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GELFAND’S WORLD - Karen Bass is running a blah campaign for reelection as the mayor of Los Angeles. That is not always a bad thing to do, particularly when an incumbent runs against an unpopular opponent, but I wonder if it is such a good idea for this candidate, this time around. On the plus side, Nithya Raman has negatives which the Bass campaign is attempting to play on. On the minus side, Bass has accumulated a load of negatives herself, mainly based on what happened on and after the days of the Palisades fire. As I did previously for Raman, I’d like to take a look at Karen Bass in her own words – by taking a look at her own reelection website.
If you were to take a look at that website (you can find it here) and believe its claims, you would conclude that she is a marvelously talented professional with a wonderful record of accomplishment in this, her first term as mayor of Los Angeles. You would believe that she has significant accomplishments in reducing homelessness on the streets of Los Angeles, that she has almost single handedly reduced the murder rate, that under her watch the city is increasing the number of police officers, and that there is near-unanimous support for her reelection.
Some of it (her opponents would say only a little bit) is correct. She has near-unanimous support from most of the elected officials, as you can see by going to her endorsement page, which you can find here. Those endorsements include 11 members of the L.A. City Council, most local elected Democrats, and a wide scattering of community leaders. She also has enormous support from organized labor. This is quite impressive except for one thing: The incumbent mayor of a large American city is expected to collect endorsements from the party faithful. That’s basically what the party does (along with soliciting money and running phone banks). It is news when active members of a political party go against an incumbent, something that is rare and usually associated with some public scandal.
So what does the Bass website tell us? The website includes a section titled How We Changed LA, which you can find here.
Let’s take a quick look at a few of the claims, starting with homicides, because lots of politicians are claiming decreases and trying to take credit for them. You can find statewide statistics here for homicides (going from 1966 to 2025) in the report filed by the state’s Attorney General. Tables 1 and 2 are particularly illustrative, because they show that homicide has been decreasing (with some ups and downs) since the 1960s. Statistics from multiple American cities (discussed here) show that the trend is nationwide.
In other words, if Karen Bass wants to point to decreased homicide levels, her opponents – or journalists in general – might wish to point out that this is a long-term national trend. Not only that, but if you had been reading these pages for a while, you might have come across a partial explanation that was popularized by the late Kevin Drum a number of years ago: The outlawing of the use of lead additives to automobile gasoline correlates nationally and internationally with the decrease in homicide rates. You can read a critical analysis of Drum’s message here, which points out the risks associated with other lead compounds as well. Whatever else you want to say, the observation that murder rates have been falling all over the country for a long time is irrefutable. Bass does not get to take credit.
And then there is the claim about homelessness on the streets of Los Angeles. The Bass website brags that “Street Homelessness is Down 17.5 percent.” Maybe so. Maybe not. But we ought to remind ourselves that the estimates for how many people are living on the streets is one of the least verifiable numbers there is. The methodology has been exposed and refuted numerous times, and I can tell you that activists who work to help the plight of the homeless will themselves explain that the numbers are not necessarily accurate, but doing the count is required to get federal aid.
And then there was a recent count which claims that homeless numbers have actually increased since last year.
I think that the Bass record on homelessness can be summarized with two short comments: First, the numbers are at best speculative and do not prove that anything this administration is doing is effective, particularly with regard to the long-term homeless population. The second is of interest from the standpoint of electoral strategy: Around 98% of Los Angeles residents are not members of the street-homeless group. They have other interests including crime, potholes, the sales tax, and whether brush fires get put out. They may have some sympathetic feel for the suffering of those who live on the sidewalks, but it is not their central concern in life.
So the Bass concentration on homelessness as her number one priority going back to the day she took office is probably not an electoral strength for her.
But then we get to a different part of the Bass website, which is the attack on her opponent. You can find it here. Raman appears to be particularly vulnerable on homelessness (in the sense that she defended the right of the homeless to camp near schools) and on crime fighting. If and when there is a mayoral debate, we can expect Bass to go after Raman’s record. Here’s one Raman weakness that will not go well with people from my district: “Raman voted against the law banning people from possessing unattached catalytic converters without proof of ownership. She justified her vote by blaming car manufacturers for making the devices too easy to steal.” Is this an accurate statement of the facts? Absent a strong refutation by Raman over a recorded vote, Bass has the advantage.
The problem for Bass is that she has little to show in terms of her own record, particularly when it comes to the slow attrition in the number of LAPD officers on patrol.
There is also something that is conspicuously missing in this website. There isn’t a lot of bragging about how Bass has worked heroically with the City Council to control costs (particularly when it comes to salaries) and thereby control the city budget in a way that allows for basic maintenance of streets, city buildings, and parks.
Some might view the above remarks as nit-picking. Others might view the election as completely apart from mundane issues like park repairs or the number of police officers. But there is one thing of electoral importance: You can just ask yourself what homeowners think about the Bass term as mayor as it applies to emergency preparedness. Here is one response I got from a colleague who was caught in the traffic jam while trying to flee from the Palisades fire: There was no organized response on the part of the police or fire department to move traffic along the main streets and evacuation corridors, even when the fire was building rapidly and the streets were filling with cars.
Whether or not this sort of response resonates with the voters, this lack of action signals a lack of interest in emergency preparedness, even though Los Angeles is becoming more and more subject to fire, flood, and earthquake. The city of Pasadena can get tens of thousands of people to the Rose Parade and back on the road towards home in a few short hours. Why can’t the city of Los Angeles at least prepare to move people when tens of thousands of lives are at risk?
A personal observation as to electing outsiders: Lots of candidates who have no experience in actually running a government agency like to brag that they are not “politicians,” where that word Politicians is spoken in a particularly angry, insulting way. I take a slightly different approach. I view politics as the way we make decisions without killing each other. It is at least slightly preferable to civil war. For this reason we need people who can administer governments and government agencies, who can mediate differences of opinion and of interests, and who can do so without allowing government to subside into chaos and corruption. It’s harder than it looks, and not everyone is talented at it.
This is where Bass has both positives and negatives. She obviously has experience in government, but until her term as mayor, it was largely limited to the legislative branch. It is a big difference.
A large part of administering in the non-legislative side of things involves getting the right people into the important jobs. I was critical of Bass in terms of her appointments when she first became mayor, and I continue to wonder about her appointments. At the time, I was most familiar with the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. The Bass appointment is a nice person with obvious talents, but at the time had no experience in the field. But equally important, there was no outreach to the community most affected (neighborhood council participants) and no real attempt to find a qualified leader from among those with experience.
Now, at this point in the Bass mayoral career, I think we might take a look at the group of people who have authority over the Port of Los Angeles. I’m going to limit my observations to what was once essentially a theme park. It was called Ports O’ Call, and was a place where you could get a fish dinner, buy salt water taffy, and view giant ships coming down the channel right next to you. It had lots of free parking and lots of shops and promenades. Curiously, it just needed one thing, which people complained about incessantly: clean rest rooms.
Simple enough. Something that the oil companies had figured out decades earlier. A place to wash your hands. Floors that were not soaking wet. Easy enough to accomplish.
And yet the Harbor Commission and the Ports O’ Call management never fixed the problem. Instead, the city decided to tear down Ports O’ Call and replace it with something else.
The process began with the destruction of the Acapulco restaurant and the Ports O’ Call restaurant nearly a decade ago. The rebuilding plan is not yet complete. Something called West Harbor is supposed to take its place. The buildings appear to be completed. You can drive by and see them. Yet here and now, as the summer months flit past, there is no West Harbor to experience. It’s true that the Covid epidemic interfered with construction at one time, but that was then.
So here is my question: Where is the Harbor Commission when it comes to kicking butt and getting the place opened up? Mayor Bass might think about replacing the whole group (who seem to have come from the business community and don’t seem to represent engineering or maritime commerce) and getting some people who can listen to the community and respond to our needs.
In brief, the Bass weakness is that she comes from a far-away legislative background and has yet to demonstrate that she has the chops to be a solid administrator. She has obviously learned a lot during her first term, but is it enough?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
