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Los Angeles is facing multiple crises. Yet the Democrats in charge have made their top priority the protection of illegal immigrants facing deportation.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has declared a state of emergency over the federal government’s deportation efforts in and around the area. This gives county Democrats the ability to funnel more taxpayer money to illegal immigrants. To listen to the supervisors tell it, Los Angeles will collapse if this action is not taken. But Los Angeles is already a city in decay, as the Democrats in charge have ignored or downplayed every real emergency it has faced for years.
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Homelessness
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass boasted that her first action after taking office was to declare a state of emergency over homelessness. Los Angeles has tried every left-wing proposal to deal with this crisis, from throwing billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars at the problem to trying to force hotels to house homeless people in vacant rooms to clearing homeless encampments (but only near rich people’s events, such as the Super Bowl or the Oscars).
Supposedly, this is all working. Just a few months ago, Los Angeles County officials celebrated new numbers that showed homelessness had declined for the second straight year. “Reducing homelessness is now a trend in LA city and the county,” we were told. Indeed, the data from Los Angeles’s homeless count show an 18% decline in the city’s unsheltered homeless population and a 14% decline for the county.
How accurate those numbers are remains a major question. According to the RAND Corporation, Los Angeles is undercounting homeless people by as much as 32%. In fact, RAND’s research shows that Los Angeles’s numbers were fairly accurate up until last year, when the county’s celebrated homelessness decline began. There was only a difference of about 5% between Los Angeles’s numbers and RAND’s up until last year, when the difference rose to 26%.
Even if you take the county’s numbers as accurate, Los Angeles is still in the midst of a crisis. The county’s own data put the homeless population at just over 72,000, with the city of Los Angeles having just under 44,000 homeless. In 2015, Los Angeles County as a whole had under 34,000 homeless, meaning this “progress” still leaves the city with more homeless now than the entire county saw a decade ago.
Worse still is the city’s nonchalant attitude toward this crisis, even in a “state of emergency.” It took a court-ordered audit to learn that Los Angeles was spending billions on homelessness without verifying that any of the money being spent was accomplishing anything. Los Angeles is full of stories of corruption when it comes to homelessness spending, whether through how contracts are awarded or how the money for homeless projects is spent. The city has also ignored the conduct of homeless people, turning Los Angeles into a tinderbox.
Fires
Rubbish fires in Los Angeles have increased 475% over the past decade, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department, a result of an increased homeless population and a decreased interest in policing that population. Homeless fires in Los Angeles doubled from 2020 to 2023, and the LAFD said that a third of all fires it has responded to in the last six years were homeless fires.
The massive fires that raged in Los Angeles in January of this year showed how woefully prepared the city and county were for such an emergency. Bass cut the LAFD’s budget, and the city removed more than 100 firefighters from the department over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. (LAFD then said it did not have enough firefighters to deal with the fires.) Los Angeles was also unable to get water flowing through the fire hydrants as the fires raged.
In the end, over 12,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. In the 8 1/2 months since the fires were fully contained, Los Angeles has rebuilt nothing, with the rebuilding process dragged down by high costs (due in part to California’s inflated cost of living) and bureaucratic zoning problems. Permits issued for rebuilding account for less than 10% of the homes destroyed in the fires.
All the while, Los Angeles (and California) Democrats did not take the fires seriously enough to evaluate the cause and prevent future emergencies. “Climate change” was immediately blamed for the fires, regardless of the water problems, widespread fires in the city caused by homeless people, and the state’s lackadaisical approach to forest management. The Democrats in charge didn’t want to look much closer. This all culminated with an arrest in early October, with the Justice Department charging a man with “maliciously starting what became the Palisades Fire.”
Crime
Los Angeles has only recently started taking crime seriously, and it is no thanks to the Democrats who run the city or county. Last November, Los Angeles County voters elected former Republican Nathan Hochman as their new district attorney. He replaced George Gascon, who was backed by the Los Angeles County Democratic Party and the county’s biggest labor unions.
Gascon was as pro-criminal as a “prosecutor” could be. He banned prosecutors from attending parole hearings to advocate the victims of rapists and murderers. He refused to pursue sentencing enhancements (i.e., longer sentences) for gang members and criminals who used guns in their crimes. He regularly sought early releases for criminals if he didn’t manage to secure them no jail time in the first place. Homicides and violent crime unsurprisingly increased.
The criminal culture developed in Los Angeles under Gascon continues to affect the county. The tolerance for “minor” crimes such as shoplifting has shut down businesses as recently as this past August, with a popular market in Chinatown shutting down after 18 years due to repeated robberies. The city of Long Beach now forces businesses with self-checkout stations to have employees supervise those stations at all times, at the risk of being fined. Many stores have shut down their self-checkout stations entirely as a result.
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Los Angeles County Democrats did not care about the effects of crime on people, businesses, or the overall quality of life in their cities. It was not enough of an emergency that the party could break ranks with Gascon and actually pursue jail time for career criminals. Even now, 10 months after a real prosecutor in Hochman took office, violent crime is up 5% in Los Angeles County from pre-pandemic levels. Aggravated assaults are up 22%.
All these problems intersect in Los Angeles. Yet none, not even the homelessness issue that earned an emergency declaration from Bass, have been treated with more enthusiasm and more passion than this illegal immigration “emergency.” The county’s solution is to create what is in effect a new welfare program for illegal immigrants. Los Angeles couldn’t be bothered to treat the real emergencies its lawful residents face, but, much like the Democratic Party on a national level, it is ready to go to the mat for people who crossed the border illegally.
