In a letter written last month seeking support for another term from the nonprofit Los Angeles Police Foundation, an independent fundraising arm of the agency, Moore wrote that he had the new mayor’s “full support.” He was almost immediately forced to apologize after the mayor’s office disclosed that she had not decided whether Moore should remain in the job. “What you have now is this convergence - a new mayor, a police chief seeking another term, and an increase in violent crime despite it subsiding somewhat from highs during the pandemic,” said Fernando Guerra, a political science professor and founder of the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. Two of the council members have departed, but the killings this month have added an additional layer of racial tension to the city’s already fraught debate over political power and accountability. Bass won the open seat for mayor in the November election.Īs she settles into office with a focus primarily on corralling the city’s homeless crisis, Bass is also confronting the fallout from a leaked audio tape of a trio of Latino city council members and a prominent labor leader using racist language to criticize council district boundaries, which help portion out power between the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods. Two of the men killed were Black and the third was Latino.Ī former community activist, member of Congress and state legislator, Bass is the first Black woman to hold the post. Moore, who became chief in 2018, is in the process of seeking a second, five-year term with uncertain support from the city’s new leadership.īass campaigned in part on a platform to make the department more responsive to the public’s demands, which include a far less aggressive approach to policing, especially in neighborhoods of color. The LAPD’s handling of the new cases, which even LAPD Chief Michel Moore criticized in a public appearance this week, also comes at a delicate political moment for the agency and for the city’s new mayor, Karen Bass (D), who was sworn into office last month. A succession of chiefs since the early 1990s has pledged to change LAPD culture. The department has been a flash point in the city’s political and social life for decades and was once subject to Justice Department oversight after the discovery that one service area, known as Rampart, had routinely engaged in corrupt practices that included false arrests, excessive force and unreasonable searches. It also evoked the LAPD’s violent past, most recently its harsh response to the large demonstrations following Floyd’s murder and the videotaped police beating more than three decades earlier of Black motorist Rodney King, which also set off violent protests. The last case, which ended in the death of 31-year-old Keenan Anderson, revived grim memories of the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd in May 2020 at the hands of police officers that Anderson cited in chilling body-camera footage of his encounter released this week. schoolteacher, died after being Tasered by officers as he allegedly fled the scene of a car accident.
Two of the men suffered from mental illnesses, while a third, a D.C. The killings occurred in the first week of January, and under pressure, a department with a problematic history of violence released body-camera footage of the fatal encounters in recent days. The deaths of three men in rapid succession this year after encounters with Los Angeles police officers has exposed a distressing lack of progress the department has made reducing police violence and managing people in crisis, despite a years-long effort to lessen the risks in such cases.
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