In the summer of 1994, Tony Zepeda and dozens of other teenagers marched through the streets of Los Angeles dressed in fake prison uniforms and toting balls and chains.
California had just passed its punitive Three Strikes law, which mandated 25 years to life in prison for a third felony conviction of any kind.
Zepeda was 18. His brothers were incarcerated. Across the US, with crime and murders at record levels, powerful Democratic politicians were competing to show how tough they were willing to be on Black and Latino boys.
But in South Central Los Angeles, Zepeda’s mentor, Karen Bass, spent much of 1994 teaching Black and Latino teenagers how to organize against the laws being passed to put them in prison.
To the young people, Bass, a physician assistant who had become a community activist, was a maternal figure, ready with a hug, making sure they had enough to eat, sometimes holding her meetings with them in her backyard, Zepeda recalled. In her political comments, she did not mince words.
California’s new three strikes law was racist, Bass told Los Angeles Times reporters at the 1994 protest. “We know who is going to jail. It isn’t the white middle-class male. Look at the statistics.
“It isn’t that we oppose sanctions against crime,” Bass said. “The problem is the hysteria right now of passing a massive social policy because of a couple murders.”
Nearly 30 years later, after a decade representing California in Congress, Bass is campaigning to become the next mayor of Los Angeles. Part of the reason she wants to return to local office, she says, is because the city’s political climate reminds her of the punitive 1990s, with voters expressing frustration and anger about crime, increases in violence, and a homelessness crisis that has left at least 41,000 people unhoused.
Bass is running as a progressive who would make history as Los Angeles’ first Black female mayor. Her main rival in the city’s non-partisan 7 June mayoral primary is Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer who has expressed willingness to arrest homeless people in order to stop them from living on the street, and who wants to roll back some criminal justice reforms meant to reduce mass incarceration.
But Bass, once an outsider challenging the orthodoxy on public safety, is also facing pressure from the left for vowing to increase the number of city police officers and put an end to people sleeping in parks or on the street.
A local activist rises to political power
Bass was raised in Los Angeles, in the same area she now represents in Congress. Her father, who worked for the post office, had grown up in the south and was “very politically conscious”, said the Rev Norman Johnson, Bass’s pastor at the First New Christian Fellowship Baptist church. “She grew up in that environment of activism, political talk at the table, the need for people to be involved.
In 1990, as the crack cocaine epidemic ravaged South Los Angeles, Bass founded a non-profit to advocate for a public health approach to addiction and crime. South Los Angeles was in the process of changing from a majority-Black to a majority-Latino area, a shift that came with racial tensions.
The Community Coalition was a multiracial group of activists focused on immediate neighborhood issues, from organizing to stop liquor stores that had been destroyed during the 1992 riots from being rebuilt, to fighting against a law that barred undocumented immigrants from using public services, to shaming local officials into funding millions of dollars of repairs to the disgusting bathrooms in local public schools.
“Race relations is fashioned through work,” she said in 2001. “If there’s a drug house on your block, Black and brown people care about it the same.”
It was not until 2004, when she was 51, that Bass ran for office, prodded by some of her Latino allies in organized labor and city politics. Once elected to California’s state assembly, she rose quickly, becoming the first African American woman to serve as the speaker of any state legislature in 2008, and then winning a seat representing Los Angeles in Congress in 2010.
She developed a reputation as progressive who is good at negotiating with Republicans: the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, a Trump ally, called her his “favorite Democrat.” One of her signature achievements as a congresswoman, the Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote, was getting a child welfare reform bill passed during the Trump administration, in part by sacrificing her personal credit and allowing the bill to have a lead Republican author.
Bass also played a leading role in crafting congressional Democrats’ police reform legislation, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which included a variety of measures to restrict excessive force and to make it easier to hold officers accountable for misconduct. It passed the Democratic-controlled House but died in the Senate, despite attempts to make compromises with Republicans.
And in 2020, she was publicly vetted as a potential progressive vice-presidential pick for Joe Biden.
Divisive issues dominate a heated race
To win the mayor’s seat in LA, Bass will have to mobilise a diverse coalition of Angelenos, said Fernando Guerra, a political scientist who studies Los Angeles’ electoral dynamics.
Caruso’s record-breaking political spending – the billionaire has invested at least $34m in his campaign – changed the race, Guerra said, but even with ads flooding radio and TV stations, the number of Caruso voters is finite. Bass needs to mobilize the people who do not always vote regularly, including Latino voters, younger voters, very progressive voters and low-income voters. “If turnout gets over 50%, Karen Bass will win,” Guerra said.
But that challenge is not an easy one, particularly in a mayoral election, Guerra said. Bass is known for pushing back against a “celebrity” style of leadership at the Community Coalition and, as a congresswoman, she did not become a household name.
In addition, despite her organising credentials, progressive voters have expressed reservations about her stances on policing and homelessness. Bass has criticised “lopsided” local budget priorities that pour money into law enforcement while not investing in social services that might prevent crises in the first place. But she has been consistent in her rejection of “defunding the police”, calling it “probably one of the worst slogans ever” in June 2020.
“I’m on record – radio, TV, print, hundreds of times – saying that I don’t support Defund the Police,” Bass told Los Angeles Magazine this February. “It’s like I can’t fully be trusted unless I recite it several times a day.”
With crime high on the campaign agenda – Los Angeles has not escaped a nationwide trend of rising homicide rates, and has seen a wave of sensational robberies in recent months – Bass has pledged to slightly increase staffing of the Los Angeles police department to its currently authorized size of 9,700 officers, as well as hiring civilians to do desk work so that 250 more officers can be out moved on the street. (Caruso, by contrast, has pledged to hire an additional 1,500 officers.)
Bass said she receives an email alert from the Los Angeles police department every time there is a shooting, and that she personally reads every one, looking for signs of trends in the details: are there more gang-involved shootings? More domestic violence?
Los Angeles saw more than 1,000 homicides a year in the early 1990s. Last year, with violence rising, the city lost nearly 400 people. But one of the things that troubles Bass most is the police department’s 55% rate of solving murders. “People worry about signals sent to people who commit crimes. That is open season. You’ve got a 50-50 chance of getting caught.” She’s pledged to increase LAPD resources specifically for officers tasked with solving homicides.
“I’m always looking for ways of addressing crime strategically and surgically, so you don’t wind up criminalizing an entire neighborhood,” she said.
Still, her ongoing opposition to “Defund the Police” has not been enough to win her allies among Los Angeles law enforcement. A local police union, one she worked closely with while creating 2020’s major police reform bill, has already spent $2m to oppose her candidacy with ads accusing her of corruption.
And her position has drawn pushback from some of her longtime allies on LA’s left. Activists against police violence argue that pouring any more tax dollars into a racist bureaucracy is unlikely to make Angelenos safer. Melina Abdullah and Patrisse Cullors, both prominent Black Lives Matter organizers in Los Angeles, argued in an essay in February that Bass’s pledge to increase police resources “harkens to a 1994-crime-bill-style pro-police system that puts targets on the backs of Black people.
“No one in South Central feels safer when a police cruiser rolls through at drive-by speed,” they wrote. “No one is relieved when a police chopper flies overhead.”
Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, who has known Bass for decades and considers her a friend, said local activists had not expected Bass to run for mayor on a platform of slashing the city’s police budget, a position “that could cost her an election”.
But they had hoped that Bass would express “a willingness to question” how much public money should go to the LAPD, and whether “the city needs to continue to spend more than half of general fund on police”.
As Bass has risen in national politics, she has become more of a “mainstream pragmatist”, Abdullah said. That shift has been disappointing for her progressive allies. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, for instance, was “stripped of any really meaningful reform, and still didn’t pass”.
Justice LA, a coalition of activist groups, accused Bass of pandering to media coverage of high-profile crimes, rather than addressing the underlying realities: “Bass’s strategy doubles-down on the hysteria of a series of false narratives about crime in Los Angeles,” they wrote in response to her plan.
In an interview with the Guardian, Bass pushed back on the idea that responding to voters’ fears of crime was “hysteria”, or a betrayal of her progressive track record.
“There is an increase in crime, and it’s real, and there’s a lot of people who don’t feel safe, and I do not believe that should be dismissed,” Bass said. “I also don’t think it’s appropriate to say, ‘Well, crime is not as bad as the 90s, so we don’t need to be worried about it.’ If you are the victim of a crime, you don’t care what the data shows. You were the victim, and that should be respected.
“The type of progressive I am, I believe that you respond to the people,” she added, “If people from all walks of life are telling you they’re having a problem and you say, ‘No, you’re not,’ that betrays my values as a community organizer.”
‘A lot of people have lost empathy’
Another flashpoint is LA’s growing humanitarian crisis of homelessness, with some Angelenos demanding that unhoused people be moved away from their homes and businesses, and others horrified as police officers forcefully evict people from public spaces and sometimes trash their few belongings.
Like most mayoral candidates, Bass has pledged to eliminate street encampments of unhoused people.
Unlike Caruso, she has said she would not “use the police department to arrest people who are in encampments” and has talked about using street outreach workers, not cops. But speaking after Caruso in one debate, when he talked about how many chances he would give an unhoused person before forcing them to accept a shelter bed, her rhetoric echoed his: “If somebody is profoundly mentally ill, they need support,” she said. “So you can give them one time, you can give them two times, three times. But if they’re hearing voices because they’re mentally ill, they’re not going to respond to that. And I certainly don’t think that you arrest them. I do think police might need to be in the background, in case it’s a dangerous situation.”
Unhoused people dealing with serious mental illness “need healthcare as opposed to a jail cell”, she told the Guardian later.
Bass acknowledges that the reason many unhoused people live in encampments on streets and in parks is because they feel safer there than in city-run homeless shelters. Part of the answer, she said, needs to be reinventing and redesigning what shelters look like, since the current shelter model is not workable in a coronavirus pandemic that shows no sign of ending.
But Bass also said it was clear that, with unhoused people living in neighborhoods across Los Angeles, “there’s a lot of people who have lost empathy” and whose attitude is “I’m done. I don’t want to hear this any more. Just get them away from me.”
Frustrated with Bass’s approach to homelessness, Gina Viola, a local business owner and activist, launched her own long-shot mayoral bid, running on a platform of gradually reducing the size of the LAPD and investing in alternative safety measures. While a late-April poll showed her support in the single digits, she was performing as well as more established politicians, including the city attorney and a city council member. Viola has won endorsements from most prominent Black Lives Matter organizers in the city, including Abdullah.
Bass, who once organized protests, is now the target of them, as local activists disrupted an early mayoral debate, shouting that all of the major mayoral candidates, including Bass, are taking harmful positions in their pledges to clear Los Angeles of street encampments and fight crime.
“Don’t be a Karen, Karen,” one activist called at her during one early debate, comparing the Black congresswoman to white women who call the police on Black people for simply living their lives in public.
Bass responded to the disruption of the mayor debate by comparing the shouting leftist protesters to her experience during the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol.
At another debate in May, Bass and other candidates watched as police at Cal State Los Angeles physically carried out Abdullah, a professor at the university and someone Bass has also referred to as a friend, for being in the debate audience without a ticket. Adbullah told the Guardian she cried out to the candidates by name for help, including Bass. In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, Bass said that she “couldn’t see or hear who it was”.
‘You better not sell out’
In 1994, the idea that Karen Bass might become a politician “was a joke”, Zepeda said. They teased her about it: “‘You’re never going to run for office.’ ‘You better not sell out.’”
Did he ever expect her to see her running for mayor? “Hell to the no.”
But as Bass’s political power has grown, Zepeda said, her cellphone number has stayed the same, and so has her willingness to take phone calls from former youth organizers who want to ask her advice or share one of their small victories. When he was in DC, Zepeda said, he would periodically show up outside at Bass’s congressional office and text her, “Hey mom, I’m downstairs.” (“Yes, that is absolutely right,” Bass said.)
Zepeda, now 45, has spent years working for Los Angeles organizations and city offices that focus on gang intervention, and homelessness, issues at the center of the mayoral race. Whatever the comparisons between Los Angeles in the 1990s and today, Zepeda says, he feels a lot has changed, including his own perspective on policing.
“Have I lost the trauma of the policing I experienced as a teenager? No. Does it get triggered? Yes,” he said.
At the same time, his work with the mayor’s office of gang reduction and youth development “humanized some of the good officers”, Zepeda said. He believes that officers with a more progressive approach have gained influence within the department since the 1990s, and that the trainings officers have had to go through in recent decades changed how they operate in communities. He said he supports spending “a substantial amount of money” on continuing to train officers, and said he wondered if cutting the police budget would end up in reductions of funding for police-department adjacent prevention programs and victims’ compensation.
Today, activists are still fighting for a juvenile exception to the Three Strikes law, the same policy battle Zepeda and his fellow youth organizers started fighting in 1994. But in the 1990s, “There was a sense of hopelessness, and a void of a voice, of people that looked like us that could really bring about change,” he said. The only prominent Los Angeles politician of color at the time was Tom Bradley, a Black former police officer. Now, Zepeda says, he and his kids have Bass.
