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      LA city council members defy calls to resign after racist recording, setting up power struggle

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      LA city council members defy calls to resign after racist recording, setting up power struggleMagic Johnson joins in with citywide denunciations of De León and Cedillo, but council is powerless to expel them The Los Angeles city council appears to be headed for a long and bruising power struggle, as two councilmen resist widespread calls for their resignation amid a racism scandal and state investigation.‘We ain’t done dancing’: Los Angeles festival brings Black community togetherRead moreA week since the president of the city council, Nury Martinez, resigned over crude and racist remarks she made during an October 2021 meeting with other Latino leaders, two other councilmembers present at the meeting have refused to step down, despite Democratic leadership – up to Joe Biden – calling on them to do so.On Wednesday, Magic Johnson, the superstar athlete, philanthropist and one of the city’s most respected celebrities, added his voice to the calls for their resignation, tweeting: “Let the city heal and move forward! The people of Los Angeles voted you in the position, and now they are calling for you to resign.”Activists from Black Lives Matter Los Angeles pledged to hold a 24/7 protest outside one of the councilmember’s houses until he agrees to resign.We have a long history of Black & Brown #Solidarity…because smashing white-supremacy benefits us all. @kdeleon betrays that history and must #ResignNow. #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/cQJQe3kjFv— #BlackLivesMatter-LA (@BLMLA) October 16, 2022
      Rise and shine. @blmla embarks on first full day of 24/7 encampment in front of LA Councilmember Kevin de Leon’s Eagle Rock home. LAPD is keeping a close watch. pic.twitter.com/QySJQBJnXo— Proud Member of The Blacks (@Jasmyne) October 16, 2022
      But that councilmember, Kevin de León, a brash, longtime power player in California state politics, disclosed in media interviews on Wednesday that he would not step down but wanted to take a leave from council meetings to attempt to restore his reputation. The city council president, Paul Krekorian, called that unacceptable.The standoff is unfolding even as there seem to be few hard rules about personal conduct and consequences for public officials. The council already has stripped De León of much of his power in an effort to pressure him to resign, but it has no authority to expel members.De León also could face a recall election if he refuses to resign, a measure some progressives in Los Angeles have been advocating.The remaining councilmember who participated in the meeting, Gil Cedillo, is already scheduled to leave office in December, after being defeated by a young progressive challenger, Eunisses Hernandez, in a primary election earlier this year.The uproar began with the release nearly two weeks ago of a previously unknown recording of a 2021 private meeting involving De León, two other councilmembers and a powerful labor leader, all Latino Democrats, in which they schemed to protect their political clout in the redrawing of council districts during an hourlong conversation laced with bigoted comments, with particularly demeaning remarks about Black, Indigenous and gay politicians and local residents.The conversation focused on the relative lack of Latino political representation in a city where nearly half of the residents are Latino, but documented Los Angeles’ most powerful lawmakers talking in derogatory terms about the “Blacks” and about Indigenous people from Mexico, as well as comparing the Black son of one of their colleagues to a monkey.The blunt backroom talk has prompted conversations about racism and colorism among Latinos in the United States, while also highlighting the enduring American scandal of political gerrymandering, in which voting districts are drawn and redrawn to protect the political power of individual incumbents.Disclosure of the recording has been followed by days of public outrage and protests, including a march of hundreds of Oaxacan Angelenos demanding the resignation of the Latino leaders who disparaged Indigenous people.A sign of more trouble came from two Black developers working on a downtown project who said in a letter to the city council that they could no longer work with De León, whose district includes the project that would be anchored to two hotels.The developers, R Donahue Peebles and Victor MacFarlane, called for his resignation and wrote that De León had been dismissive of their proposal, meeting with them just once over a two-year period.Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio said it is possible for De León to survive, but he must make sincere apologies and win back his constituents’ trust. That would start with small private meetings with business leaders, or coffee with community groups; any larger event would attract protests.He pointed to former Virginia governor Ralph Northam, who survived calls for his resignation after a picture surfaced from his 1984 medical school yearbook showing a man in blackface standing next to someone in a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe. The Democrat initially acknowledged he was in the photo and apologized, then reversed course, saying he was not in it.One person unlikely to lend a sympathetic ear to De León will be the state’s most powerful Democrat, Gavin Newsom. The governor and the councilman, who was once a Democratic leader in the state senate, have had strained relations for years that worsened when De León embarked on a failed attempt to oust Senator Dianne Feinstein in 2018.TopicsLos AngelesRaceCaliforniaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      California to investigate LA redistricting after leak of officials’ racist remarks

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      California to investigate LA redistricting after leak of officials’ racist remarksThe former president of the LA city council, Nury Martinez, resigned on Wednesday after widespread calls for her departure California’s attorney general said on Wednesday that he would investigate Los Angeles’ redistricting process, as three city councilmembers face calls to resign after a recording surfaced of them using racist language to mock colleagues and constituents while they planned to protect Latino political strength in council districts.The move by Rob Bonta, a Democrat like the three councilmembers, comes amid growing calls to address the way politics can influence the redrawing of district maps after the census count each decade.“My office will conduct an investigation into the city of LA’s redistricting process,” Bonta said, without providing many details. “We’re going to gather the facts, we’re going to work to determine the truth and take action as necessary to ensure the fair application of our laws.“It’s clear an investigation is sorely needed to help restore confidence in the redistricting process for the people of LA,” he added.Bonta said the results could bring civil or criminal results. “It could lead to criminality if that’s where the facts and the law dictate,” he said. “There’s certainly the potential for civil liability based on civil rights and voting rights laws here in the state of California.”Bonta’s investigation comes days after the leak of audio recordings of an October 2021 meeting between the three Latino members of the city council and a labor leader sparked disbelief across the city and prompted calls to investigate the redistricting process.The discussion between the then city council president, Nury Martinez, the council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, and the labor leader Ron Herrera centered on protecting Latino political power during the redrawing of council district boundaries, known as redistricting.Biden calls for resignation of LA city council members over racist remarksRead moreThe recordings document the political leaders crudely discussing the power dynamics behind the redistricting process. But they also recorded Martinez mocking the young son of her fellow councilmember Mike Bonin, calling Indigenous immigrants from the Mexican state of Oaxaca ugly, and making crass remarks about Jews and Armenians.Martinez on Wednesday resigned from the city council, after she had previously stepped down as its president and announced she was taking a leave of absence.De León and Cedillo have apologized, but have so far resisted calls to give up their seats, despite intense pressure to do so, including from Joe Biden.Bonta on Wednesday spoke in Los Angeles while the council itself was trying to conduct business nearby, possibly to censure the three members, none of whom were in attendance. But the board was unable to operate because a crowd of protesters outside. Demonstrators inside shouted “No resignations, no meeting.” The acting council president eventually announced that there was no longer a quorum and adjourned the meeting.The council cannot expel the members; it can only suspend a member when criminal charges are pending. A censure does not result in suspension or removal from office.A city council meeting the previous day – the first since news of the recording broke – was interrupters by demonstrators filling the chambers, demanding the council members’ resignation.In emotional remarks at Tuesday’s meeting, Bonin said he was deeply wounded by the taped discussion. He lamented the harm to his young son and the fact that the city was in international headlines spotlighting the racist language. “I’m sickened by it,” he said, calling again for his colleagues’ resignations.“Healing is impossible as long as you remain in office,” Bonin said in a tweet directed at the trio on Wednesday. “Resign. Now.”In one of the most diverse cities in the nation, a long line of public speakers at the meeting said the disclosure of the secretly taped meeting brought with it echoes of the Jim Crow era and was a stark example of “anti-Blackness”.There were calls for investigations and reforming redistricting policy.Many of the critics also were Latino and spoke of being betrayed by their own leaders.Candido Marez, 70, a retired business owner, said he wasn’t surprised by the language used by Martinez, who is known for being blunt and outspoken.“Her words blew up this city. It is disgraceful,“ he said. “She must resign.“Calls for the council members to resign have come from across the Democratic establishment.Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Tuesday that the president wanted Martinez, De León and Cedillo to resign.“The language that was used and tolerated during that conversation was unacceptable, and it was appalling. They should all step down,” Jean-Pierre said.The US senator Alex Padilla, the outgoing mayor, Eric Garcetti, the mayoral candidates Karen Bass and Rick Caruso and several members of the council have called on the three members to depart.California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has stopped short of doing so, denouncing the racist language and saying he was “encouraged that those involved have apologized and begun to take responsibility for their actions”.TopicsLos AngelesCaliforniaRaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Los Angeles city council president resigns from post over racist comments

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      Los Angeles city council president resigns from post over racist commentsIn leaked audio clips from October 2021, Nury Martinez can be heard making disparaging comments about a colleague’s Black son The president of the Los Angeles city council has stepped down after a series of bombshell audio clips captured her calling a colleague’s Black son “a little monkey”, among other racist and disparaging remarks.Nury Martinez apologized for the October 2021 remarks during a meeting over redistricting with fellow council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo and labor leader Ron Herrera, and stepped down as city council president on Monday. “I take responsibility for what I said and there are no excuses for those comments. I’m so sorry,” she said on Monday.“In the end, it is not my apologies that matter most; it will be the actions I take from this day forward. I hope that you will give me the opportunity to make amends,” she added. “Therefore, effective immediately I am resigning as president of the Los Angeles city council.”She did not say she would resign her council seat.At least 14 unhoused people froze to death in LA last year, records revealRead moreThe leak of the audio had thrown LA city politics in turmoil on Sunday, providing a rare look inside the political process in America’s second largest city ahead of November’s mayoral election. In the leaked audio, the Latino leaders can be heard denigrating various groups of constituents as they try to determine how to use the redistricting process to secure more political power for Latinos and keep political rivals from making perceived gains. All the politicians involved are Democrats. It wasn’t immediately clear who made the recording. The audio was leaked on Reddit by a user who has since been suspended, the LA Times reported. The series of clips has been published by Knock LA, a non-profit community news platform.On the recording, Martinez referred to fellow council member Mike Bonin, who is white and represents the city’s 11th district, as a “little bitch”.She can be heard talking about an incident in which Bonin’s two-year-old Black son was bouncing off what was apparently a parade float, and said he was difficult to control. “There is nothing you can do to control him,” she said, going on to say in Spanish “parece changuito” – which in English means “he looks like a little monkey”.“It’s like black and brown on this float,” she also said.She added that she believed the boy “needs a beatdown”.“Let me take him around the corner and I’ll bring him back,” she said, breaking into laughter after a few seconds.De León, a powerful player in California politics who unsuccessfully ran for LA mayor and the Senate and represents parts of East Los Angeles, including the Boyle Heights neighborhood, said Bonin’s handling of the child was similar to “when Nury brings her little yard bag or the Louis Vuitton bag”.Of the LA district attorney, George Gascón, Martinez said: “Fuck that guy – he’s with the Blacks.”In another recording, council members are heard talking about the Koreatown neighborhood, which is now predominantly Latino. “I see a lot of little short dark people,” Martinez said, apparently referring to Indigenous Oaxacan immigrants.Someone else in the room is heard referring to them as “little Oaxacan Korean” and “little ones”.Martinez breaks into laughter, adding: “I don’t know what village they came from, how they got here.”She also said she feared a suspension of council member Mark Ridley-Thomas, who had been in the public eye for charges of bribery and conspiracy, would prompt Black constituents to “come after us”.De León and Herrera can also be heard speaking dismissively of Black voters.“The 25 Blacks are shouting,” Cedillo says, at which Martinez laughs again.“But they shout like they’re 250,” adds De León.After the release of the tape on Sunday, politicians and civil rights groups called on the council members to resign. Bonin called Martinez’s remarks “vile, abhorrent, and utterly disgraceful”.“We love our son, a beautiful, joyous child, and our family is hurting today. No child should ever be subjected to such racist, mean and dehumanizing comments, especially from a public official,” Bonin’s family said in a statement.“It hurts that one of our son’s earliest encounters with overt racism comes from some of the most powerful public officials in Los Angeles.”City council members Nithya Raman, Paul Koretz and Joe Buscaino also called for Martinez’s resignation.On Sunday evening, a crowd of protesters gathered near Martinez’s home. The Independent reporter Jon Peltz shared a video of dozens of people outside the building.“Angry in part because I work with Black kids in LA,” Peltz said, adding he was particularly concerned that Martinez had previously tried to run for a spot on the local unified school district governing board. “The freedom, the ease with which they disparage and demean and talk about a Black child is disgusting.”The California chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called for the resignations of all those involved: Martinez, Cedillo, de León and Herrera.“This kind of overt racism has no place in political discourse,” said the chapter’s president, Rick L Callender. “We clearly know where your heart and mind are, and both of them are corroded with the rust of racism and hate.”The leaked audio of Martinez and her colleagues has statewide implications, with US senator Alex Padilla of California calling the recording “racist” and “dehumanizing”.“At a time when our nation is grappling with a rise in hate speech and hate crimes, these racist comments have deepened the pain that our communities have endured. Los Angeles deserves better,” Padilla said in a statement.Martinez apologized for her comments in a statement, arguing they came in a moment of “intense frustration and anger”.“The context of this conversation was concern over the redistricting process and concern about the potential negative impact it might have on communities of color,” she added. “My work speaks for itself. I’ve worked hard to lead this city through its most difficult time.”Herrera, Cedillo and De León have apologized for the comments and their role in the conversation.“I regret appearing to condone and even contribute to certain insensitive comments made about a colleague and his family in private,” De León said. “I’ve reached out to that colleague personally.”“While I did not engage in the conversation in question, I was present at times during this meeting last year,” said Cedillo. “It is my instinct to hold others accountable when they use derogatory or racially divisive language. Clearly, I should have intervened.”The revelations come at a tense time in Los Angeles politics. In November, voters are set to elect a new mayor, with polls showing a tightening race between US Representative Karen Bass and billionaire developer Rick Caruso. Several city council members are stepping down as well.Latinos make up about half the Los Angeles population of about 4 million. Martinez was elected to the council in 2013 and became its first Latina president in 2020. As of 2018, her district had a primarily Latino population that outnumbered Black voters.The Guardian has contacted Martinez’s office for further clarification and comments.TopicsLos AngelesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      LA sheriff Alex Villanueva appears headed for runoff election amid series of scandals

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      LA sheriff Alex Villanueva appears headed for runoff election amid series of scandalsLaw enforcement officer, derided by critics as the ‘Donald Trump of LA’, did not win enough votes for re-election, early results show Alex Villanueva, the Los Angeles county sheriff embroiled in multiple scandals, appears headed for a runoff election in November as early results suggest he failed to win enough votes to secure re-election.Villanueva, who has been derided by critics as the “Donald Trump of LA”, is likely to face off with Robert Luna, the former police chief of Long Beach. Luna was endorsed by the LA Times and LA Daily News editorial boards, which argued that the embattled agency needed an outsider to take over, though Luna’s police department also faced controversies.As of late Tuesday night, Villanueva held a slight lead, with 32% of the vote to Luna’s 26% and 35% of votes counted.Despite national scrutiny of Villanueva surrounding a series of misconduct, abuse and obstruction cases, his critics did not unite behind one candidate.Villanueva has become a favorite law enforcement figure among some far-right pundits, and is known for aggressively opposing efforts to bring accountability to the department. In recent years, he has publicly lashed out at critics and the media and launched criminal investigations into the officials who have sought to reform his agency, earning him comparisons to the former president.San Francisco recalls DA Chesa Boudin in blow to criminal justice reformRead moreThe sheriff was a little-known lieutenant when he was elected in 2018 and became the first candidate to beat an incumbent for LA sheriff in more than 100 years. He was backed by Democrats and progressive groups during his campaign after pledging to reform an agency with a long history of scandal. But over the last four years, he has lost the support of Democratic groups, civil rights activists and a wide range of LA county leaders, who say he broke his promises and allows officers to engage in violence and misconduct without consequence.The Los Angeles sheriff’s department (LASD) is the largest county sheriff’s office in the US, with thousands of officers who patrol nearly 200 southern California towns and cities. The sheriff also oversees one of the world’s largest jail systems. A former head of the department was sent to prison in 2020 after he was convicted of obstructing a federal investigation into systemic abuse of incarcerated people in the county jail system.LASD has faced growing outrage over reports of “deputy gangs” within the department – cliques of officers with names like the Banditos and Executioners, who allegedly have matching tattoos and promote brutality and racist policing. Despite increasing testimony from whistleblowers and LA county officials about the presence and threats posed by these internal groups, Villanueva has repeatedly denied their existence.The county inspector general, the top watchdog for LASD, has identified more than 40 such groups within the department, but Villanueva has defined subpoenas by the IG and demanded the county’s board of supervisors cease using the phrase “deputy gangs”. Villanueva has aggressively attacked the IG, accusing him, without any evidence, of being a “Holocaust denier”, a claim the IG said was “deeply offensive” and false. Villanueva also has a “civil rights and public integrity” unit, reportedly known internally as his “secret police”, that has launched investigations into his political opponents.In a separate controversy, a whistleblower recently claimed that Villanueva personally directed a cover-up of an incident, captured on film, in which jail guards knelt on the head of a handcuffed man for three minutes. Several high-profile killings by his deputies have also sparked national headlines in recent years, and families of victims have accused his department of harassing them.Villanueva campaigned on a platform of hiring more police, cracking down on homelessness and opposing “woke” reform efforts. In a recent interview with the Guardian, he dismissed the whistleblower and other claims against him and his department, saying they were “driven by trial attorneys and opportunistic politicians” and a “cabal of people” creating a “false narrative”.Luna campaigned on a platform of restoring trust in the department and “reforming and modernizing” the LA jails, though as Long Beach chief, a position he held from 2014 through 2021, he also battled scandals; there have been claims of racism in the department and concerns about excessive force and killings by officers. Luna grew up in East LA, in an area heavily patrolled by the sheriff’s department, and he has talked about witnessing bad policing tactics in the neighborhood.Long Beach is the second-largest city in LA county, and if he wins, Luna would be the second police chief from the city to take over the sheriff’s office.TopicsLos AngelesUS policingUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022CalifornianewsReuse this content More

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      Karen Bass and Rick Caruso head to runoff in Los Angeles mayoral race

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      Karen Bass and Rick Caruso head to runoff in Los Angeles mayoral raceCandidates head to November rematch after neither one secures enough votes to win outright in primary The congresswoman Karen Bass and the billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso will head to a November rematch in their bids to become the next mayor of Los Angeles, after neither candidate secured enough votes to win outright in Tuesday’s primary.An early tally of mail-in ballots showed Caruso with 41% and Bass with 38% of the vote, meaning both candidates failed to clear the 50% threshold needed to win outright. The Associated Press called the race as a runoff late on Tuesday evening.As the top two vote-getters, they will advance to the general election in a contest whose outcome is likely to have major consequences for Los Angeles’s approach to policing, crime and the growing humanitarian crisis of homelessness across southern California.San Francisco recalls DA Chesa Boudin in blow to criminal justice reformRead moreWhile the non-partisan mayoral primary began with a field of a dozen candidates, it quickly became a contest between the two frontrunners: Bass, a former progressive community activist in South Central Los Angeles who had risen to become the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Caruso, a luxury mall developer and former Republican who Forbes ranks No 261 on the list of the richest people in the US. The mayoral candidates and their outside backers and critics poured more than $50m into campaign spending during the primary race, a stunning figure in a campaign whose central issue has been what to do about the more than 41,000 unhoused people living in Los Angeles.Homelessness is a crisis along the entire west coast, but many voters and politicians in Los Angeles say it has reached a state of emergency. As of 2020, an estimated 40% of all unhoused people in California, and 20% of all unhoused people living outside in the US, lived in Los Angeles county. As rent and housing prices have continued to rise, the presence of people living in cars, RVs, and in tents on the street and in public parks has prompted fierce debates about the failures of city officials to resolve a growing humanitarian crisis.Caruso, who has an estimated net worth of $4bn, poured more than $38m of his own fortune into his campaign through early June, with a pledge to “clean up” Los Angeles. He was backed by celebrity endorsements from his neighbor, the actor Gwyneth Paltrow; Bill Bratton, the police chief who championed “broken windows” policing; the rapper Snoop Dog; and the entrepreneurs Kim Kardashian and Elon Musk.His omnipresent political advertising across Los Angeles won him enough votes to advance to the general election as the more conservative, pro-police alternative to Bass, a California Democrat who was considered as a potential vice-presidential pick for Joe Biden.At his election night party at the Grove, one of his shopping malls, Caruso said the voters supporting him were sending a clear message: “We are not helpless in the face of our problems. We will not allow the city to decline,” the Los Angeles Times reported.At Bass’s election party, with her grandson and other family members by her side, the congresswoman told supporters, “We are in a fight for the soul of our city, and we are going to win,” the Times reported.Caruso ran a campaign focused on crime and disorder, pledging to strengthen and expand the city’s police department by hiring 1,500 additional officers. He drew scrutiny on a number of fronts, including his suggestion to arrest unhoused people who refuse to move to a city-provided shelter bed, his record of political donations to Republican candidates who have opposed abortion rights, and the fact that he only registered as a Democrat shortly before entering the mayoral race (he was previously a political independent, and before that, a Republican).Bass, who first rose to prominence as an advocate for public health approaches to addiction and crime during the crack epidemic in the 80s and 90s, has said that she decided to run for mayor in part because of her concerns that voters’ frustrations over homelessness and high-profile property crimes might lead to the same kind of punitive, damaging policies that California politicians and voters endorsed during the 1990s.Street activist, congresswoman – mayor? Karen Bass reaches for LA’s top jobRead moreBass has highlighted the dangers of criminalizing poverty, even as she has pledged to put an end to unhoused people living in public spaces across the city. She has said she supports small increases to the city’s police force and a focus on devoting more police resources to solving the city’s homicides.As Caruso faces off with Bass in the general election, it’s unlikely that Bass will fully match his spending, but progressive Hollywood donors are expected to pour a substantial amount of money into her campaign, as well.“If Rick Caruso was willing to spend $30m in the primary, why wouldn’t he spend the same amount for the general?” the political scientist Fernando Guerra said.Bass “will not meet or beat what Rick Caruso spends”, but her campaign and her liberal Democratic allies will spend enough “that she will be competitive in terms of getting her message out”, Guerra added.To break national records for a self-financed mayoral campaign, Caruso would have to outspend the New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who spent $109m on his campaign to win a third term as New York City’s mayor in 2009. Bloomberg spent $74m in 2001 and $85m in 2005 on his earlier mayoral bids; he burned through a reported $1bn on a short-lived run for president in 2020.The mayor’s race took place alongside other closely watched political contests in California on Tuesday. In San Francisco, the city’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was recalled by voters in a blow to criminal justice reform.TopicsLos AngelesUS politicsCaliforniaDemocratsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      High-stakes California races will decide LA mayor and San Francisco recall

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      High-stakes California races will decide LA mayor and San Francisco recall Analysts watch to see if voters in America’s more liberal cities will address police reform, homelessness and mass incarceration High-stakes primary races taking place on Tuesday in California are expected to have major consequences for police reform, incarceration and the state’s growing homelessness crisis.The most closely watched race is the mayor’s contest in Los Angeles, where voters are deciding between a tough-on-crime real estate developer, Rick Caruso, who has already poured nearly $40m of his own fortune into his primary campaign, and the former community organizer and Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass.Street activist, congresswoman – mayor? Karen Bass reaches for LA’s top jobRead moreIn San Francisco, the city’s progressive prosecutor, Chesa Boudin, is facing a recall election that could have a major impact on movements for criminal justice reform across the US.Midway through a tense midterm elections year, the races are likely to serve as a litmus test for Democrats and progressives. Analysts are watching to see if the majority of voters in some of America’s most ostensibly liberal cities decide to reject attempts to reduce mass incarceration and address the stark racial disparities in the criminal justice system.But one of the starkest takeaways so far is that voters simply are not very engaged in California’s primary election, despite multiple measures designed to make it easier for them to participate. Early turnout so far has been abysmal, even though every registered voter in California was mailed a ballot.“Even if you make it extremely easy to vote, like in California, but the political culture, candidates and issues aren’t there, you aren’t going to increase the turnout,” political scientist Fernando Guerra said. “We have extreme generational issues, with homelessness and crime and the cost of housing, and I think we have the candidates. There’s a lack of political culture.”Lower turnout is likely to be a particular challenge for “a lot of the young progressive candidates”, who might end up losing to an incumbent by a small margin of votes, Guerra said.Voters in California and nationwide are concerned about gas prices and the cost of living. A recent poll found that only a third of Los Angeles voters approved of the city’s police department, a lower approval rating than in 1991, after the police beating of Rodney King, but that nearly half of voters surveyed wanted to increase the size of the force.The role of the police in public safety is one of the key issues up and down the ballot, with younger progressive candidates who support defunding the police challenging older centrist Democrats in several Los Angeles city council races.Bass, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, supports police reform and a modest increase in Los Angeles police department staffing; Caruso has pledged to put an additional 1,500 officers on the street.Both Bass and Caruso have promised to put an end to people sleeping on the street in Los Angeles. Caruso has expressed willingness to arrest unhoused people who refuse to move to a city-provided shelter bed, and has also praised an army camp for undocumented children at the Texas border as a good model for how to deal with the city’s homelessness crisis.For some Los Angeles progressives, Bass’s more centrist positions on policing and homelessness have been a disappointment. Two years after George Floyd’s murder by police sparked worldwide protests, some activists see Bass’s endorsement of putting more police on the street as a step backwards.“She’s losing the enthusiasm of folks on the left, and I think that is a miscalculation,” said Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Los Angeles, who endorsed Gina Viola, a local activist running to Bass’s left, for mayor.Progressive groups in LA have also organized to oust the incumbent LA county sheriff, Alex Villanueva, who has been at the center of multiple scandals related to abuse and misconduct cases within the department. His critics, however, have not rallied behind one opponent among his eight challengers.The role of massive personal fortunes in public elections has also become a central issue in California’s primary campaigns. The attempt to recall Boudin, a central figure in the movement to elect prosecutors who want to make the legal system less punitive and racist, is reportedly being funded by ultra-wealthy donors, many of them in the tech industry, including: Ron Conway, an early DoorDash investor; Garry Tan, an Instacart investor; and David Sacks, a former PayPal executive.The result of the attempt to recall Boudin in San Francisco will “affect whether prosecutors elsewhere feel emboldened to take new approaches or whether they will perceive that as a political risk”, said Sandra Mayson, a University of Pennsylvania law professor.Political spending on the Los Angeles mayoral primary has already topped $50m, with Caruso’s campaign spending more than $40m of that. Bass’s campaign has spent $3m, in contrast, and a local police union has spent a similar amount on advertisement opposing her candidacy.On Friday, Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, tweeted his public endorsement of Caruso, who himself is ranked No 261 on Forbes’ list of richest Americans. “He’s awesome,” Musk wrote. “Executive competence is super-underrated in politics – we should care about that a lot more!”Caruso, a real estate developer with an estimated net worth of $4bn, has used at least $38m of his own money to move to the front of a crowded non-partisan primary field, a number that has already broken every previous record for mayor’s races in Los Angeles, local experts said. The billionaire’s personal fortune has funded a barrage of attractive television ads and mailers touting his candidacy, even as Caruso has skipped some mayoral debates, and largely avoided engaging with the press or holding open public events.Bass and then Caruso took an early lead in mayoral polls, leading other mayoral primary contenders to drop out of the race, though some, such as Kevin de Leon, a current city council member, fight on.Heading into Tuesday, polls showed Bass and Caruso closely matched in terms of voter support, setting up the possibility that neither would surpass the 50% vote threshold needed to win outright. In that case, the top two candidates will advance to a runoff election in November, a result that is expected to generate millions more in political spending from Caruso and from Bass’s progressive backers in Hollywood.TopicsCaliforniaUS politicsLos AngelesSan FranciscoUS policingUS justice systemnewsReuse this content More

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      Could this tough-on-crime billionaire be LA’s next mayor?

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      Could this tough-on-crime billionaire be LA’s next mayor?Rick Caruso’s campaign is tapping into fears of rising crime and Angelenos’ frustration with the homelessness emergency A billionaire real estate developer has spent more than $23m on his campaign to become Los Angeles’s next tough-on-crime mayor, and experts say his record-breaking investment is buying him a real chance at victory.Rick Caruso, a real estate magnate who is ranked No 261 on Forbes’ list of richest Americans, entered the crowded race to run America’s second largest city in February with single-digit support and little name recognition.Two months and nearly $10m in advertising spending later, he jumped to first place, polling alongside the previous mayoral frontrunner, congresswoman Karen Bass.‘A metastasizing crisis’: can Karen Bass end street encampments in LA?Read moreCaruso has focused his campaign ahead of the 7 June primary on fears of rising crime and Angelenos’ frustration at an ever-growing homelessness emergency, arguing that the city’s political establishment has been putting residents at risk: “I see my city being torn apart because of bad decisions by leaders,” he said in November.He has pledged, if elected, to hire 1,500 more police officers, and has suggested he would arrest unhoused people who refuse to move into city-run homeless shelters. “You don’t get a choice to stay on the street any more. The minute we have a bed for you, you move into the bed, or otherwise there’s a consequence,” he said in anearly Fox News interview.Caruso is “catching the wave” of some voters’ anxieties about homelessness and crime, but “there’s no way he would be where he was if it wasn’t for the money,” said Fernando Guerra, a political scientist who has studied Los Angeles’ electoral dynamics for decades.The billionaire has spent more in the first months of the race than the city’s current mayor spent during his entire campaign, Guerra said. Caruso’s millions have translated into a flood of campaign ads, mailers and text messages targeted at different groups across the city.“If you watch TV in Los Angeles, you’ll see [his ads] three times an hour,” said Adam Conover, a Los Angeles-based comedian who has become a prominent critic. The ads are very effective, Conover added, “gorgeously shot”, “glossy”, and “completely inescapable”. In them, a sun-tanned Caruso makes a simple pitch: he loves Los Angeles, and he wants to clean it up.“He’s pure Ronald Reagan,” Conover said.A fortune in shopping mallsThe scion of a wealthy family, Caruso made his fortune in real estate. He owns a luxury beach hotel in Montecito, California, where rooms start at $2,000 a night. But he’s perhaps most famous for his outdoor malls, one of which is called the Americana, and which all feature quaint trolleys, giant fountains and speakers playing a rotation of old-fashioned tunes. Caruso’s company likes to tout that the flagship mall in Los Angeles, the Grove, gets more daily visitors than Disneyland.Caruso has never held public office, but over the years he has served on a series of high-profile public boards, from the department of water and power commission to the Los Angeles police commission and the University of Southern California’s board of trustees, which he chaired in the midst of a sprawling campus sexual abuse scandal.He has received glowing, high-profile endorsements – from Gwyneth Paltrow, his neighbour in the posh neighbourhood of Brentwood; Bill Bratton, the former police chief and champion of “broken windows” policing; and the rapper Snoop Dogg, who endorsed Caruso via a Zoom call.His campaign has highlighted photos of smiling Black and Latino youth who benefited from what it says is a total of $130m in charitable giving, though his opponents instead like to put the spotlight on what they say is his “$100m yacht”, which reportedly has nine bedrooms, a gym, a pool and an elevator. (Influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli was on that same yacht when her mother, actor Lori Laughlin, was charged for paying $500,000 in bribes to get her daughters admitted to USC.)Campaign spokesperson Peter Rangone would not confirm the value of the candidate’s yacht, saying in an email: “It’s too bad that our opponents spend so much time on personal attacks.” The Caruso campaign declined to make Caruso available for an interview, or share any information about in-person campaign events a reporter could attend.Tough-on-crime DemocratAs a real estate billionaire running for office on a law-and-order platform, Caruso has drawn plenty of critical comparisons to Donald Trump. It doesn’t help that Caruso has refused to release his tax returns, providing instead a summary of his finances “so sketchy that it’s insulting”, as one Los Angeles Times columnist put it.The comparison has its limits. Caruso is a lifelong Catholic, lauded by Pope Francis for his service to the church. He is by all accounts a profitable and detail-oriented developer, who continues to operate and fine-tune the properties he builds.“Trump doesn’t remotely know the real estate business like Rick Caruso knows the real estate business,” said Don Luis Camacho, a Caruso supporter and the owner of El Paseo Inn restaurant, a longtime family business based in downtown Los Angeles.What is clear, however, is that his policies lean more conservative than those of the other Democrats running in the race. (Caruso announced he had registered as a Democrat this January, after decades as an independent, and, previously, a Republican.)His campaign says he has “always been pro-choice” and that, with abortion rights under threat nationwide, he plans to spend $1m to support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion in California. But Planned Parenthood called on him this month to apologize for previously donating “nearly $1m to policymakers who put forth legislation that criminalized abortion”. The Caruso Catholic Center at the University of Southern California, which the Caruso family donated at least $6m to build, helped lead the March for Life through the streets of Los Angeles earlier this year.At a time when LA’s homelessness emergency has taken on staggering proportions, with at least 41,000 people unhoused, he has pledged to rid the city’s streets of encampments. He has even suggested that an army camp for undocumented children at the Texas border that has been the subject of multiple whistleblower reports alleging “gross mismanagement, chaos and substandard conditions” is a good model for sheltering the unhoused.“Fort Bliss is very well done. It has its own medical facilities, recreational facilities, its own cafeteria facilities. It has arts and crafts. It’s really an amazing place,” Caruso said in late April, noting the camp was built in “about a month and a half”.Caruso has also been a champion of the Los Angeles police department, once working with LAPD to build a miniature station for “community-based policing” at the heart of his flagship mall. (It was set on fire during the George Floyd protests in 2020.) Police outpost at #TheGrove set on fire…. pic.twitter.com/GdN9OZClX8— Jeff Paul (@Jeff_Paul) May 31, 2020
      And he’s been a critic of some criminal justice reforms designed to reverse mass incarceration. When the Nordstrom store at the Grove was targeted last November as part of a series of smash-and-grab robberies of high-end stores across LA, Caruso called the robbery “a manifestation of ‘We’re going to defund the cops’”. He has blamed a measure that reduced the criminal penalty for certain thefts under $950 for driving the recent string of California luxury store thefts.“We can all agree that stealing a $900 handbag or watch shouldn’t be an offense for which someone is released from custody within hours of being arrested without consequence,” his campaign website notes.He has also claimed that residents are now experiencing “some of the worst crime we’ve had in the history of Los Angeles” and “the most violent crime”. Compared with 1992, when Los Angeles saw 1,094 homicides, the city is substantially safer, according to police department data. The city’s homicide increase over the past two years, part of a troubling national rise in killings nationwide, pushed the number of homicide victims from under 300 a year to 397. Property crimes ticked up in 2021, but were actually down compared with most of the five previous years.“People in LA do not feel safe, that is not fearmongering, it is stating reality,” Rangone, a campaign spokesperson, wrote in an email.Any increases in crime and violence can have a big impact on people’s sense of safety. Among last year’s homicide victims was a beloved, well-known 81-year-old philanthropist, Jacqueline Avant, who was shot to death during a burglary of her house in Beverly Hills. Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix and Avant’s son-in-law, has become a prominent Caruso supporter.‘Unthinkable’Liberal Democrats have dominated Los Angeles’ politics for so long that it would have been “unthinkable” a year or two ago to have someone like Caruso, “who is not from that progressive coalition, on the brink of winning”, Guerra said.But Caruso’s arguments have definitely struck a chord with a much broader swath of voters. Polls this year have found that many residents are deeply concerned about homelessness and public safety and feel the city is going in the wrong direction.Twice in the city’s past, after uprisings against police violence towards Black residents in Watts in 1965 and in South Central and across the city in 1992, majorities of Los Angeles voters rejected a liberal Democrat to elect a Republican, pro-police mayoral candidate, Guerra said.In the wake of intense protests in Los Angeles over the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, Caruso may be the latest conservative police department champion to ride a reactionary wave to the mayor’s office.Some of the traits that Caruso’s more progressive opponents are attacking may actually make him seem more relatable to many Angelenos, Guerra said.The city has the highest total number of Catholics of any US city besides New York, Guerra said, and it’s the center of the largest Catholic diocese in the US, boasting a total of 4.3 million members across the southern California region.For many Catholic voters, watching Caruso struggle with his stance on abortion, saying he’s pro-choice and does not want Roe v Wade overturned but also funding politicians and a Catholic student center that are actively anti-abortion, may feel very familiar, Guerra said.And while the city’s global fame is focused on its film and TV industry, “the number one industry in Los Angeles today, 20 years ago, 50 years, ago, 100 years ago, is land development. Always has been, always will be,” Guerra said.Caruso “captures the aspirations of every single Angeleno who bought that second property and thinks they’re going to be the next monopoly tycoon”, he added.TopicsLos AngelesUS political financingUS policingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘We have failed’: how California’s homelessness catastrophe is worsening

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      ‘We have failed’: how California’s homelessness catastrophe is worsening A new Guardian US series reports on a seemingly intractable crisis, and hears from those living on the edge in one of America’s richest statesWhen California shut down in March 2020, advocates for unhoused people thought the state might finally be forced to solve its homelessness crisis. To slow the spread of Covid, they hoped, officials would have to provide people living outside with stable and private shelter and housing.But in the two years since, California’s humanitarian catastrophe has worsened: deaths of people on the streets are rising; college students are living in their cars; more elderly residents are becoming unhoused; encampment communities are growing at beaches, parks, highway underpasses, lots and sidewalks. California has the fifth largest economy in the world, a budget surplus, the most billionaires in the US and some of the nation’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Yet the riches of the Golden State have not yielded solutions that match the scale of the crisis that’s been raging for decades. Pandemic-era programs have had some success for a slice of the unhoused population, but many measures have fallen short.Meanwhile, homelessness has become the top issue in political races. Polls in Los Angeles, which is home to 40% of the state’s unhoused population, suggest that a majority of voters want their governments to act faster, and that residents are angered by the immense human suffering caused by a seemingly intractable crisis. ​​Unhoused and unequal: a California crisis. The pandemic brought money, political will and public support to tackle California’s longstanding homelessness crisis. Instead, things got worse. In a new series, the Guardian’s west coast team reports from across the state, exploring what it would take to address a seemingly intractable problemIn response, governments across the state are increasingly cracking down on people sleeping outside. Out of the 20 largest cities in California, the majority have either passed or proposed new laws banning camping in certain places or have ramped up encampment sweeps. LA and Oakland passed laws meant to prohibit camping in certain zones; San Francisco’s mayor has pushed for a police crackdown on unhoused people using drugs in the Tenderloin neighborhood; Fresno adopted a law to fine people up to $250 for entering certain restricted areas; and Modesto, Bakersfield and Riverside are pushing to expand the number of park rangers in an effort to enforce anti-camping rules and related restrictions.Some unhoused people and civil rights activists warn that those escalating efforts to force people off the streets are only further hurting the most vulnerable.“We have failed in so many respects,” said Theo Henderson, a Los Angeles advocate for the unhoused, who was himself living outside until recently. “There are families with children living in automobiles. There are elderly and the infirm on the streets … It’s a dark time right now, and unhoused residents are very afraid.”‘Unacceptable’ numbersIn a new series that will be published over the next several months, Guardian US is examining California’s homelessness crisis across the state.While homelessness remains concentrated in major metro areas like Los Angeles, San Jose, the San Francisco Bay area and San Diego, communities from the north to the Mexico border are facing their own emergencies.Bar chart showing the 31% increase in California’s total unhoused population, largely driven by a 57% increase in those that are unsheltered, or living on the streets, since 2010.California counted 161,548 unhoused people in the state in January 2020, the most recent count data available. The count is a “point in time” estimate that tallies people living on the street or in shelters. Since it’s a rough snapshot of a single day, and doesn’t account for people who are hidden from public view or are unhoused but couch-surfing that night, it is considered a significant undercount.At least 113,660 of those counted were classified as “unsheltered”, making California home to more than half of all people without shelter in America and the only state where more than 70% of the homeless population is unsheltered (by comparison, just 5% of New York’s homeless population was unsheltered.A treemap area chart that shows California has up over 50% of the US’s unsheltered population.The consequences of so many people living outside are severe and fatal. In 2015, the LA county coroner’s office recorded 613 deaths of unhoused people. That number has steadily climbed each year, rising to 1,609 fatalities in 2021, a spokesperson said. Those figures are an undercount, because the coroner only tracks fatalities considered sudden, unusual or violent. A report by the University of California, Los Angeles last year estimated that overdoses were a leading cause of death of unhoused people during the pandemic.Deaths of unhoused people in LA county up 160% since 2015. Bar chart showing the increase in LA county unhoused deaths from 2015 to 2021.Data analyses have revealed other disturbing trends: one UCLA study estimated that at least 269,000 students from kindergarten to grade 12 in the state were experiencing homelessness before the pandemic; in LA county, Black residents were four times as likely to be unhoused; and also in LA, there was a 20% jump in the number of unhoused seniors, with nearly 5,000 elderly people living outside before Covid arrived.“It’s just not acceptable,” said Wendy Carrillo, a state assemblymember who represents parts of LA and chairs a budget committee on homelessness. As a kid, she would pass by Skid Row and struggle to understand why so many people were forced to live outside, she said. The crisis has grown since: “We’ve become so disconnected as a society, so cold to the issue that people are OK with stepping over someone who is passed out on the floor.”A $14bn investment – and a crackdown on campingCalifornia’s catastrophe stems in part from a longstanding, statewide housing affordability crisis. Californians spend significantly more of their income on housing compared with the rest of the nation. More than 1.5 million renters spend half of their earnings on rent, leaving them potentially one medical emergency or crisis away from homelessness. In recent years, income inequality has only worsened.UCLA research on the residents of one LA encampment found that people cited a range of factors that led them to become unhoused, including eviction, job loss, domestic violence, former incarceration, family conflict and low wages in gig economy jobs.Responding to the crisis, California is pouring billions of dollars into housing and related services, but the success of new programs meant to expand affordable housing and emergency shelter has been mixed.“One of the challenges of housing policy is that it’s like turning around a giant ship. It’s a slow process,” said Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project. The state has made significant progress in recent years in investing in housing, he noted, but the benefits can sometimes take more than a decade to materialize.There are also systemic and historical problems that housing programs can’t solve, including the loss of social safety nets, the dissolution of redevelopment programs, and a controversial state tax measure passed in 1978 that has created significant obstacles for new home ownership, Roller said.And some regions have invested more in temporary shelter programs than in permanent housing, making it hard for people to transition out of shelters, especially as the housing market worsens and as more people newly become unhoused, advocates said.Emblematic of the challenges is California’s signature homelessness response during the pandemic: Project Roomkey. The program temporarily provided motel rooms to an estimated 50,000 people living on the streets. But the program was administered at the local level and some counties fell short of their goals or failed to meet the demand in their regions; participants reported struggling to find housing after hotel stays ended and some returned to the streets because of the strict rules in the program, advocates said.This year, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, is pushing a $14bn investment in homelessness solutions, meant to create 55,000 new housing units and treatment slots. His Homekey initiative, the successor to Project Roomkey, allows local governments to buy motels to use as temporary or permanent housing for unhoused people. As of last week, the state has awarded $695m for more than 2,400 units.While the programs could be transformative for some participants, advocates worry their impact for many could come too late, especially with statewide eviction protections expiring at the end of the month and pandemic-era rent relief efforts winding down. Even with a partial eviction moratorium in place, sheriffs enforced lockouts of thousands of households in the first year of the pandemic, according to a CalMatters analysis.“We are getting a lot of calls from tenants who are being evicted,” said Jovana Morales-Tilgren, housing policy coordinator with Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, a Central Valley-based organization. “A lot of undocumented folks don’t have the resources to battle an eviction notice … and then there are not enough shelters for the unhoused people.”Meanwhile, advocates warn, conditions for those living on the streets are only getting harder amid increasing restrictions on camping. A proposed state law would also allow courts to force some people with severe mental illness into treatment.The crackdown on tent living and fear of possible forced treatment can lead people to scatter into more hidden locations where it can be harder for them to access services and get into programs, advocates say.“Using law enforcement to respond to houselessness is both counterproductive and ineffective,” said Eve Garrow, policy analyst and advocate at the ACLU of Southern California. The expansion of criminalization was overwhelming, Garrow said. “And people are experiencing compassion fatigue, and they want something done. Local public officials are responding with what they see as ‘quick fixes’ that aren’t fixes at all and are completely misguided.”‘I don’t want to die on the streets’People living on the streets or in temporary shelters waiting for housing said they were worried and exhausted by the increasingly hostile rhetoric of politicians and communities.“Unhoused people are blamed for every social ill,” said Henderson, who regularly talks to unhoused residents on his podcast. “There’s an uptick in burglaries, and then the response is, ‘Can we get the unhoused removed?’ Every unhoused person has those stories – as soon as something happens, here comes the police looking at them as the prime suspect.”Kenneth Stallworth, who has been living in a group shelter since his Venice Beach encampment was shut down in a high-profile dispute last year, said he didn’t mind the shelter and appreciated the electricity, but also noted that he had seen several people die or have health emergencies in the facility.“The people are getting what they want,” he said of his fellow Angelenos. “The homeless are getting moved away from areas where there were the most complaints.”Dawn Toftee, 57, was living at an encampment near the stadium where the Super Bowl was held in LA last month, until she was forced to leave in advance of the big game. Officials said the residents were offered housing, but a month later, Toftee is camping down the street – and is still waiting for a housing voucher that could subsidize a rental.“I’m getting old and I don’t want to die on the streets,” she said, adding that she didn’t think officials cared whether people like her got housing: “They just want us out of eyesight.”TopicsCaliforniaUnhoused and unequal: a California crisisLos AngelesHomelessnessPovertyHousingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More