U.S. Rep. Karen Bass has emerged as an eleventh-hour front-runner to become Joe Biden’s running mate, posing a number of problems for the Democratic presidential nominee. Unlike her fellow Californian Kamala Harris, Bass doesn’t bring a national fundraising machine and name recognition, but more importantly, she does bring plenty of baggage.
The communist-sympathizing congresswoman would provide fodder for the Trump campaign thanks to her praise of Fidel Castro. And, like plenty of politicians from the Los Angeles machine, Bass got down and dirty with the dregs of Hollywood, lauding the cult of Scientology well after stories of the “church’s” abuse spilled from the realm of open industry secrets to public knowledge.
But one only needs to go to Bass’s own district to see the real folly in Biden considering such an incompetent lawmaker as the most likely person to become the 47th president of the United States.
I used to live in California’s 37th Congressional District, which Bass has represented in its current redistricted form since 2013. (From 2011 to 2013, Bass represented much of the same area as congresswoman of what was then known as the 33rd district.) From a purely anecdotal perspective, it seemed obvious that Bass’s district suffered from a housing crisis caused by horrific zoning laws and a lack of adequate property protection. My own neighborhood was rife with the sort of mass homelessness and tent camps rivaled only by Skid Row just north of the 10 freeway. Despite tax increase after tax increase, neither supposed road development nor public transit investments resulted in better commutes or less congestion.
Worse, as it turns out, the 37th is home to half of Los Angeles County’s most violent neighborhoods.
Chesterfield Square tops the list of the most violent crimes per capita, with more than any of the other 209 neighborhoods in LA. It also has the ninth highest rate of property crimes. In the past six months, the neighborhood of a little more than 6,000 people suffered 47 aggravated assaults, 28 robberies, three rapes, 33 cases of grand theft auto, 70 cases of theft more broadly, and 14 burglaries. All in all, that’s 305 crimes per 10,000 people, meaning that residents of Chesterfield Park have a 3% chance of being the victim of a crime in just half a year.
The other 37th district neighborhoods with the most violent crimes in the county are Vermont Knolls, Harvard Park, Vermont-Slauson, and Manchester Square. Because of the high prevalence of both violent and property crimes in the latter two neighborhoods during the last two months, the odds of suffering either kind of crime in a six-month span is 2.5% for Vermont-Slauson and 2% for Manchester Square.
If elected, Biden would be older on Inauguration Day than Ronald Reagan, our oldest president ever, was on his last day in office. Biden’s running mate could be the most consequential vice president in decades. If Bass can’t even ameliorate violence and suffering in her own district, how the hell would she be ready on day one to run the country?
