The Los Angeles City Council rejected former Fire Chief Kristin Crowley’s bid to get her job back leading one of the nation’s largest fire departments, over fierce objections from the firefighters’ union.
The council voted 13 to 2 against Crowley’s reinstatement Tuesday, handing embattled Mayor Karen Bass a much-needed political victory and show of support from the city’s legislative branch. Bass was in Ghana when the Palisades fire broke out, leaving Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson as acting mayor, and delivered a choppy performance in the days after she returned.
Crowley used Tuesday’s hearing to push back publicly, for the first time, against the arguments that Bass offered for terminating her. Seated before the council, she also argued that she was facing retaliation for publicly highlighting a lack of resources at her department.
“The truth is that the fire chief should not be prevented from, or punished for, speaking openly and honestly about the needs and capabilities of the LAFD, or for doing her best to protect our firefighters and our communities,” she told the council.
Councilmember Imelda Padilla, who represents the central San Fernando Valley, spoke in favor of the firing, criticizing Crowley for her decision to discuss the fire department’s budget with the news media while the Palisades fire was still raging.
“The chief chose the wrong time and wrong place to raise an issue,” she said.
Crowley’s bid for reinstatement was almost certain to fail, given the fact that she needed 10 votes, or a two-thirds majority. The only votes in support of her reinstatement came from Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez and Traci Park, both of whom have been Crowley supporters.
Nevertheless, Tuesday’s proceedings created a headache for Bass, who ousted Crowley as chief nearly two weeks ago. Firefighters repeatedly aired complaints that the fire department has for gone too long with insufficient funds.
Chuong Ho, who serves on the board of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112, urged council members to reinstate Crowley, saying she was fired for “telling the truth” about the fire department’s lack of resources.
“The men and women of our great fire department support Chief Crowley because she stood up, she spoke out, and she had our backs,” he said. “I’ve never seen a fire chief in my career consistently speak out about the constant understaffing and lack of funding for our fire department.”
Crowley’s appeal, which she submitted Thursday, only added to the sense of volatility that has engulfed City Hall since the fire erupted on Jan. 7, destroying thousands of homes and killing 12 people. For more than a week, Crowley’s backers have accused Bass of scapegoating the fire chief, using her termination to deflect blame.
Bass supporters, in turn, have accused Crowley of negligence and insubordination, calling her push for reinstatement part of a much larger political attack on Bass, the city’s first Black female mayor.
“At this time of crisis, as we’re trying to turn the corner, we are seeing divisive political movements … do a public lynching of the first African American mayor of Los Angeles,” said Sylvia Castillo, who worked for Bass while the mayor was in Congress, according her LinkedIn page.
Castillo, appearing before the council, said Bass had the authority to remove a chief for “dereliction of duty.” Another Bass supporter said the push to bring back Crowley was “rooted in anti-Blackness.”
Benjamin Torres, president and chief executive of the South L.A.-based group CD Tech, called the proceedings a “political move to cut off Black leadership.”
“This would not be done if [Bass] was a white male of privilege,” he told the council.
Bass fired Crowley on Feb. 21, citing two major reasons. She said the chief had failed to pre-deploy as many as 1,000 firefighters on the morning the blaze exploded in size amid hurricane-force Santa Ana winds. She also accused Crowley of refused to participate in an after-action report after being asked to do so.
Bass began criticizing Crowley publicly in the days leading up to her ouster, accusing the former chief of failing to warn her of the potential for danger ahead of the fires.
Crowley’s defenders, in turn, accused Bass of attempting to shift blame, well before the completion of after-action reports that would have assessed the city’s preparation for, and response to, the Palisades fire. They said the mayor’s own staff had been receiving increasingly dire warnings about the coming winds and the heightened wildfire conditions from the city’s Emergency Management Department, which tracks dangerous weather conditions.
Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley, said Crowley had been unfairly scapegoated by a mayor desperate for a reset on her own administration after the wildfire. She said she did not disagree with arguments that Bass had the authority to fire Crowley.
But she countered that the City Council, under the powers provided by the City Charter, also has its own power to overturn such actions with 10 votes.
“We also have a role, and so we’re exercising that role,” she told her colleagues. “And I’m not going to apologize for doing my job.”
Tensions between Crowley and Bass emerged publicly in the first week of the Palisades fire. On Jan. 10, Crowley went on multiple television stations to decry what she described as a lack of adequate funding for her agency.
In one interview, she said the city had failed her and her department. In another, she drew a link between cuts to her department and the city’s handling of the fire.
The firefighters union praised Crowley as a truth teller — someone with the courage to call out decades of underinvestment in their agency. Bass responded by summoning Crowley to a meeting that went so long that the mayor missed her own press conference to update the public on the wildfires.
Although many had expected that Crowley would be fired, Bass appeared with the fire chief the following morning and said the two were working together.
That messaging changed abruptly two weeks ago, when Bass began criticizing Crowley for failing to warn her of the potential for extreme fire conditions.
“Chief Crowley had the guts and the courage to speak out, to make sure her troops on the ground have what they need to do their jobs,” said Freddy Escobar, president of the firefighter union. “For the first time, the public and this City Council started paying attention. But her honesty cost her her job.”
The City Charter gives the mayor the power to remove most department heads, including the fire chief, without council approval. The charter also gives Crowley the right to appeal the decision to the council.
Tuesday’s proceedings appear to be virtually unprecedented in modern city history, with the closest parallel being Bernard C. Parks’ very public bid for a second term as police chief in 2002. That year, appointees of Mayor James Hahn on the Board of Police Commissioners declined to renew Parks for a second five-year term.
The City Council declined to overturn the commission’s decision, during a debate that inflamed racial divisions in the city. The council’s three Black members sided with Parks, the department’s second Black chief, and against Hahn, who was politically wounded by the battle. Parks won a seat on the council the following year, while Hahn lost reelection in 2005.
Councilmember Tim McOsker, who was Hahn’s chief of staff when Parks battled for a second term, said he didn’t want to force two people who don’t get along — Bass and Crowley — to work together. He said he had lived through that and “it can be disastrous.”
“I’m going to put a functional city above what might be more politically expedient for me,” McOsker said.
Councilmember Traci Park, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, supported the move to reinstate Crowley, saying neither she nor her colleagues have received any of the after-action reports that would show who was to blame for an array of failures — a lack of firefighters, a lack of water in fire hydrants and a lack of an orderly evacuations.
Getting those answers “might very well mean firing everyone who has culpability across multiple departments, and I have no problem with that,” Park said. But I wouldn’t do it without a well-informed record and actual evidence to support that decision. And I don’t have it today.”