Which way, LA: Bass or the Billionaire?

Backwards or forwards in mayor’s race

“First of all, I do not, I never have, supported defund the police,” congresswoman and mayoral candidate Karen Bass said in a meet-and-greet event at Sirens Java & Tea in San Pedro on Aug. 6, responding to rumors being circulated against her in her race against former Republican and billionaire developer Rick Caruso.

It’s a familiar situation for Bass who, as a Black woman — the first ever to lead a state legislature — has a long history of being misjudged, and surprising those who misjudge her.

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Despite massively outspending her, Caruso still seems unlikely to beat her in November, but he has shifted the debate, ala Donald Trump, back into the territory of “American carnage” with a focus on homelessness and crime, and claims akin to, “I alone can fix it,” leaving Bass with a lot of fact-checking and debunking to do. But in the process, some crucial possibilities for real progress may be getting lost — from criminal justice reform to housing and homelessness to climate justice and resilience, and more.

A health-care worker turned community organizer, Bass was first elected to California Assembly in her early 50s, and became Speaker in 2008. Her record was characterized by engaging with and empowering community input on the one hand — initiating the process that produced the first ever “State of Black California” report, for example — and engaging in difficult negotiations with political opponents on the other — receiving the 2010 “Profiles in Courage” award along other legislative leaders for “standing up to the extraordinary constituent and party pressure they faced while working with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to address California’s severe financial crisis.” Her willingness to work with anyone was the common factor in both sides of this record — and even extends to those attacking her now.

“I have been on record on TV, radio, print, hundreds of times, because, when the Speaker asked me to lead the effort around the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, I worked tirelessly to pass that bill out of the House,” Bass went on to explain at the coffee house that caters to first responders. “That bill, in itself, provides hundreds of millions of dollars for the police. So, if you don’t support the police, you wouldn’t support the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.”

What’s more, she noted, “Ironically, I worked closely with the Police Protective League on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. We worked closely together, which is why I was surprised that they spent $4 million attacking me, since we had worked so closely together. And, interestingly, I worked with Rick Caruso,” who helped her “with my Republican colleagues, who weren’t really sure where I was coming from.” (Caruso changed his registration to “Democrat” in January.)

It took several minutes before Bass got around to saying, “I believe in stopping the crimes of today, and investing in preventing the crimes of tomorrow.” But even after that, she said little specifically about prevention strategies, despite having deeply detailed plans outlined on her website. But she did promise responsiveness.

“I want to have an office of community safety, where we essentially go to all the neighborhoods around the city, and say, ‘What makes your neighborhood safe?’,” Bass said. “I don’t believe in one size fits all. But what I do believe is that if you define what you want, it’s my job as mayor to deliver it. And I do believe that the number one job of the mayor is to keep the city safe.”

Unfortunately, what people clamor for may not be what they want. There’s only mixed evidence, at best, that increased policing reduces serious crime — some shows the opposite. What it does do is increase misdemeanor arrests — which have significant social costs — as sociologist Brenden Beck explained at Slate in April, reporting on the results of a study he co-authored, analyzing 29 years of data spanning hundreds of cities.

“We found the size of a city’s police budget and the size of its police force both strongly predicted how many arrests its officers made for things like loitering, trespassing, and drug possession,” Beck wrote. “The trend was clear: When cities decreased the size of their police departments, they saw fewer misdemeanor arrests and when they increased them, they saw more.”

Increased arrests may make some people happy, but “Arrests for petty offenses are devastating for the people arrested and their communities,” Beck explained. “Even a single arrest makes a person less likely to stay in school, be hired for a job, or obtain housing. The punishment of an arrest often cascades into fines, fees, and what legal scholar Issa Kohler-Hausmann calls ‘procedural hassles,’ even in cases that do not result in jail time.”

“If intense misdemeanor enforcement reduced crime, these costs might have to be balanced against the public safety benefits of low-level arrests,” Beck noted, “but study after study has found intense misdemeanor enforcement does not reduce crime. One study analyzed the effects of randomly dropping some misdemeanor charges and found people who had their cases dismissed were less likely to be rearrested over the next two years, suggesting misdemeanor enforcement actively causes crime.”

It’s findings like these — hard-nosed empirical data — that are cited by aspiring progressive prosecutors, such as city attorney candidate Faisal Gill.

Bass Reverses Endorsement

Bass initially endorsed Gill, only to reverse her decision in June, when Caruso attacked her endorsement. Bass did not respond to Random Lengths’ inquiries to explain her reasoning.

Caruso attacked Gill specifically for his proposed 100-day moratorium on misdemeanor charges, “unless they are particularly egregious or time-sensitive,” which Gill credibly claims was a fear-mongering mis-representation of crimes that would not be charged.

“Rick: you may be filthy rich, but no amount of money can change the truth,” Gill said in a statement at the time. “Never did I say I would not prosecute egregious crimes as city attorney. The crimes Caruso lists that I allegedly won’t prosecute are entirely fabricated, made up out of whole cloth.”

What’s more, that moratorium was clearly a temporary transition measure, lasting less than 1/14 of his prospective term. Focusing on it was clearly intended to obscure Gill’s long-term goal to implement a safety-enhancing diversion-focused system. Now that the attempt to recall District Attorney George Gascón has failed, it’s a good time to soberly reconsider just what Gill is proposing.

The Homelessness Issue

As with crime, Caruso’s homelessness stance is long on tough talk, and claims of competence. But he’s apparently never built a single unit of affordable housing in his career. Instead, he’s relying on public anger and frustration — the desire to do something, regardless of whether it works. This was reflected in the city council’s recent 11 to 3 vote to dramatically expand the city’s prohibition on camping to public spaces around schools, which even the LA Times derided as “only fool[ing] people into thinking something is being done about homelessness.” The new measure “won’t make a dent in homelessness and it probably won’t even reduce the appearance of encampments,” a Times’ editorial argued. “It will simply shift them down the block from a school — and it might not even do that. Another anti-camping restriction wastes time and city resources and solves nothing.”

Both candidates recognize there are multiple moving parts to the problem, but only Bass has decades of experience working on the multiple levels that need to be brought together. “We have to have a whole of government approach, which means the federal government’s responsible, the state government, the city and the county.” The city and county need to work together. “It makes no sense to say the city’s responsible for building, the county’s responsible for services, when we’re talking about the same individual,” she said. “And we’ve got to get the federal government to relax a lot of regulations to address this problem like it’s an emergency.”

But there’s a way the city can lead. “The city alone owns about 70 acres — lots. Some of which are completely vacant. Why can’t we put up housing there?” Bass asked. (City Controller Ron Galperin gives a lower figure of 39 acres.) “We know how to do this,” she said, “We’ve seen what our government can do. 20,000 Afghan refugees were in Qatar. We had to build a virtual city. Did we know how to do that? Yes. Why can’t we do that here, at home? That’s why you have to have an all of government approach. We have to prevent people from becoming homeless, we’ve got to get people off the streets right away, into housing, and then we have to address why they were unhoused to begin with. What was the problem that led to them losing their housing. If we don’t address why they were unhoused, the odds of them staying in housing is very slim.”

While it’s important to address individual problems, there are broader underlying drivers — income inequality and the shortage of affordable housing — that have been worsening for decades. One way to address them would be through direct government involvement in building mixed-income social housing — a much larger scale solution than just building housing for the homeless, which is well established elsewhere in the developed world. And the need for something similar in California is clear.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Out Of Reach” report documents the “significant gap between renters’ wages and the cost of rental housing across the United States,” using its central statistic, the Housing Wage — what a full-time worker must earn to afford modest rental without spending more than 30% of their income on housing. California currently has the second highest housing wage in the country — $39.01/hr. Even with its $15/hr minimum wage it would take 104 hours per week to afford a 2-bedroom rental home.

Facing this reality, a bill to bring social housing to California, AB 2053, by Assemblymember Alex Lee, of Milpitas, passed the Assembly but died in a Senate committee by one vote in June. As mayor of LA, with wide-ranging influence, Bass would be a formidable force in getting such legislation passed next year, and she could explore how much LA could do on its own. This seems like a natural extension of her past advocacy and ideas, but again, Bass did not respond to Random Lengths’ queries on the subject.

Climate Justice

Another issue area Bass highlights on her website — climate and sustainability — has gotten far less attention, while it ought to be front and center, given how crucially it interconnects with virtually everything else local governments are responsible for. Here, again, she has some deeply detailed ideas, summed up in what she calls “a jobs and justice-centered plan to decarbonize our economy.” For example, under the heading, “Transition to Zero-Emission Vehicles and Dramatically Reduce Vehicle Emissions,” specifics include:

• Expand the network of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations throughout Los Angeles, both in households and corridors – where Angelenos live, work, and play – specifically in communities where access has been limited.
• Create  jobs installing and maintaining EV charging stations particularly in underserved communities and ensuring that small and minority-owned businesses can participate in the rapid growth of the charging network.

There’s a careful weaving together of diverse concerns here and throughout her climate plans. What’s missing is something noted in our last issue story about the 710 freeway: anything akin to Munich’s planned Freiham ecodistrict “with 15,000 jobs, a mix of homes for 25,000, schools, daycare, cafes, shops, car-free streets, parks and courtyards, all combined with high capacity transit.” The many fine pieces that are in Bass’s plan could realize even greater benefits if they could be brought together in some similar fashion.

Finally, under the heading, “Clean Up Our Port To Benefit Communities,” she not only commits to 100% zero emissions by 2030, “partner[ing] with all levels of government to meet public health and climate goals,” and “support[ing] healthy land use and permitting policies that prevent or mitigate community impacts,” she also pledges to “Support investment of port revenues in community benefits for impacted neighborhoods, including public health and mobile clinics, parks, open space, and community gardens, climate resilience and adaptation projects, technology development and deployment, education enhancements, and projects that address noise pollution.”

It’s an impressive statement of commitments, but what’s missing is something touched on in our story about the recent “Somebody Else’s Ocean” report: the need for some kind of institutional structure to alter the long-term incentives that have allowed the port to become captive to the interests of foreign shipping and manufacturing companies.

Bass has a long history of working to get unheard voices heard, and fostering collaboration. She could be a truly transformational mayor if she dares to double down on that legacy by creating new institutional forms — not just at the port, but elsewhere as well — to not just create a more inclusive, collaborative policy structure under her administration, but to establish it as a permanent feature of how Los Angeles functions, not just internally, but in all its collaborative dealings with other governmental entities as well.