Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, 72, is seeking a second term in the Nov. 3 election, after being forced into a runoff by City Councilmember Nithya Raman, a onetime ally.
A former state Assembly speaker and member of Congress, Bass became the city’s first female mayor in 2022, when she defeated billionaire developer Rick Caruso.
Once in office, she focused much of her energy on reducing homelessness and bolstering the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department. In 2025, she faced sharp criticism over the city’s response to the January Palisades fire, and for being in Ghana when the fire began amid high wind warnings.
The Times spoke with her on the seventh floor of an apartment building under construction in West Los Angeles — one made possible by her order fast-tracking approval of affordable housing. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Times: What is your single biggest accomplishment as mayor?
Bass: Well, it’s hard for me to narrow it to just one. But I do think this [building] is a perfect example of a huge accomplishment, which is affordable housing. And the fact that we have built more affordable housing in the four years that I’ve been mayor than was built many, many years before.
Really, the accomplishment was changing the rules and expediting [affordable] housing.
The Times: And what would you say is the biggest mistake you made while serving as mayor?
Bass: No question. Not being here for the fire, and being out of the country.
The Times: Why, or how, do you think that happened?
Bass: How do I think it happened that I was out of the country?
The Times: There were warnings about wind. There was concern about fire risk. Some on your staff received those warnings.
Bass: It happened in the city and in the county, that there were warnings. But no one thought those warnings elevated to a point of a crisis, or an impending crisis.
What you know about weather events is, any time we think there’s going to be a major concern, everybody comes together. There’s press conferences, there’s briefings, and the public is informed about what could possibly happen. That was not done in the city. That was not done in the county.
And when I came back and spoke to [then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley] and said, “Why didn’t you raise the alarm?” — because she had done that for previous emergencies — she basically said, “Mayor, we get Santa Ana winds all the time. We just didn’t think it was going to be that bad.”
[Crowley has sued Bass, accusing her of defamation and damaging her reputation for her remarks about the Palisades fire response.]
So the bottom line is, I was not aware, otherwise I would have not left the country. However, it’s no excuse. The bottom line is, I wasn’t here when the city needed me. And that’s a pain point for me, that I was not where I should have been, where I was needed.
I always do the analogy of, if you’re out of town and a family member is hurt or sick, it doesn’t matter where you are or why you were out of town. What matters is you weren’t there when your family needed it. And the city is my family.
The Times: What do you think is Councilmember Nithya Raman’s No. 1 failure as an elected official?
Bass: I think probably the biggest is her [failure] to take care of her own residents — the fact that her residents relied on me and not her, because she is not known to be a responsive councilwoman that assists her constituents.
[Raman has said she strives to address constituent complaints, and that “responsiveness is a hallmark of the work we do.”]
The Times: Why do you think Raman decided to run against you?
Bass: That will be a mystery that I will always wonder, considering that she had endorsed me and was very public about that.
We definitely had our differences. But I have my differences with lots of people. I did not see that coming nor did she tell me she was even thinking about it. So I was completely blindsided.
The Times: You said shortly after taking office that you wanted to restore the LAPD to 9,500 officers. The department has been shrinking every year. It’s now down to about 8,500. Why has that effort fallen short?
Bass: Well, a few reasons. One is, we thought it was a recruitment issue. We did a big recruitment campaign, had over a thousand recruits. Then I found out the city’s hiring process was so fundamentally broken that the young men and women who applied to be officers were kept waiting so long they gave up and went to work in other departments, for sheriffs or other cities.
As I delved into the issue, I had to change staff around. We had to do a lot of changes within the personnel department to actually get people through the process in a reasonable manner. And when we finally got all of the problems out of the way, and we had a great number of recruits ready to go in, the council blocked the funding.
The Times: The council did re-up the funding in January.
Bass: They did. So now it’s a matter of having the resources to hire, the numbers that we need to hire.
The Times: Do you think LAPD staffing will stop shrinking this year?
Bass: I am concerned it might continue to decrease, because the numbers that have been approved financially, I don’t know that that’s going to keep up. And the reason I don’t know is because you never know how many officers are actually going to retire.
The Times: Do you still think the police raises you negotiated were a good idea?
Bass: Oh, absolutely. There’s no question in my mind about that. One, it wasn’t just the raises [for] new officers. It was the boost that officers who were on the [LAPD] needed after a year or two. They went to work for other departments because of the pay.
The Times: You tried last year to persuade the L.A. County supervisors to stick with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county agency. Instead, they moved more than $300 million out of the system. Why did you want them to stay?
Bass: I thought and still feel that what the county did was, instead of collaborating on how should we address homelessness in the region, [they] broke away and created a huge bureaucracy. Once you create a department, once you create a bureaucracy, it never goes away. And then where’s the incentive to actually end homelessness?
Now I believe that city needs to have its own homelessness agency independent of the county.
The Times: Should the city respond to someone smoking a glass pipe or injecting themselves with a needle in front of a school or home? And if so, who should respond? LAPD?
Bass: Yes. It is not OK to shoot up or use drugs openly in front of a school. It just isn’t. The same thing with encampments. What we’ve done with Inside Safe is, we’ve gotten the people housed.
The problem with just arresting addicts is there’s nowhere to take them. The police can arrest you, but you’re going to get out immediately because there is no place for them to go. So what needs to happen is the county, which controls the drug programs, needs to have far more [treatment] beds.
The Times: Your opponent has been endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. You didn’t seek the endorsement. Why not?
Bass: There was no reason for me to seek an endorsement from an organization that I knew was not going to endorse me. I’m not aligned with a number of their policies.
The Times: Which policies?
Bass: I’m not aligned with abolishing prisons. I’m not aligned with defunding the police.
The Times: Doubling back to the Palisades fire, what is your assessment of the recovery? Would you have done anything differently?
Bass: I think the recovery has been moving along. At different points in time, there have been — not roadblocks, but problems within the process. Every time we have a problem, we have addressed it.
I issued over 10 executive orders on the Palisades. Each one of them was in response to an issue raised by residents, a roadblock or speed bump they felt in the process. When they asked to co-locate all of the [city] departments, we did that.
First we did it on the Westside, because they were removing the debris. Then after they finished removing the debris, the residents wanted it to be in the Palisades. So we put it in the Palisades, where it remains today. So all 12 departments involved with development are in the Palisades physically.
I’ve assigned a staff [member] to be in the Palisades full time. That’s their job, to just be there, to be there at the beck and call of Palisadians.
The problem that people are experiencing right now is with the DWP [Department of Water and Power]. We have over a thousand homes that are [permitted] now and people are moving back. They’re ready to move back, but then they can’t get the DWP hookup.
Now the other, bigger problem that is resulting in some people not even being able to rebuild is the insurance companies and the banking [industry], where people are not getting the financing they need and the insurance companies are not paying out.
I’ve been working on those two issues. I took a delegation of Palisadians to Sacramento pushing for legislation that would help with that.
The Times: What are you doing about the DWP electrical hookups?
Bass: Our new general manager is setting up a concierge service for people doing development. That’s going to be ready to go live, I would say maybe in another month. We’re going to do a webinar or a Zoom with Palisadians who are all facing this issue.
The Times: Why did you oppose Senate Bill 79, which requires cities to allow taller, denser buildings near transit stops?
Bass: I believe in building housing, I really truly do. But I believe in building housing with communities. Which means, if you work with communities, they can come up with what is reasonable. Sherman Oaks and Crenshaw are the two examples that I always use.
Sherman Oaks is adamantly opposed to putting multi-family units within their [single-family] residential areas. But they’re very supportive of building [housing] on their commercial corridors that are underperforming.
I think SB79 was meant for cities that absolutely oppose all housing. And I know from serving up in Sacramento, when you do state law, you do it across the board to everyone without consideration. We rezoned the entire city to make room for half a million homes. We are not a city opposed to housing.
The Times: Some of your critics have described you as a micromanager. They say you do not empower your staff to make decisions. Is that accurate?
Bass: No, I don’t think that’s accurate. But let me tell you what it is: If something’s not moving, I will jump in. For example, police hiring.
When that was not going anywhere, and where the staff were meeting roadblock after roadblock after roadblock, you better be sure that I jumped in. I will use the full power of this office to move things.
The Times: Who is the best elected official in the history of L.A.?
Bass: I could easily say Tom Bradley because of all that he did in his 20 years being mayor. I think it would be interesting for somebody to look at the state of the city before term limits and after term limits.
The Times: What is one thing that you think the public should know about you but doesn’t?
Bass: Maybe this is it: What I’m doing in my life right now, I’ve been doing since middle school. My entire life, since [being] a kid, has been dedicated to service. That’s been the through line in my life. Public office is just the last phase of my life.
The Times: What was in middle school?
Bass: I was very active politically. That’s where I was involved in my first campaign. And in high school, I was fighting for better conditions in the high school, but I was also organizing antiwar protests. In college, fighting for representation, and also against the war in Vietnam. So I have been an activist fighting for change.
I was full-time faculty at USC Medical School. I walked away from that job. I took a massive risk to go to 85th and Broadway and start an organization at the height of the homicide crisis and gang crisis — and crack cocaine and AIDS. And then I built an organization 36 years ago that’s still strong.
I walked away from that and ran for [state] office, working on the same issues I was working on in South L.A.: criminal justice reform, foster care.
Then I moved on to Congress, and then I walked away from Congress. A lot of people said, “How could you walk way from Congress? You could stay there forever!” But I did, because I was compelled to follow a problem.
That is how I have built my life, and dedicated my life. It’s never been about some ambition.
Ultimately, the crisis on the street persuaded me to leave a very comfortable job.
The Times: Meaning homelessness?
Bass: Yes.
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After the interview, as Bass headed to her car, she stopped and asked to revisit the first question: What was her greatest accomplishment as mayor?
“Getting people off the streets and saving lives,” she said. “There isn’t anything higher than that.”
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