It’s a critical time for the city of Los Angeles, with the city facing a budget shortfall and the LAPD in search of a new chief.
In her first broadcast town hall as mayor of L.A., Karen Bass joined KNX News to hear from constituents about what they want that future to look like. She took questions from Angelenos on a variety of public safety-related topics.
*This QnA has been edited for clarity*
Can we assume there will be at least one woman candidate considered for the next chief of the LAPD? If the recommendations provided to you are all men, will you be sure to add your own female chief candidate?
“I will tell you that I cannot imagine that there would not be a woman candidate. And let me tell you also something that I have been so pleasantly surprised by: when I talk to officers, officers are very open to a woman. And look at our fire department, we have an incredible chief, Kristen Crowley. And so I cannot imagine that I would be given recommendations that would not include a woman.”
What concrete steps or actions are you going to take to address the systemic racism within our police department?
“Woo, that’s a loaded question. What I’m hoping to find in a new chief is a chief that is open, a chief that is definitely in support of community involvement and community-based policing, and a chief that will take into consideration historical issues, whether it’s a historical issue over systemic racism, whether we are talking about gender equity, whether we are talking about issues in different communities. Sometimes communities are policied differently, and that becomes a controversial issue. If you’re in an affluent area it might be one way, and if you’re in an inner city area, it might be another way.”
“What I think needs to happen – and this is one of the structural problems in policing – so you’ll have police officers develop a really good relationship with the neighborhood … and then three years later, they move. And they move because, you know, they want a promotion. They want to move up. But one of the things that has occurred when I've met with the officers is that if they were to receive benefits for staying, they might stay longer.”
Why can’t you be more proactive in either preventing homeless encampments from establishing or getting to them much faster?
“We have got to develop a method of preventing people from ever becoming homeless. And so I will tell you that this is probably one of the greatest challenges, because there’s no plan. There’s no strategy. There’s no best practices that I can look to. So we have to invent it.”
“With the Mayor’s Fund, we are trying to come up with a way to prevent homelessness, so what we are doing is we’re focusing on people who are facing evictions … And so we’ve raised money, we’ve contracted with some community based organizations, and they’re going out looking for people who are facing eviction. We’ve recruited I think about 300 lawyers to provide pro bono legal services. So that is our best shot right now, but we really do have to come up with a way to predict who’s gonna be homeless.”
“When we go and we clear an encampment, we really want to have the neighbors tell us the first time a tent appears. Now, when you see tents come back, it’s not the same people. It’s people coming because they see a space. … What we want to have happen is we want the neighbors to tell us the minute there's one tent, you gotta get the person housed the minute you see one tent, because what happens is that other people start congregating.”
How much does the drug epidemic play into homelessness?
“It does play in, but you know what? It’s a chicken and egg thing. And let me just describe that a lot of people become unhoused not because they’re addicted, they become addicted when they’re unhoused. Why? Because you want to survive the night, so you want to stay awake all night, so you start using meth, and you stay awake. But what I think is really important for people to know is that one of the fastest growing sectors of the unhoused are our seniors. People who are in their late 60s and early 70s are falling into homelessness … if their rents go up and they don’t have a family to take them in, they’re on the street.”
Why are there so many unhoused people on Metro?
“So what happened in Metro – by the way, this was national, this didn't just happen here – when we were all at home during COVID, the unhoused kind of took over public transportation. And then as we were all coming back out again, then we had this issue.”
“The way we're addressing the problem is through services … We had to train the ambassadors how to administer Narcan because in the first six months last year, 50 people died on Metro. 50 people died overdosing, maybe some were health-related. What we’re trying to do, though, is put ambassadors there and put other social service providers there who can get people to come off and give them housing and other services that they need.”
What are the city’s budgeting plans for the 2028 Olympics? On what type of projects will the city be spending money? What is the plan to make sure our city doesn’t lose money or is on the hook for Olympics-related expenses?
“When the deal was made with L.A. City Council to have the Olympics, part of the guarantee was that we would not go into debt. We have LA28, which is doing a lot of the fundraising, and they’ve been raising a lot of the money now with sponsorships … And I frankly hope to use all that energy and enthusiasm to say, when millions of people come here, can’t we deal with our problem? Because we don’t want people to come here and see 70,000 tents. We don’t want that. And so I’m hoping that part of that synergy will help us address our problem of the unhoused.
“You should know that the federal government will kick in, and has already kicked in quite a lot. You probably saw the federal government, the Department of Transportation, gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Metro recently because part of the strategy around the Games is for it to be a car-free Games.”
What is the plan for implementing CARE Court in Los Angeles? What are your expectations for how many mentally ill homeless people in the city might be able to receive treatment through the courts?
“One of the saddest things, I feel, about our society – and this is not just L.A. – but we basically allowed our mental health system to completely collapse … It’s controversial in some places for me to say what I’m going to say, but I don’t really care. I have a medical background, and I just think it is cruel and inhumane to allow people to be on the street who are so profoundly ill that they have no idea they’re ill. And I don’t think that’s freedom. I don’t think that’s liberty. I think that’s cruelty.”
Is forced institutionalization the long-term solution?
“Let’s talk about money for a minute. Choose how you’re gonna pay. Because right now we have the nation’s most expensive medical institution downtown, it's called county jail. How come [civil rights advocates] are not protesting the incarceration? Because that’s what we have decided to do in this country is incarcerate people who are mentally ill. … You and I know that if we took care of them, we could prevent their deterioration to the point where they committed a crime. We don’t do that.”
“One thing too is that if you take somebody and hospitalize them against their will, they're not hospitalized forever. You can stabilize them and you can reintegrate them, but you have to have housing and some place for people to go.”
Which candidate are you backing in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's race, and do you feel the current DA, George Gascon, has done a good job?
"I don't know what I accomplished by criticizing other elected officials."
"I'm not going to take a position in that race nor comment. What I can tell you, though, is that we need to do both things. We have to deal with public safety, we have to deal with crime, but I am also very invested in preventing crime and intervening in crime."
What things about the way the DA's office functions bother you the most?
"It's tough for me because I don't know how the district attorney's office functions [but] I certainly know what the critique is - he just lets everybody go and all of that. I do think that a whole lot is put on his plate that he actually is not involved in...again, I am not a lawyer... but I think that a lot of stuff lands on him that does not belong, and maybe there are things that belong on his plate."
With pedestrian safety lacking throughout L.A., can more crosswalks be added to the Crenshaw District?
"So, I don't know specifically if we can add more crosswalks, but we are looking at traffic safety period...looking at traffic safety, looking at ways to prevent pedestrian crashes, especially, pedestrian deaths."
"It's definitely a part of the plan, and that was the heart of that ballot initiative HLA, and the whole point of that is to do an analysis...
What we're working on now is figuring out how to implement it, especially figuring out how to implement it in this budget season."
Does the city have the money right now to do that?
"When you have something as big as that, it takes a while, I mean, you have your plans to implement it. L.A. already had a mobility plan, and one of the reasons why that ballot initiative came up was because we hadn't implemented the mobility plan. But this particular budget year is gonna be particularly difficult. So, even if it was a good budget year, it still would take probably a year or more before you move into actual implementation."
Can the city do something productive with the infamous 'graffiti towers' downtown?
"I want you to know it's been my obsession, frankly."
"That building is a billion-dollar building that is abandoned and was supposed to house 700 luxury apartments. Can you imagine how many normal-sized apartments you could get there? I was on a crusade for a little while trying to figure out how we could get a hold of that building.
"One of the problems with that building, though, is that it's been built enough that now it probably would have to be torn completely down...I even had an estimate to see how much that building would cost $850 million."
The city's system for reporting crimes - violent and nonviolent - needs to be fixed. What is your office doing to address it?
"Well, one thing that we are trying to do is to increase the visibility of officers in certain neighborhoods... but we do have a shortage of officers...The numbers are coming up; we had more recruits in these last couple of classes than we've had in the last four or five years."
"Then there's also mobilizing and organizing the communities together as well so people feel safer."
"We do know that there's a lot of problems with 311 and we are trying to address that, but if you see somebody [on the street] you are left with 911 because sometimes you don't know whether they're alive or not or whether they're overdosing and you need somebody to come and that's not a 311 call."
Mayor Bass closed the event by pledging to fix the 311 system.
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