Los Angeles police chief takes over in a period of uncertainty and mixed signals

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Jim McDonnell is a cop. 

That’s hardly a surprise. He is, after all, the newest chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, one of the nation’s most storied, emulated and criticized law enforcement agencies — celebrated by Dragnet, torn to pieces by the beating of Rodney King. 

But not all LAPD chiefs are cops at their core. Bill Bratton, chief from 2002 to 2009, was a political leader, trained in law enforcement but distinguished most by his command of the city’s power structure. Willie Williams, who presided over the department from 1992 to 1997, was a community organizer in uniform, skilled with the public but less so with the rank-and-file.

McDonnell is different. He came up through the ranks of the department and knows its customs and routines, which are at least as important for leading it as understanding ideas about reform or political relationships. Beyond that experience, he also had tours as chief of the Long Beach Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff. So while he is a creature of the LAPD, he is also a student of it.

And he’s a cop. When he talks about the department’s priorities, he doesn’t turn immediately to budgets or reforms. He talks about driving down crime, enhancing public safety and improving the public’s perception of crime. He refers to his officers as “coppers.” And he speaks with a sense of history and perspective: Los Angeles today is vastly safer than the city he patrolled as a young officer — and that I covered as a young reporter — a fact that is often lost in the heat of political campaigns and the shrill demands for defunding or reorganizing policing.

“Any crime is too much,” he acknowledged in a recent interview. “But we’re in a relatively good place.”

McDonnell comes to the helm of the LAPD at a moment of uncertainty. The city is not facing a crime crisis, as it was in the 1990s, when murders topped 1,000 per year and violent crime was rampant. Nor, however, is this a period of quiescence; rather, it’s one of mixed signals.

Murders dropped in 2024, as did most violent crimes. Property crimes, however, have dipped a bit in the first months of 2025, but they’ve been stubbornly resistant to police efforts in recent years, police data shows.

McDonnell will have to make sense of that complicated picture, realizing as he does that property crime has a way of morphing into violence if left unchecked. That observation, the core of James Q. Wilson’s “Broken Windows” theory, has guided many police departments, including the LAPD, toward the historic restoration of safety to American cities. 

But its victories have to be won again and again. There is no complacency in policing.

Even as McDonnell properly focuses on crime, he faces the additionally challenging tasks of preparing Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics, responding to street homelessness, restoring police morale and patrolling neighborhoods devastated by the Pacific Palisades fire. Any one of those would represent a tall order for a police chief — all of them at once will stress the entire department.

Still, he’s an optimist. The fires, McDonnell said, provided a crash course in inter-agency cooperation, calling on police officers and firefighters to coordinate their work with that of the Department of Water and Power and others. The city’s Emergency Operations Center was activated by Mayor Karen Bass in the early hours of the fire, and the LAPD went on tactical alert — a heightened state of deployment during which shifts are held over and vacations cancelled — for a month. It was grueling, McDonnell said, but instructive, too.

“I look at that as valuable,” he said, creating lines of communication and trust that are essential to the work on homelessness and that will be useful in putting together security plans for the World Cup and Olympics, among other upcoming events. “It really is going to be all about relationships.”

Nothing happens at the LAPD without officers willing to carry out the mission, and McDonnell, echoing Bass, highlights morale and recruitment as essential to the department’s success. 

“Everybody has recruitment issues,” he said, and he’s right. Ever since the murder of George Floyd and the national revulsion at that act, it’s been hard to persuade young people to join police forces, where they should expect to be scrutinized and held to high standards of professional conduct. 

In some ways, that’s useful: It culls out the would-be officers who are drawn to the work for the chance to carry a gun and boss people around. But it also deprives police agencies, including the LAPD, of quality candidates who simply aren’t willing to put up with the downsides of the job.

“It really is going to be all about relationships.”

jim mcdonnell, los angeles police chief

McDonnell said he hopes to make clear that the LAPD supports its officers, that young people can come to the department to protect and serve, and can count on the department’s support so long as they do their jobs in good faith. The main complaint he has heard regarding morale, McDonnell said, is the fear that the LAPD’s disciplinary system is unfair, that it allows frivolous or malicious complaints to linger. 

To address that, he’s proposing quick reviews of complaints where the allegation can be easily checked — against bodycam video, for example. If the allegation is excessive force and the camera disproves it, then the complaint can be dismissed without an extended review and without having to “bench” the officer.

“We need to be more reasonable,” McDonnell said. The city should demand a “high level of accountability … but if you can show that it absolutely did not happen, clear it.”

There is peril on that path. Going too far to reassure police officers that the department will support them can encourage misconduct. The officers who beat King, for instance, insisted through two criminal trials that they had merely carried out the LAPD’s policies and practices on the use of force.

But not all slopes are slippery, and it makes good sense to dismiss allegations that are transparently false. If McDonnell can develop a system for spitting those cases out early, it could bolster morale and help recruitment without going so far as to undermine accountability.

Fighting crime, preparing for the international stage, housing the homeless and rebuilding the city — that’s a lot to handle. McDonnell knows it. 

Sometimes, only a cop will do.