Karen Bass has a chance to do ‘more than tinkering’ with a new Los Angeles police chief

Over the next few months, Los Angeles voters will choose the person to decide who oversees county prosecutors, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will select the person who oversees the city’s police. Together, those two choices will chart the near-term future for law enforcement in the nation’s second-largest city.

Bass is the central character in that process, and she understands that it gives her a chance to shape public safety in her city.

“I absolutely see this as an opportunity,” she told me on Tuesday.

Already, she has signaled her desire for change and has begun moving to achieve it. Although she did not join the campaign to recall District Attorney George Gascón two years ago, she has pointedly withheld her support in this race — her silence a much-discussed rebuke to the DA who ran on a reform platform but has become mired in criticisms of his management.

Bass’ influence is more direct when it comes to picking a chief. Just weeks after she took office, LAPD Chief Michel Moore was up for reappointment to a second, five-year term. Bass allowed that to go through, feeling in no position to replace him so early in her own term. 

But those around her also let it be known that she wanted to pick her own police chief once she had a chance to settle in. A year later, Moore, whose crime-fighting and community relations efforts have been mixed, announced his plans to retire, clearing the way for Bass to find the chief she wants.

Before she makes her selection, Bass said Tuesday that she intends to commission an outside assessment of the LAPD that captures the priorities of officers – “what, not who, they want in a chief,” as she described it – as well as business and community members. Her hope is to conduct the assessment while the department is managed by interim chief Dominic Choi, who was appointed to the job last week.

As has always been the case since Los Angeles adopted rules for its police chief in the 1990s, the process for picking a new one is overlaid with politics and debates over the direction of the department. Those are closely watched in criminal justice circles, as the LAPD has long been a leader, for better and for worse, in the ways it attempts to keep the peace in its city.

First there is the question of identity politics. The LAPD has never had a woman serve as chief, nor has a Latino ever risen to the top rank. In a city that is half female and where Latinos make up the largest ethnic groups, those are notable shortfalls. Bass already has heard from those urging her to pick someone who could break at least one of those barriers.

But Bass, the first woman elected L.A. mayor, said emphatically that she feels no compunction to make that kind of history.

“I do not feel that pressure,” she said. “I do not.”

Then there is the perennial question of whether the next chief should come from within the department or whether the LAPD would be better managed by bringing in someone from the outside. At times, that choice has been obvious: When Daryl F. Gates came to the end of his bumpy run in 1992, the city was shaking off the ashes from the riots that erupted after the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted. 

Gates’ obstreperous handling of those back-to-back crises – first the beating, then the riots – convinced city leaders that a sharp break with the past was in order, and they went out and found Willie L. Williams from Philadelphia.

That succeeded in one sense: Williams was a fresh and likeable outsider who helped quell community anger toward the LAPD. But Williams also failed to grasp the LAPD’s history and place in the city, and he lied to the Police Commission when questioned about receiving freebies in Las Vegas. At the end of this first term, he was shown the door. 

Since then, the city has gone inside for a chief (Bernard C. Parks), outside for his successor (William J. Bratton), and inside for the most recent two (Charlie Beck and Moore).

Typically, the LAPD’s rank-and-file tends to favor inside candidates. That makes sense, as promoting an officer from within validates the department’s direction and its process for selecting quality officers to move upward. It is, after all, a paramilitary organization with a formal rank structure.

This time, however, the mood appears different. Bass cautioned that she has visited just three of the city’s police divisions so far as she has embarked on her selection of a new chief, but Bass said the officers with whom she has spoken are emphatic about their preference in terms of whether to promote a ranking officer from within.

There is, she said, “an absolute drumbeat to bring in someone from outside,” adding that she interpreted that to the rank-and-file’s deep unhappiness with the department’s current command staff. That does not bode well for inside candidates.

At its core, the selection of a new chief – whether from outside or within – turns on the question of whether the mayor believes the department is running fine or whether it’s in need of major work. Bass has made clear that she sees significant room for improvement. 

Violent crimes declined in 2023, but property crimes edged up slightly. And Bass emphasized that she remains concerned that the department polices different parts of the city differently, adopting a “guardian-style of policing” in some neighborhoods and a “warrior-style” in others.

Moreover, officers are voting with their feet. The LAPD is far below its historic peak in size and well below its authorized strength, down nearly 1,000 officers since 2019. 

Interim Chief Choi, at his first press conference, promised to avoid major changes during his tenure – an approach Bass said she supported – and said he would concentrate on the need to boost the size of the department’s ranks. 

Those are challenges, and rarely has the LAPD been without them. Still, there are signs that a generation of police reform work has made a difference. Bass recently spent an evening with vice squad officers responsible for a corridor in South Los Angeles long associated with sex trafficking. 

She was impressed. “I never heard the word ‘prostitute,’” she said. Officers instead described their work in terms of “rescuing girls” who were forced into “trafficking,” treating those involved in that trade as victims of abuse rather than as perpetrators of crimes.

“To me, that’s a sign of cultural change,” Bass said. Given that, she argued that the department today is not in need of an “overhaul.” But, she added, it requires more than just minor adjustments.

“’Overhaul’ is too strong,” the mayor said. “But more than tinkering.”

For the record: An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that Mayor Karen Bass supported George Gascón in his district attorney bid four years ago. Instead, she declined to support a later campaign to recall him.