Mayor Karen Bass believes that the streets of Los Angeles are now “safer than they’ve been since the 1950s.”
Bass supported this claim during an interview with KBLA radio host Dominique Diprima, who suggested that Los Angeles may actually be a safer place than the media lets on.
“Reality is our streets are safer than they’ve been since … What? The 1950s?” said Diprima.
Bass agreed.
“Yeah!” said Bass. “And gang homicide is down — and by the way, most of the homicides are gang related. It’s down to 1960 levels.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, while violent crime has steadily been declining in the city for decades, voters are not satisfied, mostly due to the ongoing homeless crisis, public drug use, and overall decline in city cleanliness:
By many measures, the city is safer than it has been in generations — and yet voters following L.A.’s hotly contested mayoral race might think the opposite.
The challengers to Mayor Karen Bass have zeroed in on homelessness and public drug use to argue she hasn’t delivered on public safety, while also criticizing how the Police Department has operated and been funded during her tenure.
Mike Bonin, a former L.A. City Council member, said the fact that Spencer Pratt — the former reality TV star who has been attacking Bass from the right — has gained so much traction in the race is proof of how Bass and other candidates to the left have failed to change “prevailing narratives that the city is unsafe.”
A study in April also showed that a majority of Los Angeles (L.A.) residents are “less satisfied” with their quality of life as the mayoral election looms. Surveying 1,400 L.A. County residents between March 15-29 with a 2.6 percent margin of error, the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs study found that Angelenos are overall “less satisfied” with their quality of life.
“The overall index dropped to a historic low of 52, with six of the nine categories that comprise the index also falling to their lowest levels on record,” it noted. “Education, transportation/traffic and cost of living saw the steepest declines, reinforcing the ongoing strain of affordability and infrastructure challenges.”
The top issues centered on fears of deportation (31 percent), followed by income loss due to the historic wildfires (26 percent), with an overall dissatisfaction with the wildfire relief efforts (56 percent) under Democrat Mayor Karen Bass.
“Los Angeles County residents’ rating of their quality of life has been in decline since the peak of the COVID pandemic,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin. “We’ve been through a lot in the last five years. COVID, increases in the cost of living, immigration sweeps, and the Altadena and Palisades fires have taken their toll on virtually every aspect of our lives.”
“Despite the challenges county residents have faced, when asked if they were generally optimistic or pessimistic about their own economic future in Los Angeles County, a majority of survey respondents (53%) said they were optimistic,” Yaroslavsky added.
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