Is liberal Los Angeles ready for a billionaire mayor?
In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, wealthy Republican businessman Richard Riordan was elected as the city’s mayor after claiming he was the only candidate “tough enough to turn LA around”.
With gang-related crime sending homicides to an all-time high of almost 2,000 a year, Riordan’s promises to put thousands of new police officers on the streets resonated with a fearful public.
Thirty years on, Angelinos are on edge again — and another wealthy businessman is running for mayor with a pledge to restore order to a city plagued by rising homicides and widespread homelessness.
Rick Caruso, a billionaire property developer who once served as the city’s police commissioner, shook up this year’s mayoral race by entering the contest a day before last week’s deadline. “I know that we can end homelessness, crime and corruption,” he said in a Twitter message. “But the politicians can’t.”
Caruso, a longtime Republican who defected to the Democratic party this year, has been outspoken in his opposition to progressive police reforms that have taken hold in California.
He favours a return to the “broken windows” law enforcement methods championed by William Bratton, the former New York police chief whom he recruited to take over the LA force, and ex-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
He enters the LA race as rising crime in big US cities has forced Democrats to balance calls for a fairer criminal justice system with citizens’ concerns about safety. New York elected Eric Adams, a former police captain, as its mayor last year, while San Francisco’s London Breed pledged to be “more aggressive” in fighting crime.
Another question is whether liberal LA wants a billionaire as its mayor. Caruso’s $4.3bn fortune, built on a property portfolio that includes his signature high-end outdoor malls, will make him a serious contender in the race, experts say. But the electorate that Caruso will face in November’s poll is far different than the one that elected Riordan, when pro-business Republicans dominated California.
“We’re not in that era any more,” said Sonja Diaz, founding director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, citing demographic changes, with Los Angeles becoming more Latino, less white and more Democratic.
“Today this is a majority Latino city that has been clear about what policies it prefers,” Diaz said. “Rhetoric by candidates or moneyed interests saying we need to go back to ‘broken windows’ policing is incredible. Broken windows made LA the carceral capital of the country.”
In the 1990s, violent crime was heavily concentrated in LA’s poorer areas where gang wars were being fought. But in the past two years, homicides and burglaries have occurred across the city, even in its wealthiest quarters. Los Angeles Magazine captured the spirit of the moment when it ran a cover story this month with the headline: “Are you safe?”
Last year there were 397 homicides in LA, the most since 2006 but a far cry from the 1990s peaks. Among them was the shooting death of socialite Jacqueline Avant during a break-in at her Beverly Hills home, shocking the city’s establishment and prompting some Hollywood Democrats to whisper that they hoped Caruso would run. “Violent crime has gone up, homicide rates have gone up,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a longtime city official. “It’s much lower than it was 20 years ago, but crime is more ubiquitous now. It’s shown up throughout the city.”
The effectiveness of Caruso’s law-and-order message may be blunted by the fact that other candidates have staked out similar territory. Frontrunner Karen Bass, who served as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and was considered by President Joe Biden for vice-president, said this month that she would put hundreds more police on the streets — adding that previous attempts to “arrest our way out of a crime crisis” had failed. “Karen Bass is a progressive person and is very upfront about public safety being a priority,” Yaroslavsky said. “She takes the position that public safety and constitutional policing are not mutually exclusive. Some progressives believe we don’t need a police department but those are a small number of people.” Homeless people in LA. Outgoing mayor Eric Garcetti endorsed a $1.2bn plan to build 10,000 affordable housing units but the rollout has been sluggish.
Caruso’s message may overlap more directly with that of Joe Buscaino, a former police officer serving on the city council who has called for 1,300 additional officers. Other contenders include councilman Kevin de León, the most prominent Latino on the ballot, and Mike Feuer, the city attorney who emphasises a crackdown on gun violence. While calling for more officers may be more controversial now than before the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a policeman, it is a policy that is easily understood.
Much more difficult to articulate is a solution to the city’s disturbingly high homeless population — the issue that polls say Angelinos are most concerned about. In 2020, 66,000 people in the county were homeless; last year’s count was cancelled. Like crime, homelessness has spread across the city, leaving citizens feeling helpless and unsettled. “For many years the homeless were confined to Skid Row or Hollywood,” Yaroslavsky said. “Now they’re in the Pacific Palisades and other affluent neighbourhoods. Everywhere you go you see homeless encampments.”
Eric Garcetti, the outgoing mayor who is standing down after two terms, claimed “full responsibility” for the response to the crisis, but homelessness swelled during his tenure. Garcetti endorsed a $1.2bn plan to build 10,000 affordable housing units but the rollout has been slow and the numbers inadequate to the challenge.
As the race to replace Garcetti heats up, the question is whether LA is anxious enough to elect a law-and-order candidate — perhaps one who is extremely wealthy.
“There may be an opportunity for a tough-on-crime, crack-down-on-homelessness message,” said Dan Schnur, a University of Southern California professor who teaches politics and communication. “But it will be a greater challenge today than it was for Riordan when he ran.
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