It’s not a good sign for the city of Los Angeles when it’s difficult to tell the difference between Wednesday’s mayoral candidate debate and unruly children fighting during recess.
The bully on the playground was clearly reality-T.V. guy Spencer Pratt, who repeatedly went after Councilmember Nithya Raman.
The moderators from NBC4 and Telemundo allowed Pratt to speak in the background while she was attempting to answer questions – and did not appear to handle the disruptions well.
In fairness to Raman, the moderators’ uneven application of the rules gave the impression everyone was against her. During a rapidfire yes-or-no question about allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, Bass answered instead that “it depends” and the moderators broke the rules to ask her to clarify. When Raman immediately attempted to do the same, they interrupted her while reminding her that it was “a yes-or-no question.” Perhaps we should allow some of the Superior Court Judge candidates to moderate so we can simultaneously see how well they can control a room.
The moderators were so awful that they even allowed Pratt to do some moderating himself. After consistently allowing the candidates to disregard their directions, Mayor Bass requested a chance to respond to one of Raman’s comments. As the moderators moved on to a different topic, Pratt interrupted and got them to allow Bass to respond. He later did it again.
When they did answer questions, our candidates all underperformed. Bass spent much of her time blaming everyone from former Fire chief Kristin Crowley for her response to the wildfires last year (even though she was in Africa despite alarming weather forecasts) to the Los Angeles City Council.
On public safety concerns under her watch and the possibility of hiring more LAPD officers, Bass deflected. “I have not had the cooperation from city council, including unfortunately, my colleague next to me who has voted repeatedly against hiring officers,” she stated, referring to Raman.
Raman rightly responded that she voted against a large police contract because the city simply didn’t have the funds and was facing a significant budget deficit.
This was one of the many examples of Bass blaming the city council when concerns were brought up about her leadership. The problem with this strategy is that it calls into question her ability to navigate the city’s government to fix those issues and implies that her promises to do so during a second term are hollow.
Turning to Pratt’s performance, as with the conversation I had with him, Pratt offered dubious hopes of funding everything, including the LAPD, by somehow finding and eliminating massive amounts of fraud and waste. When he was asked about his strategy for recruiting more police officers and paying for them, Pratt offered nonsensical claims that were reminiscent of our conversation:
“Our sheriff partner. They’re the same size. They have a billion-dollar more budget for the same size. So this idea that Councilwoman Raman keeps saying that the police department is overfunded. Public safety should be our number one priority and we’re going to find all this money when we stop her useless open-bed plans that actually doesn’t put drug addicts in these housing that we’re spending billions of dollars.”
The sheriff’s department is considerably larger than the LAPD, which partly explains the larger budget. But even if they were the same size, the LASD having “a billion-dollar more budget” while being the same size would suggest that the LASD is operating much less efficiently than the LAPD. Perhaps he’s instead claiming that they operate over similarly sized areas, which would also be false.
The LAPD may or may not be overfunded depending on your priorities but how would any of this suggest that it isn’t overfunded? It doesn’t because that was a reality T.V. guy speaking, not someone who has any business leading our city.
Pratt was also asked what experience he has that would allow him to be able to balance LA’s budget. According to Pratt, it’s not his job to balance the budget and he would hire someone smart to do it. Well, Pratt should have encouraged that smart person to run instead.
The reality-T.V. guy was later asked about his ridiculous plan to have the city’s police act as immigration enforcement, to which he responded that this was not his stated position and that his plan is only to jail those who commit crimes whether they are illegal or not.
This is not what Pratt told me when we spoke. He told me that he plans to convince the Department of Homeland Security to stay out of the city by using the police and the sheriff’s department (which he does not have control over) to round up violent illegal immigrants and “hand them off in the desert” to ICE – it seems he may have thought better of it since then.
Many vague promises of progress were made but it would be completely understandable if those who watched the debate were filled with pessimism about the future of L.A.’s leadership and the suspicion that candidates in four years will be talking about fixing the exact same problems.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.