Neither Karen Bass nor Nithya Raman prioritizes LA public safety

Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell just put an extraordinary number on what it would take to adequately police America’s second-largest city: 12,500 officers.

The LAPD currently has 8,551.

“We’re not even in that ballpark,” McDonnell told the California Post in an exclusive interview.

Los Angeles is nearly 4,000 officers short of what its own police chief says would provide the best possible coverage. And things are moving the wrong way: The department has lost about 200 officers just since February.

For years, politicians in Los Angeles debated how much policing the city could do without. McDonnell has now posed the opposite question: How much policing does Los Angeles actually need?

Consider how large 12,500 is. The largest LAPD has ever been was about 10,000 officers, in 2013. McDonnell isn’t talking about simply restoring what was lost. He says Los Angeles needs a police force roughly 25% larger than the biggest LAPD in history.

Compared with other major cities, 12,500 isn’t an unreasonable number. McDonnell notes that New York and Chicago have four to four-and-a-half officers per 1,000 residents. Los Angeles has 2.2.

How did things get this bad?

LAPD loses 500 to 600 officers a year. Los Angeles isn’t hiring enough replacements, much less the thousands of additional officers McDonnell says are needed.

This didn’t happen by accident.

Los Angeles cut $150 million from LAPD in 2020 amid the “defund the police” movement. And Los Angeles voters elected politicians who wanted to go even further.

Council members Hugo Soto-Martínez and Eunisses Hernandez, both aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, have repeatedly opposed efforts to increase police spending and hiring. Soto-Martínez has identified as a police abolitionist. Hernandez has described herself as an “abolitionist organizer.”

Council member Ysabel Jurado was caught on tape saying “f— the police” shortly before taking office.

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Recruiters say council members’ open hostility toward police only makes hiring harder.

Then there’s council member and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, who faces Karen Bass in November’s runoff. Raman entered city politics declaring “Defund the Police” and advocating that LAPD become a “much smaller, specialized armed force.” She now says the city should maintain its current under-resourced police force.

Maintaining 8,500 officers when the chief says Los Angeles needs 12,500 isn’t a public-safety plan. It’s accepting the shortage as permanent.

Mayor Bass, meanwhile, once promised to rebuild LAPD to 9,500 officers.

Higher recruit pay, faster background checks and retention incentives have all been tried on Bass’ watch. The department continues to shrink anyway.

By April, Bass had shelved that 9,500 target for the foreseeable future.

“My goal changed, unfortunately,” Bass acknowledged. “I do hope that one day we get to the expansion, but we are not there now.”

Her shelved goal was already 3,000 officers below what McDonnell says Los Angeles needs.

The city’s own budget makes the problem plain. It funds 510 new officers this fiscal year, essentially enough to offset expected departures. City budget officials project LAPD will have about 8,555 officers next summer — almost exactly where it is today.

The excuse, inevitably, will be money.

Yes, nearly 4,000 additional officers would be expensive. But Los Angeles operates on an annual budget approaching $15 billion. LAPD’s direct departmental budget is roughly $2.1 billion, plus additional costs associated with overtime, pensions and other expenses.

Budgets are choices.

And public safety should come before plenty of things City Hall currently chooses to fund. That is what priorities are supposed to mean.

Los Angeles can afford to devote more of its resources to police protection. What City Hall cannot do is spend the same dollar twice. More cops mean spending less somewhere else.

That’s what governing is.

Protecting lives and property, maintaining public order and responding to 911 calls are among the most basic responsibilities of local government. If McDonnell says 12,500 officers are needed, City Hall needs to decide whether that responsibility takes precedence over some of its other spending priorities.

And the clock is ticking. In two years, LAPD expects to dedicate roughly 2,400 officers to the 2028 Olympic Games while policing the rest of Los Angeles. The eyes of the world will be on Los Angeles, understaffed and unready. 

The staffing problem is so severe that the department has discussed shutting down academy classes for roughly seven months and temporarily reassigning more than 300 officers from its training division.

Think about that. Los Angeles may stop training new cops because it doesn’t have enough cops. You can’t build an experienced police force overnight.

Then there is November.

Angelenos will choose between Bass, who has shelved for now even her 9,500-officer goal, and Raman, who entered politics advocating a much smaller LAPD and now favors maintaining its depleted ranks.

McDonnell says Los Angeles needs 12,500 officers.

Neither candidate is proposing anything close.

And that leaves Angelenos with two candidates for mayor, neither of whom is making public safety the first priority of city government.

Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com