‘Handwriting on the wall’: L.A. Mayor Bass urges hiring of more than 400 police officers

(The Center Square) – Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sent a letter this week to city council members, urging them to pass a budget that would allow the Los Angeles Police Department to hire 410 new officers.

In the Dec. 10 letter, Bass implored the council to approve $4.4 million in funding, without which the police department will no longer be able to hire incoming recruits.

“It will mean no new cadets in the police academy in January of 2026,” Bass wrote in the letter. “It will mean increasing overtime hours and costs as fewer officers will have greater workloads. It will mean that we strain officers’ health with longer shifts and more responsibility.”

Bass and the president of the Los Angeles City Council, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, did not respond to The Center Square for comment this week. The Los Angeles Police Department deferred questions to the city council and mayor’s office on Thursday and did not return calls and emails from The Center Square on Friday.

In her letter, Bass noted the nation’s second-largest city can’t have a police force that staffs at the same levels as 1995. She also noted Los Angeles doesn’t have enough police officers per 1,000 residents the way other large cities throughout the country do. The demands of the police department with the upcoming 2028 Olympics and 2026 FIFA World Cup, she wrote, would strain the LAPD.

“Mayor Bass sees the handwriting on the wall,” Assemblymember Tom Lackey, R-Palmdale and a member of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, told The Center Square on Friday. “We’ve got some worldwide, high-profile events coming with the World Cup and the Olympics coming. They would be one of the most understaffed police departments in the country per capita.”

Some groups outside of the electorate of the city support the funding package, telling The Center Square on Friday that a robust police presence is crucial in keeping the city safe.

“Without this very paltry amount of money in the scheme of things, there would be no hiring for a period of time,” Tom Saggau, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Protective League, a police union in Los Angeles, told The Center Square on Friday. “That would have devastating impacts to the safety of not just our police officers who need backup, but also the residents of Los Angeles.”

However, a local anti-police group, Stop LAPD Spying, told The Center Square on Friday that the organization did not support the $4.4 million package deal.

“We absolutely reject it,” organizer Hamid Khan said. “They [the LAPD] are constantly bleeding the city of its resources. This goes to show the completely sick priorities in that it is more about policing the youth, criminalizing unhoused people and giving more money to the LAPD rather than investing in communities and their health and wellness.”

Another group, the Anti-Police Terror Project, did not respond to The Center Square on Friday.

The National Police Association, a nationwide industry group for local law enforcement, was unreachable on Thursday. Another pro-police group, the Los Angeles County Professional Peace Officers Association, did not respond to The Center Square on Friday.

Hilda Solis, the chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, also did not return calls.

This story originally appeared in The Center Square.