Mayor Karen Bass spoke with L.A.’s Morning News’ Margaret Carrero and Mike Simpson about the letter she sent to the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday night, urging them to find $4.4 million to hire more LAPD officers.
Want to get caught up on what's happening in SoCal every weekday afternoon? Click to follow The L.A. Local wherever you get podcasts.
She spoke with councilmembers on Wednesday night ad said they need to approve the funding by the end of Friday so that the LAPD can hold its academy in January.
“We are six months away from the World Cup. The last thing in the world that we can do is not continue hiring higher officers,” she said. “We have a class that would be ready to begin in January. We have letters ready to go out to tell them when to start. Their action yesterday essentially will halt that. Letters will not be able to go out and the class will stop. We have to find the money.”
Bass also stressed that the department can’t dip below 8,000 officers.
“It's absolutely essential. We cannot go backwards,” she said. “One of the problems that we have had, it's been difficult to get officers hired. First, the issue was recruitment. We solved that. We had - and hopefully, we have reduced it some - over 1,200 people who wanted to be police officers. We had hiring problems within the bureaucracy of the city. We have finally solved that. We have a class of 56 that is getting ready to start. That is almost triple the size of classes before them. So we are finally beginning to increase hiring. Now is not the time to stop hiring when we have finally solved the problem of why so few officers were moving into each class.”
Bass said it's important the city has enough officers out there, especially with the World Cup starting in June.
When the city council approved the budget for the 2026 fiscal year, it cut back on LAPD hiring plans from 400 to 250 officers. City council, however, promised to consider boosting that number if more money could be found to make it happen.
Bass added that 48 hours is plenty of time to approve the funding.
Listen to our full interview with Mayor Bass in the audio above.
Follow KNX News 97.1 FM
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok