Reform is on trial in LA — literally, in one case — and the city keeps tripping over homelessness, police funding, and who ends up holding the bag when it all goes sideways. You're listening to The LA Daily Fix. It's Monday, and we've got a lot: shelter deals, a CD9 ethics race heating up, and a budget fight over LAPD that keeps pulling in two directions at once. Two directions is generous. It’s more like the council cuts traffic stops with one hand and shovels more money at the department with the other. Classic LA. All right, let's get into it. 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 federal case for years, and Friday U.S. District Judge David Carter signed off on an updated agreement that adds nearly 1,100 beds and shifts the city’s focus from clearing encampments to actually getting people indoors. More beds is the right direction — I'll take that. But, come on, this is a court order making LA do what it should've been doing four years ago. The city needed a federal judge to tell it, house people, don't just sweep them. The original settlement was in 2022. They’re still in court extending obligations. That’s not exactly a fast-moving bureaucracy, Devin. Exactly. If LA could permitting-and-processing its way out of homelessness, we'd already be done. The only thing that moved the needle was a judge with enforcement power. 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 into a live-wire election cycle. The Daily News has candidates lining up on ethics and accountability while Curren Price's corruption trial is literally on the calendar. And South LA voters are connecting the dots between City Hall graft and the broken streetlights on their block. And they’re right to. Illegal dumping, cracked sidewalks, neglected corridors — that’s what a decade of bad priorities looks like at street level. One candidate put it plainly: residents are saying, 'No wonder nothing gets done.' That’s not cynicism. That’s pattern recognition. The question is whether 'ethics and accountability' stays a campaign theme or turns into real budget oversight once somebody wins. South LA has heard the reformer pitch before. 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 wants to put $47 million toward hiring 500-plus new LAPD officers as part of a nearly $15 billion city budget, and the Budget and Finance Committee got an earful about it last week. Credit to MyNewsLA for first reporting the proposal details. Six thousand domestic violence victims and job-seekers could be served with that same $47 million. Instead, we're expanding a department to handle calls it admits it shouldn't be handling. That UCLA researcher isn't wrong — we keep funding the hammer because we never built the other tools. To be fair, Bass is also looking at this through a post-fire, post-crime-spike political lens. She needs Council votes, and she needs to show she's not soft. The math may be bad, but the politics are very LA 2026. Cool, so working-class neighborhoods get a talking point and westsiders get more patrol cars. Budget hearings wrap May 15th — if nobody shows up loud, this sails through. 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.
The LA City Council voted fourteen to nothing Friday to advance restrictions on LAPD traffic stops. The idea is that minor vehicle code stuff gets handled by civilians, not armed officers. Unanimous. Not a single no vote. Good. Pretextual stops have been the city's favorite way to mess with working-class Black and Brown Angelenos for decades. If you've got a busted taillight, you do not need a gun pointed at your window to sort it out. The counterargument from law enforcement is real, though — impaired drivers, people with warrants, weapons, those do show up in routine stops. The question is whether you redesign the whole system around the edge cases. Every status quo gets defended by its edge cases. The city has been 'studying' traffic enforcement reform since before I could drive. Fourteen-zero is the first time anyone's actually moved. We’ve put links to every story from today’s episode in the show notes, so if something stuck with you, you can head there and read more when you have a minute.
That’s The LA Daily Fix for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.