LOS ANGELES, California — Newly-installed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will call for the city to hire 1,000 additional Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers, after years of attrition thanks to her predecessor.
The LAPD used to have over 10,000 officers, but has fallen to just above 9,000. In 2020, as Breitbart News reported, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti bowed to the Black Lives Matter movement and promised to cut $150 million from the police budget — over 10% of the total — and to redistribute the money to “communities of color.” Garcetti, now the U.S. Ambassador to India, denied that LAPD cuts would lead to an increase in crime.
But crime has risen over the last four years from pre-pandemic levels — thanks also to L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón, a George Soros-backed radical whom Garcetti backed (after dumping incumbent Jackie Lacey, the first black woman to hold the post, whom Garcetti had previously endorsed for reelection).
Bass, who is set to deliver her first State of the City speech Monday, after 127 days in office, will unveil her proposal for more police in her budget speech on Tuesday. Notably, she will recommend that the LAPD recruit new officers from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) — a move to increase diversity on the force and overcome resistance from the political far-left.
The Los Angeles Times reported on Monday:
Mayor Karen Bass is looking to confront the issue head on by ramping up hiring and lifting barriers to recruitment. Her proposed budget, which will be released Tuesday, will call for the city to restore the department to 9,500 officers — an extremely tall order, given the ongoing staff exodus.
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Bass will send her budget proposal to a council that is ideologically further left, and more skeptical of police, than it was when she launched her campaign in 2021. Two of the council’s newest members, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez, argued against police hiring during their campaigns.
A third, Councilmember Nithya Raman, ran in 2020 on a platform that called for transforming the LAPD into a “much smaller, specialized armed force.”
The Times plays down the radical positions of the city council members who are likely to oppose Bass’s plan. Raman, for example, called to “defund the police,” and Hernandez has explicitly called to “abolish the police.”
In her State of the City speech, Bass is likely to draw attention to the city’s progress — however limited — in fighting homelessness, after housing 1,000 people (out of some 40,000) in her first three months in office.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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