on the 12th, sat through an orientation and, finally, was escorted to his new home, a small but comfortable second-floor studio apartment.
He was not overwhelmed, as one might expect. It was too much to process.
California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding it. His column focuses on the blessings and burdens of advancing age — and how some folks are challenging the stigma associated with older adults.
“To be honest,” he told me, seated in his dining nook a few weeks after moving in, “I wasn’t aware. I wasn’t feeling it.”
Mays, who speaks deliberately, turned inward, searching for the right words.
“I had been taught to be justifiably cynical for so long, that when it finally happened, and it was real, and we’re doing this — this is your apartment — my brain almost kind of took a pause,” Mays said. “And then at some point, I realized — I think when I collapsed on that bed, and it took a couple of days for it to truly sink in –- this was my apartment.
After two years of living in his car, David Mays prepares to move some of his belongings into his new apartment.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“I had been out there so long that this was almost the equivalent of a daydream, because I had been so far removed from what I knew to be a normal life before it all went south, “ he said. “And then to come back to some semblance of that, after two years of nothing … it’s a quantum leap.”
Mays said the experience was “almost a shock wave … I’m lying there in that bed and I’m going, ‘Am I really here?’ I just laid out, and within 14 days, all the massive swelling went away. All of it.”
Mays’ story is a small victory in a city with roughly46,000 homeless people, but it’s also a window into a societal collapse and a grinding bureaucracy that has long been a symbol of government failure. Crippling housing and workforce shortages and a fragmented, dysfunctional response — along with entrenched poverty, unchecked mental illness and a raging drug epidemic — have produced a simmering humanitarian crisis visible to one and all.
David Mays enters his new apartment at the Wilcox in East Hollywood for the first time as community manager Daisy DePaz watches.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“The timeline for housing remains a multi-year process,” said Emily Uyeda Kantrim, who runs Safe Parking L.A. and said Mays was in the housing queue since 2021.
Mays readily admits to his frustration.
“I lost faith,” he said, telling me he came to believe that the “system” treats homelessness as a monolithic condition. In fact, it’s 46,000 puzzles, each with a different solution, but key pieces of each puzzle are missing.
Eventually, he was buoyedby Safe Parking’s continued efforts to make a connection for him. Safe Parking helps its clients — a third of whom are older adults — with car maintenance costs and other expenses while they look for permanent housing.
“They were with me through the whole process,” Mays said, right up to the time he moved into his new home.
David Mays shares his enthusiasm about finally getting a place to live with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
On Nov. 6, while Mays was in his room, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was downstairs in the courtyard, presiding over the official grand opening of the Wilcox. Tackling the homelessness crisis was at the top of her agenda when she was elected a year ago, and I recall traveling across the city with her when she was a candidate, as she talked about blowing up the bureaucracy, leveraging her contacts in Washington and Sacramento, working with — rather than at odds with — county supervisors, and lowering the cost of new housing and building it faster.
All of that remains a work in progress, but she gets high marks from some observers. Bass’ strategy of targeting problematic encampments, cutting through paperwork and leveraging her connections has changed the dynamic, said Miguel Santana, director of the California Community Foundation. Her background as a physician’s assistant has helped, too, he said, because she’s attuned to individual needs.
“She has placed the priority on the person who is unhoused and tries to advocate for them, not for the system,” Santana said. “She’s pushing against the system.”
“She has brought … real focus to this issue in a way no other administration has, and I’ve worked with several,” said John Maceri, director of The People Concern. “Her executive orders and directives, in terms of streamlining things, are real, and that has really expedited a lot of projects that had been languishing in the pipeline for a long time.”
“I had been taught to be justifiably cynical for so long, that when it finally happened, and it was real, and we’re doing this — this is your apartment — my brain almost kind of took a pause,” David Mays said.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Bass, like me, turned 70 in October. I had told her more than a year ago that while I was thinking it might be time to scale back my output, she was running for what would be the toughest job of her career. She told me she badly wanted the job.
“It’s been reported that one of the fastest-growing sectors of the unhoused population are our elders, and it is a scourge on society,” Bass told a small audience before doubling down on the need to continue addressing the crisis with a sense of urgency.
The mayor then wanted to meet some of the residents, and the first one she visited was Mays.
“How are you?” Mays asked when she stepped into his room, and Bass volleyed the question back at him.
“I’m disoriented a little bit,” Mays said. “I can’t believe that this is happening.”
They talked for several minutes about his career and his health, with Bass saying she wanted to make sure he was connected to the help he needed.
“You brighten up my day,” Bass said. “This is what we’re trying to do. This is the goal.”
Before the mayor arrived and after she left, Mays talked about his plans, which do not necessarily include a long-term stay at the Wilcox. He worked for years as a private in-home caregiver, with room and board included, but it’s a profession in which clients move on to nursing homes or die, and Mays ended up out of work and homeless.
David Mays walks past a billboard with the message: “Create Your Future.”
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Given multiple health challenges, he doesn’t think he can be a live-in caregiver again, but he’d like to work day shifts if he can find the right match. He said the problem is that if he were to make more than $1,000 a month, on top of his Social Security income, he’d no longer be eligible for the apartment he just moved into.
Mays said he’s got to figure out what to do about all of that, but emphasized that he doesn’t think of his arrival at the Wilcox as the end of his career or his aspirations.
“I have to work that out,” he said. “This, for me, is another rest stop. And it’s a vast improvement over the last one.”
A Los Angeles city employee who was trapped in Gaza for weeks has been safely evacuated from the besieged territory, according to the mayor’s office.
“Our office has been working to get him to safety and I have been in regular contact with his son. I am relieved to announce today that the employee is now safe in a neighboring country and out of the war zone,” Mayor Karen Bass said Thursday afternoon in a statement.
The city employee is Simi Valley resident Sohail Biary, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Hundreds of Palestinians with foreign passports have been allowed to leave Gaza since Wednesday after weeks of attention on their plight, according to the Associated Press.
The isolated Palestinian territory has faced a worsening humanitarian crisis amid brutal Israeli airstrikes. More than 9,000 people in Gaza have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. The war began on Oct. 7, ignited by Hamas’ devastating attacks inside Israel that killed more than 1,400.
Biary’s son, Khalid Biary, spoke to the Ventura County Star last week about his father’s situation, telling the paper that the 53-year-old man had traveled to his hometown of Gaza City to visit his parents before war broke out in the region. Biary works as a district supervisor for the city’s General Services Department and has four children, according to the Star.
“He came here with nothing and started a life here,” Khalid Biary told the Star of his father, saying the elder Biary had sought asylum in the U.S. 30 years ago and settled in Simi Valley. Khalid Biary did not immediately respond to an interview request from The Times.
With borders closed and his father trapped in an increasingly desperate situation, Khalid Biary had reached out to the U.S. State Department for help and was told to direct his father to the Egyptian border, according to the Star. Sohail Biary waited for hours at the Egyptian border with his American passport but was turned back three times, according to the Star.
“I can’t explain the feeling of not knowing whether my dad is alive or not,” Khalid Biary told the paper before his father’s evacuation, describing how his father was facing worsening bombings, constant power outages and difficulty finding food. This was Sohail Biary’s first visit to see his parents and other relatives in 15 years, according to KABC-TV.
In her statement Thursday, Bass thanked President Biden; the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs director, Tom Perez; California Sen. Alex Padilla; and Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Westlake Village) for “working with us to arrive at today’s result.”
“We look forward to welcoming our colleague home,” Bass said.
Until a few days ago, Michael Schneider truly believed that his nonprofit, Streets For All, had solid enough political support to pursue what was certain to be an unpopular idea in L.A.: a study of whether it makes sense to rip up a Westside freeway and replace it with affordable housing and a humongous park.
He was a man about town, excitedly touting the letters and statements of “immense enthusiasm” from elected officials.
Like from the office of Mayor Karen Bass, who called the Marina Freeway — a three-mile, lightly trafficked stretch of Route 90 that was left unfinished after a plan to link it to Orange County was abandoned in the 1970s — a “freeway to nowhere.”
And from state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D-Los Angeles), who described Schneider’s idea as “a forward-thinking project that would help alleviate L.A.’s need[s].”
Indeed, as someone who drives the Marina Freeway all the time, I’ve long thought there had be a higher and better use for the land than a mere shortcut from Marina del Rey to the 405 Freeway and over to South L.A. And so I was excited to hear that Streets For All was applying for a federal grant to study it for two years, tracking everything from environmental impacts to traffic to the opinions of nearby residents like me.
Now, though, my excitement as well as Schneider’s has given way to familiar feelings of frustration. True to form for NIMBY-indulging Los Angeles, the political support he believed was solid has suddenly turned porous.
That includes Bass: “I do not support the removal or demolition of the 90 Freeway,” she said in a statement last week. “I’ve heard loud and clear from communities who would be impacted and I do not support a study on this initiative.”
L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park agrees with her. After conducting a very unscientific poll of her Westside constituents, she wrote in her newsletter that: “The 11th District does not support the demolition of the 90 Freeway. Your voice is why Mayor Bass rescinded her initial support.”
L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell told me that, despite rumors to the contrary, she never decided to back a study or tearing down the Marina Freeway, which abuts her district in the unincorporated neighborhood of Ladera Heights. “But it’s a moot point now,” she said.
Meanwhile, Smallwood-Cuevas said she still supports a feasibility study, but cautioned this week that it can’t be at “the expense of transparent community-driven input and analysis.”
Similarly, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Culver City) said he’s never opposed to research. But there’s a difference between studying the impact of removing the freeway and, referring to several renderings of what Schneider envisions as Marina Central Park, “proposing an alternative design and resolution without a study having been completed.”
Streets for All, a local non-profit is proposing turning the 90 freeway, one of L.A. County’s shortest, and unfinished freeways, into a large public park with nearly 4,000 housing units.
(Courtesy of SWA / Streets For All)
“The 90 Freeway,” Bryan assured me, “is not going anywhere.”
It’s problematic that, at a time when roughly 75,000 people are sleeping in the streets countywide and vehicle emissions are exacerbating the effects of climate change, Los Angeles can’t summon the unified political will even to study — STUDY! — whether to replace a freeway with housing.
Equally problematic is the reason why.
I’m not talking about the blame that some have placed on Streets For All for being overzealous with its messaging and tactics. Or that, according to others, elected officials were too quick to surrender to the fears of their constituents, some of whom wrongly believe the removal of the Marina Freeway is imminent.
I’m talking about the fundamental disagreement in Los Angeles over the role and importance of community outreach. How much of it is enough? How soon should it be done? How much weight should it be given? And to what end?
These unanswered questions are ultimately why political support crumbled for studying the Marina Freeway, and it’s a troubling harbinger.
Most residents understandably want a say — or the say — in what happens to their neighborhood, whether it’s affordable housing on what’s now a freeway or a homeless shelter on what’s now a parking lot.
But given the size of the unhoused population and the scale of the housing construction needed to address it and lower rental prices for everyone else, I increasingly believe L.A.’s political leaders can’t keep putting so much stock in the opinions of residents. Not all development projects that are worthwhile or necessary will be popular.
“For so long, the loudest voices have usually derailed things,” Schneider said. “And all I’m saying is the loudest voices aren’t always the most correct voices.”
::
People don’t like change.
This is a truism that has led NIMBYs to file an untold number of frivolous lawsuits up and down the state of California.
It also has led Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature to repeatedly roll back local control over land use decisions — the latest being a law that lets nonprofit colleges and religious institutions bypass most local permitting and environmental review rules and rezone their land to build housing.
Even Bass, who has made homelessness her top issue, has pushed to cut through red tape and streamline the construction of housing and shelters, trying to extend the pipeline for unhoused Angelenos who have been moved into hotels through her Inside Safe program.
But the mayor said she’s still a big believer in “doing the hard work” of community outreach. She explained why when I shared my skepticism.
“This goes back to my days at Community Coalition,” she said. “We used to fight when the city tried to impose development on South L.A. without including South L.A., which is why you would think that I would say build everywhere, anywhere. But I don’t feel that way.”
Instead, she wants to get people involved in the process and build in ways that are in line with what each community wants.
“If I took a position that said, ‘steamroll everybody, just get housing done,’ we would tear the city apart,” Bass said, adding that residents would likely be against development for no reason other than it was forced upon them.
This is a big reason why she decided against supporting a study of the Marina Freeway. In talking to residents, she told me she heard only complaints — about the possibility of more traffic and longer commutes, and from Black people in South L.A., about losing a convenient corridor to Marina del Rey and the beach.
But most of all, Bass said she heard consternation that there had been no community outreach.
This came up in an online petition that went viral last month — even though it was packed with misleading assertions — written by Daphne Bradford, an education consultant from Ladera Heights who is running for supervisor against Mitchell in the March primary election.
“Ladera Heights is not just any neighborhood; it holds the distinction of being the 3rd most affluent African American community in the nation,” Bradford wrote, channeling her inner NIMBY. “Our community has worked hard to create a safe and prosperous environment for our families, and we believe that our voices should be heard when decisions are made that will affect us directly.”
Schneider sighed when I asked him about the petition.
“The whole point of the feasibility study is we would have almost two years of community outreach,” he said. “We’re a small nonprofit, we don’t have the resources to do the community outreach before getting the grant money.”
In the meantime, rumors about the Marina Freeway have overwhelmed the facts, and many residents have dug in their heels in opposition to whatever they think is happening. Mitchell suspects one reason for this is that Streets For All didn’t “do outreach the way we define outreach.”
The Marina Freeway, an unfinished three-mile stretch of road from Marina del Rey, is one of Los Angeles’ shortest thoroughfares. Now a local nonprofit is suggesting turning it into a large public park and thousands of affordable homes.
(Rendering courtesy of SWA / Streets For All)
“It can’t be 10 a.m. on a weekday, one meeting at the community center,” she told me. “You really have to get creative, partner with communities and not be afraid to reach out to people who will oppose you.”
But community outreach is a thorny issue, Mitchell acknowledges. Again, people don’t like change. And too many people want to “pull the drawbridge up” behind themselves and not let new housing into their neighborhoods.
“When people say outreach, they mean, ‘You didn’t ask me. And then when you asked me, you didn’t do what I said,’” Mitchell said. “That can’t be the expectation. But I do believe that every effort should be made to make sure that impacted communities are aware.”
Eventually, though, everyone will have to get used to the idea that our neighborhoods will look a little different to accommodate the housing that Los Angeles needs.
“These are really difficult decisions that we all kind of have to make,” Mitchell said.
::
Which brings me back to the Marina Freeway.
Despite the Streets For All being abandoned by much of the political establishment in Los Angeles, Schneider said its plan to conduct a feasibility study isn’t dead.
“We live in a democracy. You can’t stop somebody from studying something in the public space. That’s just not possible,” he said. “If we’re awarded the federal grant, we will do it. If we need to raise the money privately, we’ll do it. But we’re committed to exploring the idea because it’s worth exploring.”
Whether that study leads to removing the freeway and building thousands of units of affordable housing in Marina Central Park is another matter.
It’s a huge political decision, Schneider admits. One that will ultimately — undoubtedly and unfortunately — hinge on community outreach. After all, this is L.A.
A man was arrested early Wednesday morning after allegedly attempting to break into a Studio City home and reportedly threatening the Jewish occupants — an incident authorities say is being investigated as a possible hate crime.
The home invasion was reported around 5 a.m. in the 3000 block of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The suspect, identified only as a man in his 30s, is accused of entering the home’s backyard and trying to kick in a door; he was held at bay by an occupant who then contacted the police.
KTTV-TV Channel 11 reported that the person who called police said the suspect had “threatened to kill them because they were Israeli,” and that the home’s occupants were Jewish.
Footage captured by the television station showed the suspect yelling, “Free Palestine” several times after being placed into the back of an LAPD vehicle.
In additional footage taken by a neighbor, the man can be heard yelling incoherent responses to police and stating that he was not armed.
LAPD officials said the incident is being investigated as a possible hate crime. In a statement, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called it a “vile act of hate.”
“In the wake of the terror and violence inflicted over the previous weeks, this is one of the worst fears of Jewish families across our country — hatred spilling across the threshold, destroying the sense of safety and sanctuary in a home,” Bass said. “We remain steadfast in support of the Jewish people. The people of Los Angeles will not cower to hate.”
Bass said the LAPD would continue to conduct increased patrols and called on officials “to take action to ensure the person responsible for this heinous act is held fully accountable.”
A homeless housing project in West L.A., backed by Mayor Karen Bass and opposed by some neighborhood groups because of its proximity to residential homes, was approved by the Los Angeles City Council on Friday.
The council, with exception of one member who was absent, voted unanimously in favor of the 33-bed facility on a city-owned parking lot at Midvale Avenue and Pico Boulevard, across from the former Westside Pavilion. The council also decided that the project is exempt from a comprehensive environmental review.
Bass, Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky and other supporters argue the project will provide relief for the area’s unhoused population. It will also help the city comply with a legal settlement that requires it to add beds.
“The citywide issue of homelessness deserves a citywide response,” Bass said in a statement Friday. “We must continue to do all that we can to bring unhoused Angelenos inside and I thank Councilmember Yaroslavsky and the City Council for continuing the work to urgently confront the homelessness crisis.”
Yaroslavsky spoke ahead of the vote, promising residents and business owners who opposed the project that she would secure additional parking before breaking ground and would also develop a neighborhood safety plan with the Los Angeles Police Department and local homeless service providers.
“But let me be absolutely very clear, we need these beds,” said Yaroslavsky, who represents the area. “I know 33 beds doesn’t seem like a lot, because in all honesty, it’s not. It’s not nearly enough, considering the emergency we’re in right now.”
Right now, Yaroslavsky said, fewer than 100 of the city’s 16,000 homeless beds are in her district.
“What this means for my constituents, not only in Westwood but across the entire district, is that when we are trying to resolve an encampment and bring people inside, off the street and into housing, it’s nearly impossible,” she said.
The facility, which is projected to cost nearly $4.6 million, will include “sleeping cabins” with restrooms in each unit. There will also be on-site laundry facilities, storage bins and office space, according to a report from the city’s Bureau of Engineering. It’s expected to open in about a year, Yaroslavsky told The Times.
She said residents will have access to mental health and substance use disorder specialists, employment assistance and help finding permanent housing. There will be 24-hour security on-site. Most of the beds will be reserved for people who have ties to the area.
The Westside Neighborhood Council voted last week to oppose the project because it would be near homes and businesses along Pico Boulevard. The group also expressed “dismay that other sites were not being evaluated as alternatives.”
Controversy over the proposed facility ratcheted up earlier this week when Bass abruptly removed the president of the Transportation Commission days after he led his colleagues in delaying a vote on an environmental review waiver.
At a commission meeting, President Eric Eisenberg had expressed concern about the waiver and asked for a delay so the panel could hear more about the project from city representatives.
On Monday, Eisenberg said, he was informed by the mayor’s office that he was no longer a commissioner. Bass’ office has declined to explain why she removed Eisenberg.
At a special meeting on Wednesday, the Transportation Commission — now operating without Eisenberg — approved the waiver.
Bass has made reducing homelessness her top issue. Her Inside Safe initiative seeks to quickly move unhoused Angelenos into motels and hotels, and she has ordered city departments to hasten the construction of affordable housing and shelters.
Eisenberg, in a statement he provided to The Times, said he wasn’t convinced the project should be exempt from review under the California Environmental Quality Act.
A “project of thirty small homes, with sewage, plumbing lines, and trash disposal, [could] cause a situation, where the benefits of the project do not outweigh the hazards to the community,” he wrote.
Barbara Broide, a neighborhood council member, urged the City Council at a committee hearing on the project earlier this month to look at different sites, including one on Cotner Avenue.
“We’re here to tell you this is the wrong location,” Broide said. “It’s a good project for another place.”
Broide was one of several residents who hoped to address the City Council before Friday’s vote. But the council did not allow comments until afterward.
“I just wanted the council to know that it has shredded the faith that dozens of my neighbors have in their government,” said Meg Sullivan, who lives in the council district. “They came here today to let you know their very reasonable concerns, which I share, about putting housing on a much-needed public lot on Midvale, and yet they were not able to speak.”
Margaret Gillespie, a member of the Westside Neighborhood Assn., spoke in support of the project.
“I want to thank Councilmember Yaroslavsky for her leadership on this very difficult issue. It’s difficult because of all the misinformation that circulates and the false narratives about the homeless,” she said. “I support the project because 25 of the 30 units are reserved for people who live here.”
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