Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has launched a new line of attack against City Councilmember Nithya Raman, accusing her opponent of romanticizing the era of former police chief Daryl F. Gates.
Bass, surrounded by about two dozen Black community leaders at her campaign headquarters Thursday, said Raman’s mention of Gates during their televised debate this week showed a lack of knowledge about the city’s history of police abuse and the suffering of Black and Latino residents during the former chief’s tenure, including the 1991 videotaped police beating of Rodney King.
Raman brought up Gates briefly while criticizing the mayor over the Los Angeles Police Department’s handling of federal immigration enforcement during Tuesday night’s debate. She said the LAPD under Bass’ watch shared information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, undermining the trust of the city’s immigrant communities.
“This city used to be the gold standard in terms of noncooperation with immigration enforcement years ago, under the era of Daryl Gates,” Raman said.
Bass denounced Raman’s remarks, saying it was “a lie” to portray Gates, who held his post from 1978 to 1992, as the gold standard for the city’s Latino residents. She called on Raman to retract her remarks and issue an apology, saying Gates “inflicted serious harm to the African American community.”
“My opponent is not really familiar with L.A., especially the Black community,” Bass said. “She doesn’t know us.”
While Bass was holding her news conference, Raman posted a response video on YouTube saying the mayor “owes Angelenos answers about LAPD’s cooperation with ICE.” She called Gates “an abhorrent and racist police chief” and accused Bass of deliberately distorting her statement at the debate, calling such behavior “completely unacceptable.”
“Over and over, I have challenged Mayor Bass over reports of LAPD cooperation with ICE under her leadership,” Raman said in a statement. “Now Mayor Bass is deliberately twisting my words to distract from the questions she is refusing to answer.”
Raman said she had used the phrase “gold standard” to describe Special Order 40, which was issued by Gates in 1979, prohibiting officers from stopping people for the sole purpose of determining their immigration status. She also cited a Times report that found that the LAPD has sent fingerprints collected during bookings to a national law enforcement database that ICE can access.
Special Order 40 was aimed at reassuring the city’s immigrants that they could safely report a crime or serve as a witness without fear of deportation. However, it didn’t prevent the LAPD from working with federal immigration agencies.
In 2008, while the City Council was taking a second look at Special Order 40, Gates pushed back on the idea that it kept police from working with immigration authorities.
“If somebody violates the law and the officer brings them in, the first thing they’re supposed to do is notify immigration if they believe they’re undocumented,” Gates told the council. “That’s in Special Order 40.”
An LAPD spokesperson said Thursday that Special Order 40 has never been rewritten or rescinded, and that officers don’t engage in civil immigration enforcement. The department hasn’t found any evidence that its automated license plate reader data have been shared with any immigration enforcement agency, said Dean Gialamas, commanding officer of the LAPD’s Information Technology Bureau.
Gates resigned in 1992 amid a groundswell of criticism over police abuse and his slow responseto the riots that broke out in April of that year after four police officers were acquitted on charges of severely beating King, a Black motorist.
At Bass’ campaign headquarters, several speakers denounced Gates’ record, pointing to the department’s repeated use of a battering ram to knock down the walls of suspects’ homes. Others spoke of police chokeholds and the grainy footage that showed officers striking King with batons.
Bass said she formed the nonprofit Community Coalition in 1990 to push back against Gates’ practice of conducting mass arrests on weekends in South L.A. She also took part in a lawsuit over LAPD surveillance and harassment.
Bass is seeking a second four-year term in the Nov. 3 election, after being forced into a runoff with Raman in the June 2 primary.
Raman has been campaigning on her work securing passage of a 2024 law that prohibits city workers from participating in federal immigration enforcement. Under L.A.’s sanctuary ordinance, city workers must treat data or information that can be used to trace a person’s citizenship or immigration status as confidential.
The sanctuary law doesn’t apply to people who have illegally reentered the country after being convicted of major felonies and deported.
Bass, asked about Raman’s YouTube video, said she doesn’t believe the LAPD is sharing information with ICE. Both she and Raman have said they want the LAPD to stop working with license plate reader company Flock Safety.
Earlier this year, the LAPD allowed its agreement with the company to lapse over concerns that the Trump administration is using the data it collects to locate immigrants targeted for deportation.
“The information sharing that I’m concerned about was with Flock cameras, which is why … that contract is not being renewed,” Bass said.
Staff writer Libor Jany contributed to this report.
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