Bass vs. Horvath

of the house, ransacked the house, and took off. It's not clear, at least not yet if he took anything at the time. We're actually going to be talking with LAPD Chief Jim McDonald coming up at the bottom of this hour and talk more about some of those high profile things and what the LAPD can do, if anything, to protect to protect homes there. We've seen quite a little bit of conundrum maybe between LA Mayor Karen Bass

and LA County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath. Go back to January twenty first, if you will, the Palisades fire only partially contained.

There were new fires that were going to erupt. January twenty second, I believe, is when the Castag fire, the Hughes fire broke out, and Karen Bass is still wobbling and wobbling simply because her first few days on the fire were week at best in terms of the response of the leadership, etc. City and county officials were doing these daily news conferences every day LA Unified or whatever the term they were using for their eight o'clock news

conferences until that morning because Mayor Bass went to the reporters and did so without anybody from the county, I mean, the two most common faces that we saw from the county Supervisor Catherine Barger and Supervisor Lindsay Horvath, So behind closed doors, they were a little bit of a little bit of contention maybe between two of arguably the most powerful politicians in LA. Lengthy text message that Lindsay Horvath sends Karen Bass. This almost feels dirty seeing their seeing

their text messages. And by the way, these all come from text messages and other correspondents that are available through public records requests in this case the LA Times. So Lindsay Horvath, supervisor whose district covers the Pacific Palisades, to Karen Bass, you asked us to lay off the daily pressers.

Lindsay Horvath was referring to. When they should sit down later in the afternoon and talk about it by contract. Now, listen, Lindsay Horvath and all of the county supervisors right now, they represent about two million people a piece, and you could argue that's more powerful, at least in sheer number of constituents, more powerful than a member of Congress. Members of Congress represent each district is seven hundred and fifty

thousand ish people. And again five board, sorry, five supervisors on the county board, each of them represent about two million people, and in her case, Lindsay Horvath's district stretches from Malibu and Santa Monica into West Hollywood North through a lot of the San Fernando Valley, but it does include the entire burn area in the Pacific Palisades. By contrast, Karen Bass obviously the most visible politician in all of

La County, responsible for about four million people. So this January twenty first back and forth about Hey, why'd you cut us out of these news conferences? I thought we were doing this together. It doesn't feel very locked arms, hardly a one off. When asked about the text messages and the relationship, Karen Bass was very careful. She praised Lindsay Horvath, said they're very unified in their mission. She said in a statement, Supervisor Horvath has been a tremendous partner.

She and I continue to work together to make sure the Palisades can rebuild as quickly and safely as possible. But when you ask Lindsay Horvath about it, a little bit less less in love with Karen Bass than Karen Bass, at least as saying she is with Lindsay Horvath.

We're talking about this back and forth between LA Mayor Karen Bass and LA County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath, specifically about the county getting bounced out of some of those post fire news conferences just a couple of weeks after the fire itself, in fact, to the two week mark, and Lindsay Horvath says doesn't feel very locked arms to me.

of that. Now, some of this came to a head back on the thirty first of January. If you remember, this would have been ten days after Lindsay Horvat says you doesn't feel very locked arms to me. There was a zoom meeting and Karen Bass comes out and says that the Palisades was going to reopen to the public Sunday. This would have been Friday night that she said it was happening Sunday. Well, Steve Sobroff was one of the people who criticized her and said it's probably too early

to do that. Tracy Park again representing the city that district represents, but she represents the Palisades. She said it was too soon for the neighborhood to reopen. So Palisades residents get upset with Mayor Bass and hours before they're set to reopened, she reverses course, and she says, okay, So the checkpoints that block off the area to almost everyone except residents would stay in place. All of this catches everybody flat footed. Mayor's the decision to reopen catches

everybody flat footed. Her aids don't inform Lindsay Horvath of the reversal until after they put out a press release announcing such a thing. Then it got into the assistant level. You've got a spokesperson for the supervisor talking to a spokesperson for the mayor, and they know that their bosses aren't on the same page, and they start getting chippy with each other, saying that this is problematic, saying why did you call the mayor of Malibu and not the county.

The Malibu obviously is its own separate city from La so it doesn't work the way palisades do, and sending a press release is not coordination. What you have done is create more chaos and less chaos. And then finally, Lindsay Horvath goes directly to Mayor Bass at ten o'clock at night and says, is there a reason your staff called Malibu officials without calling me or the sheriff. And again, this is a decision to partially reopen pch and the

pala Shads. We are working within protocol and they are not your jurisdiction. Sheriff has been working with Chief McDonnell, and you pull the rug on the coordinated plan. I reach out to you to no avail. Even you and Tracy Park don't seem to me on the same page. No love lost between Lindsay Horvath and Mayor Bass of la. If we get into what you watch on Wednesday late in the show, I'd love to hear what it is

that you are watching. My wife and I are several episodes into The Pit right now, which is a hospital drama that, according to a lot of doctors and nurses, is very very realistic.

Kellogg told reporters that he intends to make his three day visit to learn of Kiev's views on ending Russia's war. With Russia's war on Ukraine, he says, we're going to listen. We understand the need for security guarantees and of course the sovereignty of this nation and the defense of this nation as well. And the risk that they asteroid called twenty twenty four, why are for is going to crash into earth has increased.

a giant team effort. And when I look at the time we've had together here and the challenges that we face between the fires, the events we've had building up to the Academy Woods, We've had the Grammys, we had the worst fire in LA's history, big effort in supporting the fire department, working with our partners on that, and then we had the floods, the mud slides, and then dealing with the protests, the immigration protests has been very

challenging on our deployment, but everybody has been pulling together. Look at out of this tragedy, I think we've become stronger as a department, but also stronger as a city in a region.

the affected areas. That was something that was very challenging because people certainly want to get back in to be able to see their property, to see in some cases what's left of it, or to try and figure out what they need to go for next steps. Very emotional.

But then also from a public safety standpoint, you've got a very toxic area there with a lot of you know, danger involved, and initially with down power lines, with open gas lines, with broken water mains, as well as when you know the materials in modern housing, they're very safe

until they burn and then they become toxic. That coupled with the challenges of how many people have electric cars, you know, Teslas or others, and the lithium ion batteries in those cars and as well as in the garages on the power wall that they charge the car with. Those are all as well lithium ion batteries, which when heated, become unstable and are potentially explosive. Those had to be

updated before we could safely let people in the area. Thankfully, the EPA played a significant role in that, in removing and neutralizing them and then disposing of them. But it's kind of one thing after another, and the more technology improves and makes our lives easier, it provides also additional challenges for us and what happens to those materials of that technology when it's under unusual conditions, And certainly this was very unusual.

predicted or things. Those are those are front of mine things for people, but they also come with challenges because you have limited resources. When you pre stage them and it happened somewhere else, then you're not where you could have been or quickly respond able to respond to those areas.

But I also look then at the type of conditions that our people worked in and people, when I say are people not only our department, but everybody who was the first respond to everybody who was out there, uh, and just the air quality and the type of things

that people were exposed to without really knowing it. You went out there to do the job you could do to help save lives and protect property, but there was an awful lot of unknown substances in the air during that period, burnt particulate, and my concern was are we preparing our people and equipping them well enough to be able to deal with potentially what we'll find down the road was a health challenge.

South American crime gangs have been pretty prolific here in the last couple of years, particularly as it involves burglaries of affluent areas. We work those. We have people dedicated to work in gathering intelligence on those individuals in the ring, and we've made a significant number of arrests to disrupt some of that activity, but they are then backfilled by others who come in and keep going The level of sophistication we've seen from these groups is unlike we've seen before.

They come in with jammers. They can jam your your system if you have wireless cameras, wireless alarm systems, so they shut those down. And then they go in after they've done surveillance of your house without probably you being aware of that by leaving a car across the street with cameras in it, or implanting cameras and your flower better your neighbor's flower bed, to get a pattern of life when you're going to be home, when you're not

to know what you're going to do. And then when they get there, they check the house and they go in the back, usually break a rear slider, go in there, in there for a very limited duration, and then they're out and off, and then they pool their their where they're stolen property in a very organized fashion into a

warehouse where it's distributed or sold from there. So these are transnational criminal enterprises that in this case specialize in this type of activity, and we've seen it not only in Los Angeles and southern California, but in various areas throughout the nation.

and what's going on with federal immigration rates. Now, back in nineteen seventy nine, Special Order forty was adopted under then Chief Daryl Gates, and it prevented officers from initiating contact to figure out if somebody was in the country illegally. But it did say if after all a said and done, someone was in the country illegally, it was going to go up to the chain, up the chain to supervisors.

Supervisors in the department would then notify federal authorities. Has has that changed at all since nineteen seventy nine?

part of what we do. We're enforcing criminal laws in Los Angeles and trying to be able to maintain see maintain the trust of those who we serve, and we found that if we were to enter into that realm where we're in forcing civil immigration of law, then we would lose the trust of much of our community and ultimately the community would be less safe overall. So we're

committed to the principle of Special Order forty. There are other laws that have come along more recently, the California Trust Act and the California Values Act, which have basically put into law what we've been doing for almost forty five years.

see that involved that. The Internet has been a great boon for our society, but has also provided challenges for public safety with online scams of every type where people are being ripped off for you know, for their life savings in some cases, elder abuse, you know, the internet exploitation of children. There's so much more we'd like to do if we had enough resources to do that, but we do the very best we can with what we have. Now.

We try and be as judicious as we can be and to continue to prioritize our resources to address the threats of the day.

Los Angeles. Here, we're working with the mayor, We're working closely with the Personnel Department, another city department who does much of that work, to be able to move this forward in a way where we're able to fill classes of sixty each month, which is a good capacity for us. Unfortunately, we've been at about a third of that for the last several years, which really doesn't match our attrition rates.

So we continue to move forward and every chance I get to try and recruit people and share with them that you know that you have a tremendous opportunity to be able to make a difference, to be able to change our city for the better by becoming a Los Angeles police officer. The opportunities are great, and at the end of the day, you're able to say that maybe you made someone's worst day of their life a little bit more manageable.

they're having a good day. They call them when things are upside down. It's chaotic, there's emotion involved, off and alcoholic drugs are also involved in the situation. So we insert our people into the most challenging problems that society can pose, and we have an expectation they're going to be right one hundred percent of the time. And I don't think we hold any other profession in our society to those kind of standards.

wear this uniform. I think it's probably the nicest uniform, if you will, or the most professional uniform. It's relatively unadorned and plain, if you will, but also, you know, plain, professional looking and easily recognizable.