{"id":330394,"date":"2026-05-24T10:51:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T10:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/330394\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T10:51:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T10:51:11","slug":"l-a-crime-has-plummeted-but-its-still-a-hot-mayors-race-topic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/330394\/","title":{"rendered":"L.A. crime has plummeted \u2014 but it’s still a hot mayor’s race topic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Homicides in Los Angeles are down to levels not seen since the 1960s<\/a>. Neighborhoods once awash in gang violence now sometimes go weeks, even months, without a shooting. And the follow-home robberies<\/a> and street takeovers that captured the public\u2019s attention in recent years have largely subsided.<\/p>\n

By many measures, the city is safer than it has been in generations \u2014 and yet voters following L.A.\u2019s hotly contested mayoral race might think the opposite.<\/p>\n

The challengers to Mayor Karen Bass have zeroed in on homelessness and public drug use to argue she hasn\u2019t delivered on public safety, while also criticizing how the Police Department has operated and been funded during her tenure.<\/p>\n

Mike Bonin, a former L.A. City Council member, said the fact that Spencer Pratt \u2014 the former reality TV star who has been attacking Bass from the right \u2014 has gained so much traction in the race is proof of how Bass and other candidates to the left have failed to change \u201cprevailing narratives that the city is unsafe.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt hosts a campaign block party on 10th Avenue in Los Angeles on May 20, 2026.<\/p>\n

(Robert Gauthier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Pratt has been particularly active on social media, where he has shared artificial-intelligence videos created by fans depicting him as various superheroes coming to the rescue of a city that, under Democratic rule, has turned into a dystopian hellscape.<\/p>\n

In a March 26 post on Substack, Pratt railed against the thousands of drug-related calls that emergency officials respond to every month. He has said that if elected mayor, he would order the police and fire chiefs and the county health director to \u201ctreat every encampment as a grave-disability zone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo new laws needed,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNo endless task forces.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flanking Bass on the left is Nithya Raman, a progressive City Council member who was once the mayor\u2019s political ally.<\/p>\n

Raman has argued that Bass has thrown too much money at the LAPD, with raises for police officers coming at the expense of other basic services such as park maintenance and street paving. Raman said the LAPD pay increases have \u201cbankrupted\u201d the city, depriving other services of much-needed funding. In campaign ads, Raman has cast herself as a more sensible alternative to Bass. Raman has said she would work to reduce traffic deaths and prioritize safety on the city\u2019s buses and trains.<\/p>\n

When she first ran for office in 2020, Raman called for defunding the police,<\/a> saying the Los Angeles Police Department should be a \u201cmuch smaller, specialized armed force.\u201d Since then, however, she has voted for some budgets that increased spending on law enforcement. <\/p>\n

In response to questions from The Times, Raman said she would work to find ways to overhaul public safety.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll propose budgets that expand unarmed response, work with LAPD to improve 911 response to more quickly answer calls for help that don\u2019t require armed officers, and will appoint leadership at the Police Commission who will actively partner with the City Council to work on reform,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Representatives for Pratt and Bass didn\u2019t respond to requests for interviews with the candidates.<\/p>\n

Bonin said Bass \u2014 who supported various police reform measures while Congress \u2014 has shocked some of her supporters with how \u201caggressively pro-police she has been.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she ran for mayor in 2022, Bass vowed to retool the recruitment and hiring process in order to restore LAPD staffing to 9,500 officers. That hasn\u2019t happened.<\/a> The number of sworn officers recently fell below 8,600, despite Bass striking a deal with the police union<\/a> to offer higher starting salaries and new retention bonuses.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Mayor Karen Bass takes part in a candidate forum on May 5, 2026, in Sherman Oaks.<\/p>\n

(Eric Thayer \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

On Thursday, the City Council approved<\/a> a $15-billion budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which included funds to hire 510 new officers \u2014 just enough to offset turnover and maintain current staffing levels.<\/p>\n

Raman has said the LAPD should not shrink any further because there aren\u2019t enough officers to respond to 911 calls \u201cin a timely fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Samantha Stevens, a Los Angeles political consultant and former legislative staffer, said people seem willing to back Pratt because he acknowledges that their sense of safety has been shaken \u2014 even if he has offered few concrete details about how to tackle crime beyond cracking down on homelessness.<\/p>\n

Pratt\u2019s critics say that his plan relies on funneling homeless people into a shelter system that doesn\u2019t have the capacity to handle them all. Others have noted that the aggressive tactics he has proposed would probably face legal challenges.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor, makes a campaign stop at the site of a home burned in the Palisades fire. <\/p>\n

(Eric Thayer \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s kind of a case study in somebody who has a lot of opinions but has no idea of how the city is run,\u201d Stevens said.<\/p>\n

Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, said Pratt seems to have tapped into a deep well of discontent among Angelenos who believe that crime and homeless have spiraled out of control. The challenge for Bass, he added, is that although the numbers suggest that crime has decreased, many people associate the sight of encampments spilling onto public sidewalks as \u201ca breakdown\u201d that indicates the city is becoming less safe.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want to go back to the days of Daryl Gates, you\u2019ve got Pratt,\u201d he said, referencing the former LAPD chief whose controversial police sweeps in the late 1980s yielded thousands of arrests while alienating large segments of South L.A.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want more of the same from the past 20 years, you\u2019ve got Bass,\u201d Guerra added. \u201cAnd if you want something new, then you\u2019ve got Raman, but she has to explain what exactly she wants to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Pratt and Raman appear to be the strongest challengers to Bass, several long-shot candidates have also made public safety a key issue in their campaigns. Some have gone after Bass for her support of LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell. Hired by Bass in 2024, McDonnell has touted the impressive drop in crime under his leadership, but also faced criticism over an uptick<\/a> in shootings by police and aggressive crowd control tactics<\/a> during protests against the Trump administration\u2019s immigration policies.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Police Chief Jim McDonnell attends a news conference at LAPD headquarters on May 21, 2026.<\/p>\n

(Genaro Molina \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Rae Huang, a minister and housing rights advocate, said if elected mayor she would immediately replace McDonnell with someone who has the \u201cability to really reimagine what public safety really looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m the only one with the guts to say that out loud,\u201d Huang told The Times during a recent campaign stop at a bookstore in the West Adams neighborhood.<\/p>\n

In social media posts and interviews, Huang has frequently referred to the LAPD as \u201cone of the biggest legal gangs in the world,\u201d and said she would work on diverting money from the police budget to scale up programs that have shown promise<\/a> in sending unarmed specialists to deal with emergencies that involve people experiencing mental health crises. <\/p>\n

The city is already running two such pilot programs, but under Bass they have remained underfunded, Huang said. Last week, the City Council signed off on expanding one of the programs.<\/p>\n

Huang said she would also invest more heavily in addressing the city\u2019s lack of affordable housing, which she said is an underlying cause of crime and homelessness.<\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Police Protective League has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into attack ads against Huang and Raman. <\/p>\n

Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur, has tried to strike a balance in his mayoral campaign, advocating for changes while acknowledging that many people still feel unsafe despite the historic drop in violent crime.<\/p>\n

He criticized a recent vote by the L.A. City Council to limit so-called pretextual stops, in which officers pull people over for minor traffic infractions in order to investigate more serious offenses. The stops have been blamed for enabling racial discrimination.<\/p>\n

Miller said that \u201cconstraining the Police Department is the opposite of what we should be doing.\u201d He called for \u201cleveraging\u201d AI and modernizing the department\u2019s archaic computer systems, which he said could allow the LAPD to catch up to other agencies that have embraced new technology.<\/p>\n

Miller told The Times that he recently went on a ride-along with officers from the Rampart Division, which he said was eye-opening.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the highest level I think Angelenos don\u2019t feel safe anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cThey don\u2019t feel safe in their neighborhoods, but more recently they don\u2019t feel safe even in their own homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Statistically speaking, the city might be safer than it\u2019s been in decades, he said \u2014 but that doesn\u2019t necessarily matter to voters.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s just perception,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s reality that crime has spread.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Homicides in Los Angeles are down to levels not seen since the 1960s. Neighborhoods once awash in gang…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330395,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[137097,12858,2076,1409,137096,137095,48,52,51,5015,47,50,49,80054,592,236,6162,34965,43125,3293,1791],"class_list":["post-330394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-armed-officer","tag-bass","tag-budget","tag-city","tag-hot-mayor","tag-l-a-crime","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lapd","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-nithya-raman","tag-people","tag-police","tag-public","tag-rae-huang","tag-spencer-pratt","tag-thousand","tag-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330394","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=330394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330394\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}