Mayor Karen Bass’ priorities in her first report: More funding for the police and the homeless

127 days after her inauguration, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass released her first State of the City report in which she highlighted her administration’s priority on housing with more than one billion in investment in addition to $250 million to expand the Inside Safe Initiative as part of her plan. to reduce the number of homeless people living on the streets.

In her speech, which lasted just over half an hour, the mayor shared her vision for a “stronger, healthier, happier and safer city.”

In this last category, on Tuesday when he announces his budget for fiscal year 2023-2024, he will announce his plan to increase the number of officers in the Los Angeles Police Department by 500 people.

Bass, 69, admitted in his report that he could not say the state of the city was “as it should be,” although he noted that he had a clear intention of focusing his work on people’s most pressing problems.

“The state of our city really depends on the state of your neighborhood,” he said, “in terms of the state of the houses, the mood of the people of Angelena, whether you need to look back when someone walks after dark, whether you feel proud of your local park or if you have the peace of mind to pay the rent.

“If the answer is yes, then we can say that the state of our city is strong,” he said. “This is the new Los Angeles we’re building.”

Elected in November 2022 as the first African-American woman to mayor of Los Angeles, Bass’s biggest political triumph to date has been her intervention to end a three-day strike of thousands of LAUSD service workers backed by the teachers’ union. .

“Many of them are struggling to survive despite their hard work,” he stressed, publicly thanking school principal Alberto Carvalho and SEIU Local 99 executive director Max Arias for achieving what he called a “historic agreement” for students and school workers.

State of emergency

The former Los Angeles congresswoman said declaring a state of emergency for the homeless — in conjunction with county officials — was essential to the success of the Inside Safe initiative, a new approach to moving people off the streets and camps into temporary or permanent housing. . The initiative has been launched with Board members Paul Krekrorian, Bob Blumenfield, Nitya Raman, Keith Young Yaroslavsky, Marquis Harris-Dawson, Tracey Park, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Tim McOsker.

“Today, thanks to this initiative, more than 1,000 Angeleno residents live safely and at home,” Mayor Bass said.

Based on this program, he announced that his budget includes a $250 million investment to scale Inside Safe across the city.

LAPD reinforcements: ‘bad idea’

Community activists have been heavily criticized for a plan to increase the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to 9,500 employees, according to plans by Mayor Karen Bass, for the 2023-2024 fiscal year.

“This is a very bad idea,” Yvette Ale-Ferlito, executive director of La Defensa, an anti-racist, feminist and anti-capitalist movement in Los Angeles, told La Opinión. “The city’s budget should be an opportunity to invest in resources that we know are working and delivering results in the community, as well as helping, like the Let Everyone Move With Dignity (LEAD) program.”

He added that “in the city and county of Los Angeles, the problem is that although they have a program where they are trained to send people for help resources, they send them to jail.”

Ale-Ferlito emphasized that “this issue is especially relevant for people suffering from mental health problems and drug abusers.”

The mayor is expected to announce in the city budget tomorrow a plan to restore the LAPD to 9,500 officers, 500 fewer than the 10,000 that were under the administration of former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Today, the number of officers has fallen to 9,103 in the last three years under former mayor Eric Garcetti, Buss’s predecessor.

According to a report by LAPD Chief Michel Moore, the number of sworn officers is declining, and to remedy the situation, Mayor Bass plans to increase hiring and remove barriers to hiring.

“What we are seeing in the country, in Seattle, Washington, is a transformation of police departments with community members, mental health professionals, and psychologists intervening in security crises and connecting people to help resources.” said Ale-Ferlito. . “This model is much more effective than more cops on the streets.”

He also criticized that over 50% of Los Angeles’ budget is given to the police each year.

“With a lot of cops, you are only bandaging wounds, instead of making a concrete transformation and investing resources in the homeless, in families and people who are struggling with drug addiction and mental health problems. If the mayor wants to invest in long-term solutions, she shouldn’t be spending more money on an apartment. [LAPD] which attacks our community and is not a solution [para la seguridad]”.

According to the report The Role of Mental Illness in Fatal Encounters with Law Enforcement, one in four fatal police encounters ends the life of a person with severe mental illness.

At this level, the report adds, the risk of death during an incident with police is 16 times higher for people with untreated mental illness than for other civilians approached or detained by police.

They don’t believe in law enforcement

Michelle Zay, an activist for the Revolutionary Club of Los Angeles, commented to La Opinión that Mayor Bass’s plans “are another clear example that Democrats have no real solution to police killings of Hispanics and African Americans.” “.

“All they can do is hire more cops,” he said. “People should understand that we should not place our hopes for safety in the police, who, even if they look like they have the same skin color as us, will not respect us, much less protect us, as we saw in 2020. with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Andres Guardado.”

Cliff Smith, a member of the Coalition of Public Control over the Police, spoke in the same sense.

“They have 9,000 cops and they still want 1,000 more… I think there are too many places where resources should be invested,” Smith told La Opinión. “For example, in youth programs, mental health services, services for the elderly, green spaces, parks, potholes; there are more important things that should be prioritized.”

The activist pointed out that, on the other hand, “little or almost nothing” has been done to prosecute police officers who use excessive force against citizens.

“The failure to prosecute them sends a chilling signal that almost nothing has been done to hold them accountable when they kill a person,” he said.

LAPD is a ‘very expensive’ job

For his part, Salvador Sanabria, executive director of El Rescate, an advocate for immigrant rights, opined that with the workforce that the LAPD has, the crime rate should be much lower: since we have a police department that is very costly to taxpayers.”

By March 8 this year, the specific crime rates in terms of the number of murders and acts of violence associated with the use of weapons decreased by 26.3%.

According to the LAPD’s Compstat system, there were 95 homicides between January 1 and March 8, 2022, compared to 70 during the same period this year.

There were 397 homicides in 2021, the highest number in 14 years, and 382 homicides in 2022.

“We continue to see an improvement in violent crime rates, especially shootings,” Police Chief Michelle Moore told the Los Angeles Police Commission at a Feb. 28 meeting.

However, from February 11 of this year to April 8, the number of murders in the city increased from 13 to 23, that is, an increase of 79.6%.

“The figures of the city budget, which the police manage, are in the billions, but, on the other hand, you need to be fair and objective, because, despite the restrictions on access to firearms in the hands of citizens, it is very easy to take them,” Sanabria said.

“They come out as if they were candy that you buy in any store, and there are the results of so many deaths,” he stressed.