Like most big cities, Los Angeles has steep challenges: homelessness. Extreme weather. Housing affordability. Budget shortfalls. Law and order has for years been a relative bright spot. Not since the 1960s has the city experienced such a low homicide rate.
In an unlikely turn, however, public safety has emerged as an abrupt flashpoint in the city’s fierce mayoral contest. Last Tuesday, Nithya Raman, the challenger, vowed to replace the police chief if elected. Two days later, Mayor Karen Bass stood next to the chief as they applauded a sweeping crackdown on drug dealing on Skid Row.
Points of contention between the two Democrats have included 911 wait times, who would best handle security for the 2028 Olympics and who did or did not use the words “fascist liar” to describe the police chief.
The traditional Republican argument that Democrats are soft on crime has been losing steam this election cycle as crime rates drop across the country. G.O.P. candidates are neverthelessi making a go of it in places like Michigan, where they are going after Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate race, and North Carolina, where Roy Cooper has been under attack in another Senate contest.
In liberal Los Angeles, though, politics are more blue-on-blue, and the usual dividing lines on law and order have been scrambled this year as a Democrat and a democratic socialist take different tacks on the police force as they vie for the city’s top elected post.
In a year of resounding success for democratic socialists around the country, the election in the nation’s second-largest city is also poised to test whether that organization has shed its image of demonizing the police that lingers from the days of protests over George Floyd’s death.
Ms. Raman, 45, is a Harvard-educated policy expert backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that has argued that law enforcement receives too large a share of public funding. Ms. Bass, 73, has made her career as a progressive leader, but has been criticized for being too aligned with the police, whose union has endorsed her and spent significantly to back her re-election.
And as the two women, formerly allies, enter the homestretch, the city’s conventional political wisdom has been upended by a Trump-like Republican influencer who in June placed third in the mayoral primary, failing to make the runoff.
That influencer, Spencer Pratt, whose house burned in the Palisades fire, railed at City Hall and charged that Democrats had let the city degenerate into a wasteland of identity politics and homeless “zombies.” Brash and far-reaching, Mr. Pratt’s argument was also heavy on law and order, and he repeatedly pointed to the squalid streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles as evidence that the city was being failed by liberals like Ms. Bass and Ms. Raman.
As they compete for his supporters, at stake is the 25.53 percent of the primary vote he won, a potentially pivotal bloc in a contest in which polls show roughly one voter in three is undecided.
“Spencer Pratt was a conservative outsider — he was tough on crime, and he wanted to shake up the system,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican political consultant who now teaches political communications at several universities in California. And as polls show Ms. Raman starting to pull ahead, Mr. Schnur said, the two remaining candidates are each now vying for “exactly one half of Pratt’s persona.”
So Ms. Bass is now highlighting her record on crime as proof that she’s more centrist than Ms. Raman, Mr. Schnur said. And Ms. Raman, a relative unknown despite six years on the City Council, is seeking to show “that she’s more of an outsider than Bass.”
Those dynamics were on display last week as Ms. Raman’s campaign ramped up its social media to capitalize on her momentum, while Ms. Bass stood side by side with the Los Angeles police chief, Jim McDonnell, whom Ms. Raman has criticized for the department’s response last year during raucous immigration protests.
First Ms. Raman was filmed with a progressive online provocateur, Ed Choi, who asserted in the video that Los Angeles had become “extremely fascist” since Ms. Bass appointed Mr. McDonnell to lead the Police Department. Ms. Raman, who in 2024 had voted for Mr. McDonnell’s appointment, said the chief had not “met this moment,” noting the use of tear gas last year in quelling protests. Then she repeated a vow that if she is elected, she would hire “new leadership within the department.”
At the influencer’s behest, according to Ms. Raman’s campaign, she then joined him in reciting his tagline: “Only you can stop fascist liars!” As they spoke, an image of Ms. Bass appeared onscreen.
The video, which was posted by Ms. Raman’s campaign and then disavowed by her and removed when it drew backlash, was swiftly condemned by the mayor.
Ms. Bass charged that Ms. Raman did not “hold our police officers in high regard” and was “crossing the line” in “labeling them fascists.”
“It’s dangerous and extreme rhetoric, and it has no place in this city — let alone from someone trying to become mayor,” Ms. Bass said.
Ms. Raman’s campaign said she had been referring to federal immigration agents.Ms. Bass retorted that her challenger was “not ready for prime time.”
To suggest a search for a new police chief with the 2028 Olympics looming was “naïve,” Ms. Bass repeated in interviews and appearances with donors.
In an ironic twist, the Trump administration’s top prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli — who is often at odds with city Democrats over arrests and detention of immigrants — praised Ms. Bass for her “leadership” in supporting a sweep of about two dozen suspected midlevel drug peddlers. He warned against Ms. Raman’s D.S.A. supporters, some of whom advocate defunding or disarming the police.
Ms. Raman’s campaign points out that she has not called for the police to be disarmed or defunded. Rather, she wants civilian mental health and homelessness professionals to handle more calls that do not require an armed response. But Mr. Schnur noted that in Los Angeles, the debate among voters is less about ideology or policy than livability.
“When Los Angeles voters think about crime, they tend to do so not in the context of danger but rather disorder,” he said. “Crime and homelessness and even traffic and potholes add to the impression of whether a city is working or not.”
In a statement, Ms. Raman’s campaign pointed out that “911 wait times have gone up under Mayor Bass” and that “we have 1,500 fewer officers than we did several years ago, even though we’re paying half a billion dollars more each year.”
“That,” she added, “is a failure of public safety management.”
In an interview, the mayor, whose approval ratings dropped precipitously last year after it emerged that she had been out of the country when the Palisades fire erupted, did not deny that she hoped voters would look at the tens of thousands of homeless people who have been moved indoors on her watch and the historic lows in the city’s crime rates. She asserted that safety and livability have been enhanced in Los Angeles since 2022, when she was elected amid the pandemic wreckage.
“I’m certainly hoping that they’ll look at both of us,” she said, referring to voters, and added, “And then say, is this what I really want?”
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