When she ran for mayor four years ago, Karen Bass said she wanted to regrow the Los Angeles Police Department to the 9,500-officer force it was before the ranks began to shrink. Now up for reelection \u2014 and facing a budget crunch \u2014 Bass says her plan has shifted.<\/p>\n
The aim going forward, she told The Times in a recent interview, is to simply stop the department from getting smaller.<\/p>\n
As of this week, the department had 8,677 sworn personnel \u2014 the lowest total in nearly a quarter-century<\/a>. Even after efforts under Bass to streamline hiring and boost recruitment<\/a>, some officials are concerned there won\u2019t be enough new cops to replace those projected to leave or retire in the coming years.<\/p>\n \u201cMy goal changed, unfortunately,\u201d Bass said. \u201cI do hope that one day we get to the expansion, but we are not there now.\u201d<\/p>\n A Bass spokesperson said after the interview that the mayor remains committed to reaching the 9,500-officer benchmark in the long run, but did not provide a timeline for getting there.<\/p>\n On April 20, Bass will release her spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts on July 1. She and the City Council will spend the coming months working out how to balance the city\u2019s books in a way that avoids deep cuts to other services and the layoffs of city employees. A projection by the city administrative officer estimates the city\u2019s budget deficit to be \u201cseveral hundred million.\u201d<\/p>\n Bass said she had spent years addressing a years-old administrative bottleneck<\/a> within the city\u2019s personnel department, which runs the background process for police hires. <\/p>\n The efforts were targeted \u201cat every level: at the top, as well as internal to the department,\u201d said Bass. \u201cAt least the impediments that kept us from retaining recruits, to get them in the academy, that has changed.\u201d <\/p>\n The mayor called the old hiring process \u201carchaic,\u201d and said similar issues exist with other city departments. At the LAPD, she said, \u201cWe expanded recruitment and had a record number of recruits, and then we couldn\u2019t get them hired, so we had to revamp the hiring process.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite attrition at the LAPD in recent years, crime has plummeted, with homicides in the city falling to levels not seen since the 1950s<\/a>. Yet public safety remains an issue in the mayor\u2019s race, where Bass faces a challenge from City Councilmember Nithya Raman.<\/p>\n A recent survey co-sponsored by The Times found that more than half of voters view Bass unfavorably in the race. The same poll found that 39% of Angelenos think the LAPD needs to increase in size, with 29% saying the department should stay the same size and 19% saying it should shrink.<\/p>\n Raman came out ahead of Bass in a recent poll<\/a> that only identified candidates in the mayoral race by their platforms, but not their names, though other surveys that identified them by name showed Bass in the lead.<\/p>\n Raman has said that she believes the police force is the right size<\/a> at around 8,700 officers. Bass\u2019 onetime ally has argued the mayor has thrown too much money at the LAPD, an approach Raman claims has come at the expense of other basic services such as park maintenance and street paving. <\/p>\n Raman has accused the mayor of signing off on raises for police officers with a contract that has done little to make a dent in the department\u2019s recruitment struggles and only made worse the city\u2019s financial picture. She and other critics say that with the dwindling number of cops, officials need to start investing more in community-led efforts that prioritize prevention over punishment in order to further reduce crime. <\/p>\n Bass said she had embraced a crime-fighting strategy that balances traditional policing with a more public health-oriented approach, pointing out that she had opened an Office of Community Safety to support gang interventionists who help defuse neighborhood conflicts before they explode into violence. Her administration also spearheaded sending mental health teams<\/a> or other unarmed responders to emergency calls that were once fielded by police.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no accident, she said, that killings in some of the most crime-impacted neighborhoods had fallen by 27%. So far this year, police say that most crime categories are down compared to where they were at this point in 2025.<\/p>\n LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell has said that without addressing police staffing the city\u2019s progress on crime is at risk, especially as L.A. gets set to host large-scale sporting events like the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics. <\/p>\n During his briefing to the Police Commission on Tuesday, McDonnell said roughly 8% of the department\u2019s employees are unavailable to work because they are on sick leave or other work restrictions. McDonnell and other police officials have said staffing shortages are limiting the department\u2019s ability to respond quickly to low-level crimes, leading to high officer burnout rates, and driving up overtime expenses.<\/p>\n Asked to assess McDonnell\u2019s first year-and-half as the city\u2019s top lawman, Bass issued a written statement that said she considered McDonnell a strong partner \u201clowering crime, hiring more officers, and reversing longstanding trends.\u201d<\/p>\n She added: \u201cI will always keep pushing every City leader to do better by the people of Los Angeles.\u201d <\/p>\n Bass said she would continue working with the chief to \u201cidentify measures\u201d to reduce the number of police <\/a>shootings, particularly those involving people in crisis.<\/p>\n Such changes would go hand in hand with an overhaul of the department\u2019s much-maligned disciplinary system, which has faced criticism from some corners for not meting out harsh enough punishments when officers shoot unarmed people. The union that represents the department\u2019s rank-and-file members has long complained of a double standard that lets well-connected officers and senior leaders off the hook.<\/p>\n Bass said that based on her conversations with officers, \u201cthe internal part of the disciplinary system has gotten a little better.\u201d<\/p>\n Broader reforms have also been under discussion, with the council weighing new limits on so-called police pretextual stops, in which officers use a minor violation as justification to pull someone over and then investigate whether a more serious crime has occurred. Bass said she is in favor of further changes to tighten LAPD policies.<\/p>\n A recently published report<\/a> by Catalyst California, a group that advocates for racial justice, found that such stops have continued to disproportionately affect Black and Latino drivers, even as the LAPD has scaled back<\/a> their use over the past decade.<\/p>\n \u201cCertainly, when I was younger, I experienced pretextual stops, and they are terrifying,\u201d Bass said, adding that she believed the department\u2019s culture was already changing. \u201cI will tell you that as many roll calls as I\u2019ve been to, a lot of officers already feel like they can\u2019t do pretextual [stops] anymore \u2014 so I think there\u2019s been progress there, but clearly more, more to go.\u201d<\/p>\n Times staff writers David Zahniser and Noah Goldberg contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When she ran for mayor four years ago, Karen Bass said she wanted to regrow the Los Angeles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[12858,1610,723,6246,48,52,51,5015,47,50,49,17708,45457,2322,21747,592,2325,2211,32081,8366,72],"class_list":{"0":"post-258902","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-bass","9":"tag-city-council","10":"tag-crime","11":"tag-department","12":"tag-la","13":"tag-la-headlines","14":"tag-la-news","15":"tag-lapd","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","18":"tag-los-angeles-news","19":"tag-mayor-bass","20":"tag-mcdonnell","21":"tag-officer","22":"tag-other-service","23":"tag-people","24":"tag-police-officer","25":"tag-race","26":"tag-raman","27":"tag-record-number","28":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}