The violent crime rate rose for a third consecutive year in Los Angeles, but that‘s not something Mayor Eric Garcetti is eager to highlight ahead of the March election, one mayoral challenger said this week.
During a candidate forum hosted by the Northridge West Neighborhood Council, Mitchell Schwartz, a political strategist who is attempting to unseat Garcetti, accused the mayor “of hiding and suppressing the police reports from last year” by not holding his annual news conference to discuss the end-of-year crime statistics.
Garcetti’s campaign spokesman, Yusef Robb, fired back Thursday, calling Schwartz’s accusation a “cockamamie conspiracy theory” and blamed the lack of a news conference this year on “scheduling.”
He added that “despite the city having to deal with the state’s failures on Prop. 47 implementation, the fact is crime in L.A. is at historic lows.”
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Even though the issue of rising crime can quickly become a thorny subject for an incumbent candidate, or perhaps because of it, the issue has nevertheless caught on as a line of attack for many of Garcetti’s challengers.
Schwartz, who is promising to add 2,500 officers to the force, includes the crime increase figures in his standard pitch to voters.
He said Thursday that “public safety is the number one issue for the mayor and the majority of the budget,” and attacked Garcetti’s policies, saying they “are evidently not working.”
Another candidate, Paul Amori, also took up the issue at the Northridge candidate forum, saying “crime is up massively and has gotten terribly worse in the last four years, since Garcetti has been mayor.”
But he hedged a bit, saying “it’s not my place to blame – that’s not what I do, so I won’t say it’s entirely Garcetti’s fault.”
He echoed a common refrain of most of the other candidates, as well as the police union, saying the city is “very under policed” and that there are “not enough police on the streets.”
The statistics for 2016, which showed violent crime up by 10 percent over the previous year, were rolled out on the police department website with little fanfare, though they ultimately got some print and digital media coverage.
But in previous years, the mayor took a much more prominent role in announcing these figures, joining the police chief, usually in January, to discuss the latest “end-of-year” numbers in front of a full house of reporters and television cameras.
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As of mid-February, no news conference on the statistics had been scheduled by the mayor’s office. Aides said Thursday that a “public safety initiative” will be announced by Garcetti and Beck on March 3.
But without the end-of-year crime numbers announcement, the public loses out on an opportunity to hear what city officials plan to do to reverse trends, according to police union president Craig Lally.
“You can still go on the website and get the statistics, but the question should be, ‘What is city government and what is the police department doing to control crime and reduce crime?’” Lally said.
Last year the mayor and police Chief Charlie Beck announced several strategies to combat crime, including adding domestic violence response teams and expanding the Metropolitan Division so that it served as a central post for quickly deploying officers to crime hotspots around the city.
But this year, without an open discussion on the latest crime numbers, city officials are “not out there telling us, whether that helped or hurt,” Lally said. “What is the answer now? If you tried this, is it working, number one, and number two, what’s the solution to this?”
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The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents more than 9,900 rank-and-file officers, has for years been requesting more funding from city officials to pay for more police officers in the field.
Lally described the department as having an “emergency”-level shortage of officers affecting not just divisions in South Los Angeles, but also those in the San Fernando Valley, which tends to rank lower in priority for resources.
Lally said that while he feels Garcetti is sympathetic to their concerns, he has not heard the mayor speak publicly about what he plans to do about the uptick in crime.
The police union endorsed Garcetti for mayor, but Lally said they had no other option, since there is no “credible” challenger.
Meanwhile, some elected officials have been “out in front,” like council members Mitchell Englander and Mike Bonin, who recently introduced a motion to put more cops in the field.
Other elected officials appear to also have mobilized. Councilman Bob Blumenfield recently pushed through a motion in committee that requested more information about gangs in the West Valley, pointing to a 14 percent increase in homicides to 65 in 2016, and a 33 percent spike in robberies.
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His aide, Jake Flynn, said the councilman did this because he “wants to make sure that we have the most up-to-date information about gangs in our area, and ensure that the West Valley gets its fair share of gang prevention and intervention resources.”
The city’s gang prevention program is typically operated out of the mayor’s office.
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