The Democrat mayor in denial about the violence ripping her city apart

Yahoo

2 days ago

A few months ago, Karen Bass was accused of standing by as Los Angeles burned.
Now, the city's mayor has been accused of 'fanning the flames' – but this time of the rioting, violence and looting that has consumed its downtown area.
Critics say Ms Bass has provoked clashes between law enforcement and protesters, who have been demonstrating against raids by immigration authorities since Friday, and is in denial about the scale of the crisis that has gripped the City of Angels.
A constant presence on Left-leaning CNN and MSNBC this week, she has routinely downplayed the violent scenes even as cars have been torched and journalists have been injured by non-lethal rounds.
When immigration officials raided workplaces in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, Ms Bass declared herself 'deeply angered' and hit out at what she claimed was an attempt to 'sow terror in our communities'.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, later claimed the mayor had 'embarked on one of the most outrageous campaigns of lies this country has ever seen from an elected official, blaming President Trump and brave law enforcement officers for the violence'.
Critics say Ms Bass's words inflamed the tensions between immigration officials and demonstrators, provoking riots that have lasted for days.
'Karen Bass whipped all of this up,' Ric Grenell, Donald Trump's presidential envoy for special missions, wrote on social media.
'She attacked the rule of law. She undermined democracy. The mayor of LA is creating chaos in LA.'
This week, she issued a statement downplaying the scale of the violence, even as several journalists caught up in the ensuing melee were shot by police using non-lethal rounds, including The Telegraph's Jon Putman.
Mr Putman, who was struck in the ear, narrowly avoided serious injury, but said a clean shot would have put him 'out of commission'.
Nick Stern, a British news photographer, was shot in the leg with a non-lethal round on Saturday, and when a paramedic cut off his clothes found a 'five centimetre hole with muscle hanging out of it'.
If Ms Bass is an effective rabble rouser as her critics claim, then the evidence shows she is less adept at cooling tensions.
Over the weekend, she called on rioters to stop looting businesses in downtown Los Angeles, but the dozens of masked figures who raided the CVS, Adidas and T-Mobile shops among others seem to have been unmoved.
Finally, with crime spiralling out of control, Ms Bass decided to act on Monday.
'We reached a tipping point,' she said at a news conference, announcing a curfew between 8pm and 6am local time after more than two dozen businesses were vandalised. Others might have reached the same conclusion days ago.
At that point, she conceded the 'vandalism and violence' had been 'significant', long after images of burned-out cars and masked protesters had made their way around the world.
Moses Castillo, a former LAPD detective who responded to the Rodney King riots that gripped Los Angeles in the early 1990s, criticised Ms Bass for being too slow and indecisive.
'I think she's trying to play catch up,' he told Fox News.
'I think if she had been very forceful in the beginning that we're not going to tolerate these crimes and allow police officers to do their job and arrest people on sight, I think it would have been different.
'She's now saying that these crimes will not be tolerated, looting will not be tolerated, but it's a little bit too late.'
To Ms Bass's political enemies – and there are many, including within her own party – these are familiar themes from the Los Angeles mayor's playbook.
When the city found itself in the grip of devastating wildfires back in January, she fumbled her public statements, rowed with officials, and belatedly tried to get a grip on the crisis.
Ms Bass wasn't in Los Angeles when the fires broke out. She wasn't even in California, or the US.
She was in Ghana to attend the inauguration of its president, and hours after the Pacific Palisades blaze started she was posing for photographs at a reception organised by the US ambassador.
The trip was a 'mistake', she later conceded, adding: 'I hated the fact that I was out of the city when the city needed me the most.'
When she did return, Kristin Crowley, the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) chief blamed her for slashing their budget, leaving her colleagues defenceless when the fires broke out.
By the time the smoke cleared, the wildfires had consumed some 16,000 buildings, forced 200,000 people to evacuate, and killed 30.
But for some ill-judged comments about Cuba's Communist regime, it's possible that Los Angeles could have been spared the worst of these crises.
Joe Biden, the former US president, briefly considered Ms Bass as a potential running mate for the 2020 election, before she won the mayoral election two years later.
But it subsequently emerged that Ms Bass had visited Communist Cuba several times as a young woman in the 1970s, and when Fidel Castro died in 2016 after ruling the country for decades, she lamented 'a great loss to the people of Cuba'.
That was enough to end the prospect of any role in the Biden campaign. Ms Bass's loss, as it turned out, was Los Angeles' loss too.
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