LA mayoral candidates square off on public safety, homelessness

LOS ANGELES (CN) — The three leading mayoral candidates to lead the second-largest U.S. city feuded Wednesday evening in a live televised debate that frequently tended to be more heavy on rhetoric than substance.

Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass stressed repeatedly that the number of people living on the streets had come down for the first time for two years in a row under her watch.

“Homelessness was going up year after year,” Bass said. “While it went up in the country 18%, it came down in Los Angeles 17.5%.”

Bass leads the polls for the June 2 election with 25% of likely voters favoring her, according to a UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs survey last month. Spencer Pratt, who rose to fame on the reality TV series “The Hills,” follows with 11% of likely voters and LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman came up in third with 9% in the poll.

If no candidate wins a majority, the two top candidates will face each other in the Nov. 3 general elections.

Pratt, who lost his home in the Palisades Fire last year, took aim at Bass for not allocating enough funding to the city’s fire department, which he said meant there was not enough equipment available to address the massive firestorm when it first erupted.

A major flashpoint in the debate was the public safety concern that many Angelenos experience. even though police statistics in the city of about 4 million residents suggest that crime is down.

Bass argued that she has been fighting to hire more officers for the understaffed Los Angeles Police Department, but that the City Council, including Raman, has been obstructing her efforts.

Raman countered that she voted against a massive contract that gave the police union more money than the city had available and contributed to a $1 billion budget deficit last year and cuts in essential city services.

“If you’re wondering why the streetlights are out on your block and the Bureau of Street Lighting is telling you it’s going to take a year to fix the streetlights, that is why,” Raman said.

Pratt added that he’d welcome more federal law enforcement to help crack down on lawlessness in the city, such as Wednesday’s roundup of drug dealers and gang members at MacArthur Park west of downtown LA.

And while both Bass and Pratt agreed with a proposal by Norm Langer, the owner of a landmark deli near MacArthur Park, that the city should end its program to provide needles to drug users around the park, Raman said she opposes the idea.

The mayor defended the progress the city has made in reducing homelessness through her Inside Safe program, but the other candidates questioned the enormous amount of money that’s been spent to achieve what they called incremental improvements of the intractable problem that has been plaguing the city for decades.

“Let’s use the dollars that we’re spending, let’s actually build out a real system that can get as many people indoors as possible, and let’s not put them in a $100,000 a year motel room for a year or more,” Raman said. “This system is not fiscally sustainable.”

Pratt, however, pointed out that Raman herself bears responsibility for the city’s failure to make a more substantial dent in the homelessness problem because she runs the city council’s homeless housing program.

Moreover, Pratt insisted that the vast majority of the people on the streets are drug addicts and that the approaches the two other candidates advocate to provide housing and service miss the point.

“These people don’t want a bed,” Pratt said. “They want fentanyl or super-meth.”

The purported $400 million the city has spent to house 3,000 people, he said, was an absolute failure.

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