Reform is on trial in Los Angeles — homelessness, ethics, and the LAPD all in the dock at once. This is LA Politics and Urbanism Daily — I’m Cassidy, with Devin, and today the city is fighting itself on basically every front that matters. Housing deals, a corruption trial reshaping a council race, and a budget trying to pour more money into LAPD the same week the council tries to rein it in. Monday, I guess. Let’s start with the part the city actually agreed to on homelessness. Makenna Cramer, writing in LAist:
Los Angeles will boost the number of housing and shelter opportunities for people experiencing homelessness and focus more on moving people inside rather than clearing encampments, under an agreement approved by a federal judge Friday. The updated agreement from a 2022 settlement is the latest step in a long-running legal saga focused on the city's response to the homelessness crisis.
LAist’s Makenna Cramer has been on this beat for years, and Friday a federal judge signed off on an updated agreement that adds nearly 1,100 beds and extends the city’s obligations past what the 2022 settlement originally called for. The headline says ‘boost housing and shelter,’ but the real story is the city had to get dragged back into federal court to do more of what it already promised. Judge Carter didn’t call that hearing because things were going great. Moving people inside instead of just clearing encampments is a real shift on paper. The whole question is whether the beds show up on any kind of real timeline. Eleven hundred beds sounds impressive until you remember this city has been promising beds for a decade and somehow the math never closes. I’ll believe it when somebody’s sleeping in one. Teresa Liu, writing in Daily News:
As Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren Price’s corruption case moves toward trial, candidates vying to represent Council District 9 are increasingly centering their campaigns around transparency, accountability and public trust — themes several said resonate with frustrated voters across South Los Angeles. Candidates for District 9 interviewed by the Southern California News Group said many residents increasingly connect ethics and accountability concerns at City Hall with broader frustrations over neighborhood conditions, city services and economic investment in the district.
CD9 is heading toward a wide-open race as Curren Price’s corruption trial gets closer, and the Daily News has candidates lining up to run on the one thing Price allegedly wasn’t: accountable. South LA residents are still asking where their tax money went while streetlights are broken and illegal dumping piles up. That’s what happens when a council seat turns into a personal ATM for years. CD9 covers a huge stretch of South LA and downtown-adjacent neighborhoods that have been chronically underserved. So once everyone says ‘ethics,’ the question gets very simple: who actually has a plan beyond the bumper sticker? Ethics without a housing and services platform is just vibes. I want to hear which of these candidates is actually going to push permits through and fix the neglected corridors — not just promise to be less crooked than the last guy. Here's Jiah Lee at UCLA Luskin:
Turner used survey data from over 35000 individuals from the past six years to highlight that many individuals do not want to invest money into law enforcement, “We want to invest in things like housing security, and things like food security, economic assistance, public health and health care, child and youth development, environmental justice and climate change,” Turner said.
Mayor Bass’s proposed $14.89 billion budget wants to hire over 500 new LAPD officers — that’s about $47 million in new salary costs. Budget and Finance Committee hearings run through May 15th, and hat tip to MyNewsLA for the early numbers. Forty-seven million dollars. And a UCLA researcher just showed you could use that same money to serve nearly six thousand domestic violence survivors. We’re not even having the right argument — we’re just auto-funding the most expensive tool in the drawer. To be fair, Bass is threading a needle here — she got elected promising public safety, and ‘hire more cops’ is something council members can still sell at town halls. That doesn’t make it the right call, but the politics aren’t hard to see. The professor’s own line is the killer: police are being asked to do things they don’t even want to do. That’s not a public safety argument, that’s a bureaucratic inertia argument — and we’re spending $47 million to keep it going. Ethan Brook, writing in Time News:
In a move that has ignited a fierce debate over the balance between civil liberties and public safety, the Los Angeles City Council voted 14-0 to advance a series of restrictions on police traffic stops. The motion, which passed without a single dissenting vote, signals a significant shift in how the nation’s second-largest city intends to manage its streets, moving toward a model that seeks to decouple routine vehicle code enforcement from armed police intervention.
Fourteen to zero — that’s not a close vote, that’s a statement. On Friday, the LA City Council moved to restrict LAPD traffic stops and push toward civilian-led enforcement for minor vehicle code violations. Credit to Time News for getting this first. Harris-Dawson has been saying for years that traffic stops are basically fishing expeditions — broken taillight, then suddenly it’s a pretext to run somebody’s name. A 14-0 vote tells you even the council members who usually hedge decided they couldn’t defend the current system out loud. Law enforcement’s pushback is real, though. Their argument is that impaired drivers and armed people don’t announce themselves, and a civilian traffic agent walking up to that car is a different risk calculus than a trained officer. That argument proves too much. If every traffic stop is potentially a violent encounter, maybe that’s the problem we should be solving — not locking in a system where we send a gun to every expired registration. Have a tip, a story idea, or a correction for us? Send it to ladailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We read your notes, and they help shape the show.
If you want to dig deeper, we’ve put links to every story from today’s briefing in the show notes. Follow the ones that caught your ear.
That’s Los Angeles Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Monday. This is a Lantern Podcast.