Karen Bass sits down with Elex Michaelson

And very happy Wednesday to you. At twelve oh seven in the West, it's the John Phillips Show, mister Randy Weggs in Culver City.

John, we are now less than two weeks away from the elent the end of election season in Los Angeles City and County continue to underperform the state of California when it comes to getting those ballots. In the state of California is at six percent. LA City in La County are at four percent.

Which is interesting because Spencer Pratt is the one that is generating all of the interest in this election.

Yes, but is that interest from people who can vote in Los Angeles or is that interest from the people on the internet that can't vote in Los Angeles. Very good point, Randy.

Eight hundred two two two five two two two is jellphone number one eight hundred two two two five two two two. Well, speaking of the City of Los Angeles, La Mayor Mother Oos gave another disastrous interview, this time to CNNs Alex Michaelson. Here's the short version. It did not go well. She's out of her element if she's not rhyming.

Let's hear Karen Bass in her sit down with CNN's Alex Michaelson.

So when you talked to Jake Tapper in twenty twenty three, you said that your goal was to end street homelessness in LA by twenty twenty six. It's now twenty twenty six.

And we haven't ended it.

We have not ended it, and we're not close to ending it.

Four more years. By the way, Gavin Newsom did the exact same thing that he was mayor of San Francisco.

How are you so off?

Well, basically, when I said that have you a valley girl?

I thought you were in Baldwin Hills.

Remember when Barbara Ferrer took on the valley girl persona?

The evidence is like feel clear on that?

Well, what do you think she was like at You See Santa Cruz. I don't want to know because that's like the biggest party school in the UC system. So what was she doing?

Well, just because you know her as the lady with the white lab coat doesn't mean when she was an undergraduate at You See Santa Cruz, she wasn't dancing on tables whipping her braw around her head to mony mony.

Next side. He always paid interesting visuals on this show. Well, basically, when basically.

Well, basically, when I said that it was.

This is true. On the old Loveline show before it ended with Doctor Drew and Mike Catherwood, they used to have a bell they would play when they'd have a caller who called in, and they hit the bell every time. Someone would say basically because they would say it about seventeen times when explaining how they got in STD.

Oh my, well, basically, when I said that it was at the beginning of my term, I am very committed to achieving that goal. I didn't anticipate some of the bureaucratic barriers that I would experience.

Well, you should have gotten some advice from Shang E Tao. The breaucracy is real. Could have learned a lot.

But I am prepared to take those on now. And let me just give you.

You know, this first four years was just getting the training wheels, figuring out how this city works. The next four years it's gonna be great.

It's not like spring training in baseball, where you get a whole month to work the kinks out. You said, if elected, you would end street homelessness in four years, and now there's a bomb on it corner.

But I am prepared to take those on now. And let me just give you an example. Los Angeles made a decision probably twenty twenty five years ago to not address street homelessness, to focus.

Well, twenty five years ago, this wasn't that big of a problem. No, no, this has become a massive problem in what the last ten years, pretty much since twenty fourteen, because that is when we de facto legalized drugs, and you could go all the way back to about twenty ten when we started depopulating the prison system.

It was a combination of those two things prison realignment Prop forty seven, Prop Fifty seven. The moment we decriminalized drugs and we decriminalized retail theft, it exploded.

To focus solely on building. And granted, I have fast tracked forty two thousand units of a fourth did.

You say granted or granted? I don't know. Let's listen to that again.

And granted, I.

Makes for a hell of a countertop.

And granted, I have fast tracked forty two thousand units of affordable housing, but it still takes a couple of years.

So basically, and that fast tracking was in an executive order. She wrote about two weeks ago.

Okay, But even though she's giving some of them units to sleep in, they're just storing their stuff there, and they're still hanging out in the encampments because that's where the drugs and the fun are.

But it still takes a couple of years. So basically, the policy of La that was.

The second one. I need a bell. Are we gonna hear about chlamydia next? Oh? I missed that show.

So basically the policy of La City in La County was we could accept straight homelessness as long as we were building. We didn't anticipate the problem tasticizing. In my three and a half years, for the first time, two years in a Row Street homelessness has decreased in our city.

Nope, and that's with how many of them dying on the streets per day between five and seven in the county, you know, so you're looking at a few thousand that are dying because of overdose or other issues every single year.

In my three and a half years, for the first time, two years in a Row Street homelessness has decreased in our city. There hadn't been a decrease before.

Also, some important context. When Karen Bass took over, she installed her friend Valicia Adams Kellum. Excuse me, doctor Valiicia Adams Callum is the head of LASA, who changed the methodology of how they count the stupid homeless count, and who also, through a whistleblower complaint, was hiding about how ineffective Karen Bass's homeless plans were. Huh.

And that's one thing that you should be able to notice because you see it on a regular basis. It's like when someone loses weight. You're used to fat Al Roker, and then all of a sudden, Al Roker loses a ton of weight, and he's this thin guy doing the weather and you go, oh, look, Al Roker's thin now, or maybe not thin, but not as fat as he used to be. You live here in Los Angeles, You drive around the streets, you drive around the freeways, you

Let me tell you, as a resident, unfortunately of the city of Los Angeles, you can see it. You can smell it.

You can smell it right here.

And you can feel it.

In my three and a half years for the first time two years in a Row Street. Homelessness has decreased in our city. There hadn't been a decrease before. That is a quality of life issue that impacts all Angelinos, whether you are unhoused or whether you run.

Can we stop using that term, No, she is wed to that.

Term, or whether you run a business.

By the way, lassit doesn't even like that term anymore. They say. The appropriate term is people experiencing homelessness. Okay, how about this.

If they actually have a house, whether it be a unit that was given to them through Project Inside Safe, a bed at a homeless shelter, a couch to sleep on, whatever, But they have a domicile where they could live if they wanted to, but they prefer to hang out in the encampments because that is their preference.

What do you call that?

Or whether you run a business and your business can't function because there's tenths outside, whether you're a peer that's trying to navigate through tenths to get to.

School, all of this is still happening every single day.

Or whether it's residents where it has decreased the quality of life. So this is a problem. That all Angelino's experience, and we have got to have a commitment that this has to end the.

City you're in charge. This is so pathetic.

Where she's making the argument, well, I know, I promised that I would fix this problem in four years and I didn't even come close. However, I'm making a dent in it, and you need to give me four more years, because only if you give me four more years can I make the problem go away.

I don't think she can make the problem go away at this rate in forty more years. No, no, she can't because she's part of the problem.

The city and the county never made that commitment before. And I found something that surprised me. I found a lot of people who work internal in this system who were very resistant to ending street homelessness.

You mean the homeless industrial complex who you are bringing the brinks truck to. Shocking that the service providers don't want to solve the problem because that's how they get their funding. Part of Karen Bass's problem is this, she is one of these people who buys into the false idea that the high cost of housing is causing the homelessness, which we all know is not true. It's drugs, it's alcohol,

But you promised that it would go away one hundred percent and it's only gone down about seventeen point six percent. So why should people trust you that you're going to be able to get to the hunting?

Because great question, Alex Michaelson. Good for him.

So why should people trust you that you're going to be able to get.

To the hunt because, let me just tell you, for the first time, we've had a decrease at all.

No, if you were selling a product and car companies get in trouble for this all the time, they put ads in the newspaper, buy this suv because it gets thirty miles per gallon, and then in real reality the car comes nowhere near thirty miles per gallon. It gets I don't know eighteen nineteen miles per gallon, and you go, now, wait a minute, that's not what the salesman promised me. That's not what it said on the sticker. That's not what the car company said in their literature. They promised

I drive on Vano And Boulevard from my home on the west side of the San Fernando Valley to Bourbank Airport pretty regularly, and the last few times I've done this, I've started counting the tents that I see just on Van Owen going through the Valley to get to that airport. The amount of tents have not changed.

No, it looks like outside of a Best Buy on Black Friday.

There was not a decrease before at all, because there was no commitment to get rid of street encampments, and we had encampments all over the city.

We still do. It. Used to just be in skid row, but now they're everywhere.

So I would ask for people's trust in the sense that.

We did drop a tea there. She likes to do that, doesn't she Usually she drops the d That's the first time she's dropped the tea. I trust Bass.

So I would ask for people's trusts in the sense that we have absolutely made progress. We know what we need to do now to in street homelessness.

We need I finally figured out what to do. I'm going to need four more years to implement it, though.

Okay, then why aren't you doing it now? If you've cracked the code, why is it that we have to wait until after election day in November.

We know what we need to do now to in street homelessness. We need to end the failed policies of the past, which is all we're going to do is focus on building, and we are going to ignore street homelessness. That is what the city in the county has done for years, ignored street homelessness.

Well, she's really trying to throw everybody but her under the bus.

And by the way, when she talks about the quote mistakes of the past, what she's talking about is incarceration. If we're ever going to get out of this crisis, what we're going to have to do is put many of them in prison because they're breaking the law on a regular basis. They're doing it in plain side, and the cops and the system are being told to look the other way.

What would you identify as sort of the biggest obstacle that you learned maybe being in the job, and how are you going to tackle that differently in the next four years.

The biggest obstacle is the resistance to building interim housing so.

Basic, you mean putting up shelters in single family neighborhoods that attract crime. Gee, I wonder why there's resistance to that. That one's hard to figure out. And by the way, this was a policy of the former mayor Eric Garcetti who created the Bridge Home system, where we needed a shelter in every district. But don't you worry. If we build these things, we're going to make sure to clean up the area in front of the shelter. And that did not happen. I received things on both ends.

So basically it was an three.

Where's that bell?

So basic it was an ald or nothing type policy. I think probably.

She added a D there.

I guess if she drops the D she can pick them up and use them when she wants to.

So basically it was an ald or nothing type policy. I think probably for a good reason. We didn't want people to languish in shelters, but the shelters of the old was a big room with cots all around. That does have to end. But now there's new and improved shelters where you can house multiple people. It's not a motel room.

You can have oy way. Your hope plan's been motels. So why aren't you changing that strategy right now while you are in charge of the government for at least the next six months.

When she had the big reveal of Project inside Safe, wasn't the snooty fox mentioned by name?

Oh yes? And there were yelp reviews that were complaining about the specific kinds of porn that you could order on the TV. We got a lot more of this unedited twenty minute interview with Karen Bass sitting down with Alexmichaelson and it did not go well.

And we'll give you a hint. She drops more ds. Remember when Jeffrey Tubin dropped the D.

We don't need to get into that.

Eight hundred two two two five two two two is a telephone number one eight hundred two two two five two two two. If you'd like to email the show, you can do so at Johnny Don't Like Show at gmail dot com. That's Johnny Don't Like Show at gmail dot com and Randy. If you want to go back and listen to yesterday's program where we spent a lot of time talking about the gubernatorial election, you can do

Yeah, are you coming down here for this? Are you working from there?

I haven't decided yet, because if you're staying there, then I'm staying home.

I don't want to be a Culver City till nine o'clock at night. Anyway, that's a conversation I have with Art if you want to hear what we think about the election. As we close the polls at eight o'clock, we're going to be broadcasting live from seven to nine pm on seven ninety KABC in Laws Angeles, eight ten KSFO in the Bay Area, and five eighty KMJ in the Central Valley. We're going to be in all three

In the meantime, what do you say we make a couple of listeners very happy?

Oh, I'm very happy about this. Seven ninety KABC welcomes the twenty first annual LA Winefest at the La Equestrian Center in Burbank Saturday. By the way, I love that the LA Winefest is happening in Burbank. It's happening Saturday, June thirteenth and Sunday, June fourteenth. Hey, they know what neighborhood's safe. Tickets are on sale now at Lawinefest dot com. But right now Collin number nine at one, eight at eight, seven ninety five two to two two gets a pair

Back to LA Mayor Karen Bass's sit down interview. We see it ends Alex Michaelson.

But now there's new and improved shelters where you can house multiple people. It's not a motel room. You can house multiple people.

Where they got to figure this out four years ago just by having a one conversation with the Union Rescue Mission.

Where they do have a modicum of privacy. And one thing that we have specialized that we have absolutely conquered in my time, which is we know how to get people off the streets. We know how to get there.

Where what evidence do you have to prove this? Every single day that I drive into this radio station and we're right on the dividing line of LA and Culver City. Once you cross Venice, you're into Culver City. But when you get off the ten Freeway at Robertson, you're still in the city. And what do you see as you're getting off the freeway a massive encampment that has been there for years and years and years and years and years.

Under the freeway there's a homeless encampment that has a loading dock for stolen bikes.

Which is, we know how to get people off the streets, we know how to get them to accept the services that they need. And the only people.

That forty percent of the people in your Signature program are back on the streets three years later.

And the only people that refuse at this point, and it's a very small number, are people who are so profoundly ill they don't even know they're homeless. Or you have the criminal element, and that's a very small element of the homeless population.

But sure about that? What planet is this Disney broad living on. Well, if you admit that there is a massive criminal element to the homeless population, the public would want to put them in prison.

Do you remember some time ago we had then Anaheim councilwoman Lucille Kring on this program who talked about touring the Santa Ana River. That's the river that runs right through Orange County to the ocean and goes right by Angel Stadium. And she said when she was interviewing the people who were living in the river, almost to a person, they were let out of prison early. It was a criminal encampment. People who should still be in state prison

Know from the raids of MacArthur Park, and we've heard this for a very long time. We've heard this about encampments. Even in Nitia Rahmans District, the gangs imbed themselves in the homeless encamment. Where do you think the drug dealers are.

Or you have the criminal element and that's a very small element of the homeless population, but it does exist and they should be held accountable.

Of course, the most hollow word in the English language in the state of California.

Accountability, accountability, accountability.

All of the candidates for governor said that people who refuse shelter should be forced into it. Do you agree with that, Well.

It depends. Let me just explain people.

Who are Wait, did you say depends or do you say depends because those are two different things, one of them sold to Target.

Do you agree with that, Well, it depends.

Let me just explain thinks you dropped another d.

Let me just explain people who are profoundly mentally ill and they don't even know that they're ill. I do believe there should be involuntary hospitalization. Right now, the laws don't allow.

For that, right I thought Gavin Newsom's care Court specifically allowed for that.

I love that all of these people act like they have no power. You know, if I were in charge, we take all the crazy ones and we throw them in the nuthouse.

Right now, the laws don't allow for that, and even if they did, we didn't have the facilities. But you can't just incarcerate people, And let me.

Tell you why not.

If they're breaking the law, and they're doing it in front of you, why can't you put them in jail?

Call up our sheriff and say, ask him what he thinks about that. The jails are already overpopulated.

Well, if you went to Sheriff Robert Lona, who is also up for reelection, and you said I don't feel safe in La County because you won't do anything about the homeless program, he would say back, I need you to not fill that wait.

You know what's funny. Whenever we hear a crime victim in a local news report and they sound totally defeated from top to bottom, where they have no fight left in them at all. That's what Robert Luna sounds like. Every time he goes on television. He sounds like the most defeated man on planet.

Earth. I'm talking about al Bundy level. Even al Bundy had a little more fighting in than that guy. That's true.

And if you were upset about how much it costs, it costs far more money.

I don't think it does. I don't think it does. When you talk about all the different service providers, all the NGOs, all the nonprofits, I really don't think it costs more to keep these people in jail, in prison. No, and think about this too.

Every time a crime occurs, there's a cost associated with it. Every murder costs society a certain amount of dollars because you have to have the police officers to go look

And you need to put them in jail.

That's what we did in the nineteen nineties, and it worked like a Swiss clock. And then we became a victim of our own success. People were saying, why is it that we're spending a fortune on the prisons. Why aren't we spending that money on education. Well, because we like nice things. And if you let the criminals run wild, guess what, you can't have nice things.

And if you were upset about how much.

Karen Bess's planned to put people in motels is costing seventeen thousand dollars per bed per month, And if you.

Were upset about how much it costs, it costs far more money to incarcerate somebody than it does to take care of them. So that's an emotional response. And I understand that that response comes out of frustration, but it is not a productive thing.

No, don't say that. You know what that reminds me of. It reminds me of all these sitcoms from the nineteen fifties where the wife is so emotional and the husband has to tell her to calm down. We're not a nineteen fifties housewife. Our fear of the homeless and our fear of the criminals is not something that is unwarranted. It's a totally rational thing to have because we see what they've done to the neighborhoods. We see how retail stores can't stay open, we see the encampments. We've been

Let's talk for a moment about the fires, because that's been a big part of what your opponent, Spencer Pratt, is talking About's big reason why he's running in the first place.

Because you burned his house down. Seems like a legit reason to run to me.

And he points to the fact that you went to Ghana. You said to me in February twenty twenty five that there were warnings that you weren't aware of and that it didn't reach the level to you to say that you couldn't shouldn't have gone on the trip. It's what you said to me when I was on Fox eleven. There's a new book out by Jonathan Bigliatti of CBS News called Torched.

Oh this was the reporter, by the way, that was at these press conferences every single day following the initial break of the fires, and Karen Bass got so pissed at all of his questions. Oh I remember that. And his book has some damning revelations.

And he says, quote, according to multiple sources, Bass had been briefed before her departure about the National Weather Services fire models, So which is it.

That's just simply not true.

The book also claims that Karen Bass didn't tell any of her staffers where she was going.

So this is a little bit like Joe Biden being senile. Anyone paying attention to the news is aware of it. It's not like it was some big secret that the winds were coming. It was on all the local TV stations, all the local radio stations, it's on your iPhone, it's everywhere you go. It's not as if you have to have some sort of secret briefing with the chief of the LAFD so you understand the wind is coming.

Open.

So I don't know what sources he's talking to, but that is a whost sale.

Well, if the sources were named, you would probably retaliate against them like you did with the fire chief falsehood.

I will tell you that it wasn't just the city. The entire county was not prepared for this.

That's not a really good defense. No, it's not. We get a lot more of this insane answer to this fire question coming up, Johnny.

Eight hundred two two two five two two two is telephone number one eight hundred two two two five two two two the fixed California Hour coming up after the news it won. Jim Lacy joins us. But right now we're going through the sound of La Mayor Karen Bass to sit down with ceen n's Alex Michaelson.

And when I talked to the chief when I got home, basically the response.

A dang she it really does like that word.

And when I talked to the chief when I got home, basically the response was, well, we always have Santa Anna wins. We didn't anticipate them being this bad.

That's not what the chief who's suing her is saying.

That's not what they said on every single traffic and weather report in town.

It was not just the city of Los Angeles. It was not just me, but what I also said to you, Alex is that it was a horrible, horrible moment in my life, and obviously it wasn't so many others lives.

Uh yeah, this isn't about you, baby.

People's homes burned down, their businesses burned down, their communities burned down, and she's making this about Karen.

People died.

I compare it to if you're out of town when a loved one has an accident or is sick. It doesn't matter where you were, and it doesn't matter why you were there. The point is I wasn't here when my city and that is a profound regret.

So why should we ever trust you?

Good question, But that book makes the point that you being in Ghana actually hurt the city's response. It argues that during the hour when the fire was building, that you were sort of out of touch because you were focused on the event in Ghana.

No, that's actually not true either. So I'll have to read this book. And it would have been helpful if the author would have interviewed me.

Well, he said, he said that he asked for an interview for a couple of years, and.

Well that's news to me.

Sure, blaming her staff. Now, typically what journalists do before they're about to put out a damning report or a damning book is they asked for you to comment. They ask parent bass, would you like to share your side of the story. They did not do that, And now she's claiming that she was never asked for that interview.

Sure, she only does friendly interviews. Have you noticed that she goes was on KNX, She'll go on Spectrum, She'll go on MSNBC. I think she thought she was going to get a softball from Alex over at CNN, and boy did she guess wrong.

There's a big difference between going on with Alex Michaelson and going on with Brian Tyler Cohen.

Let me just explain to you that when the fire broke out, it was nighttime in Ghana, and I was due to board a plane in a couple of hours, and I took.

You were at a cocktail party. There's pictures they first plane out.

I was in touch the entire time. I was in touch the twelve hours I was actually on the plane because it was a military plane, and I was on the phone the entire time. The minute the fires broke out, I was on the phone talking to the chief and talking to the council president. So when I leave town, the council president becomes the mayor.

Was you also had a deputy mayor of public Safety who's supposed to direct response to police and fire, but he was on.

Leave for what John making fake bomb threads.

I was helping with the executive order that was being issued, but obviously that wasn't enough. I wasn't here. It wasn't like I found out there was a fire and I was in the middle of a party.

Actually you were, No, that's exactly what happened.

Do you think that, knowing what we know now looking back, that this fire could have either been prevented or way way way less in terms of its damage if the city would have acted differently.

Well, I think if the city and the county had acted differently.

Oh, we're throwing the county under the bus again.

She's doing that for a reason, because, don't forget it was La County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath who was toying with the idea of running for mayor against Karen Bass and decided against it at the last minute. That's why the county, he is experiencing their time in the barrel,