For the first time in a quarter century, Los Angeles is engaged in charter reform, revising basic aspects of how city government functions to increase accountability, effectiveness, and public trust, expand the city council for the first time in a century, and double funding for city parks. But you’d never know that a major overhaul of city government was being worked on, for voters to consider in November, if you watched the televised mayor’s debate on May 6.
Instead, it was selectively framed in terms of a few headline problems, in a manner favoring sound bites and simplistic solutions that fail to come to grips with underlying causes and limitations.
In an echo of national politics, that framing favored the least qualified candidate by far, Republican reality TV star, Spencer Pratt, distracting from what could have been a highly productive debate between the incumbent, Mayor Karen Bass, and City Councilwoman Nithya Raman — previously a city planner — who was recently called “the tip of the spear in the struggle” for charter reform by the City Council President, Marqueece Harris-Dawson.
By professional background, Raman thinks in terms of systemic causes and consequences, and has detailed issue position pages on her campaign website. Anyone who has long-standing grievances about how the city works ought to be interested in at least paying some attention to ideas she’s engaged with.
Mayor Karen Bass’s website lays out in detail what she’s accomplished in her time in office — crime and homelessness are down, and new housing is up, as prime examples. There’s obviously a constructive debate to be had contrasting her accomplishments with what Raman argues is possible.
A Reality TV Debate
But the debate moderators had something else in mind: playing up the reality TV star, Pratt, a Trump-like peddler of grievance, attacks, “alternative facts” and simplistic promises.
“Oh shit, I can be president now,” Pratt thought while watching Trump run for president in 2016. “Do I want to be in the White House one day?” Nothing came of it then, but that changed after his house burned down in the Palisades fire. He’s now running to be LA mayor, framing that loss as his political origin story, though his sister Stephanie Pratt disagrees.
“He’s just trying to stay famous and sell his memoir, don’t be fooled,” she wrote on X in mid-February. “Spencer has done great work for the Palisades,” she continued, “But LA does not need another unqualified and inexperienced mayor.”
Ignoring her warning, the moderators opened the debate just as Pratt would have wanted it, using the fires to question if Bass deserved another term, then asking Pratt a dream question he couldn’t have topped himself:
“Your desire to run for office for mayor of Los Angeles. Really born of your own experience. You lost your home in the fire. You lost your neighborhood,” moderator Conan Nolan said. “How does that really color your view of what needs to happen at this point, and how does that help others moving forward?”
With the “question” having said everything Pratt could have wished for, he ignored it and continued attacking Bass instead, adding garbled facts in the process. “He’s saying several things that are completely inaccurate,” Bass responded. And Pratt replied by calling Bass “an incredible liar,” just as Trump might have done.
Lost in the interchange was any attention to root causes: the unheard of midwinter wildfires were a direct result of global warming — which Pratt sought to wave away — and while he also obscured the inherent inability of municipal firefighting infrastructure to deal with wildfires on this scale, neither the LA Department of Water and Power nor the fire department was without fault. Restructuring departmental accountability is just the sort of thing charter reform is meant to do, though the current report doesn’t deal with it, instead listing it as the first recommended item for future reform.
If the moderators had any awareness of the charter reform process and Raman’s role in advancing it, they could have asked her why it wasn’t being dealt with now, and whatever her response, it would have given the audience a more informed view of the issues involved. Instead, Raman, who had been doing her job — with preparedness efforts beforehand and fire preparedness motions afterwards — was asked non-specifically if she was doing enough, even though, as she noted, “We didn’t have a single home that was lost during these fires” in her district.
Feelings Over Facts In Crime Debate
The next issue, crime, was framed in a facts-be-damned manner. “LAPD is reporting the overall crime rate is down, but people repeatedly say that’s not their perception. They do not feel safe,” the question to Bass began, putting a privilege on fears over facts, as the corporate media has done for generations, covering crime.
As a result, people almost every year say that crime is getting worse, even though crime rates have decreased dramatically since the 1990s, with steady declines over most of that period, except for the immediate aftermath of COVID-19. The questioner went on to mention “yet another series of home burglaries in the San Fernando” and the federal arrest of 18 people for drug trafficking, asking if the latter was “a sign that our communities are not safe?” When debate moderators cite arresting criminals as a possible danger sign, you can be sure that they’ve totally lost the plot.
Notably missing from their questions was any concern for police accountability, for alternatives to police in crisis situations, or for anything else that might contribute to public safety, though Raman did try to squeeze them into the conversation.
For instance, she noted that a bloated police contract resulted in “a $1 billion budget deficit last year. That led to us having to cut essential services across the entire city,” she noted. “If you’re wondering why your street lights are out on your block, and the Bureau of Street Lighting is telling you that it’s taking a year to fix a street light. That’s why.”
Street lights, of course, also contribute to public safety, as well as quality of life. But the debate was devoid of questions about improving the quality of life.
Drug Myths And Homelessness
When the debate turned to homelessness, it went even farther off the rails, with Pratt portraying the homeless as an incorrigible, violent, drug addicted menace.
“No matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth, they are on fentanyl. The DEA statistics says 93% of this is a drug addiction problem,” he said.
But that’s simply not true. Past homeless surveys in LA have shown that income loss is the primary cause of homelessness, accounting for almost half, while drug addiction accounts for less than a third of that. Drug use is far more a consequence of homelessness than a cause.
Ramping up the mindlessness of the debate, the moderators asked for a yes or no response to continuing the city-run needle exchange program, which Pratt alone automatically rejected. “No needles and pipes for drug addicts on the street ever, got it?”
Complete missing was decades of documented experience showing how much good such programs do, not just in preventing disease and death, but in promoting treatment and recovery. One Seattle study, for example, found that needle exchange participants were three times more likely to substantially reduce or even stop injecting drugs than those not involved in the program.
Again and again throughout the debate, the lack of concern for facts vs. feelings skewed the whole enterprise into fantasy, helping Pratt play the fantasy role of no-nonsense, get-it-done tough guy, despite having no evidence his ideas would actually work, rather than making things worse, á la Trump.
Sizzle vs. Steak
When asked how his experience qualified him to oversee LA’s $14 billion budget, Pratt not only claimed “I have common sense,” but “I’m humble, I have humility,” so he would surround himself “with the smartest people in the world,” a direct echo of Trump’s promise in 2016. “My job is to be as crazy as this will sound. I’m the adult in the room,” he said.
He’s right. It does sound crazy, given how little he knows and how much he thinks he knows.
In dramatic contrast to Pratt, Raman has detailed plans for dramatically increasing housing supply, protecting renters and dealing with homelessness, as well as increasing park space and planting trees, and improving transportation and public safety — exactly the sort of thing one might expect from a city planner. A public debate about the city’s future should at least consider the kinds of ideas that Raman is putting forward, and compare them with Bass’ record of achievement.
But the moderators instead went the reality TV route — all sizzle, no steak.