tension

Months of tension between Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and members of the City Council burst into public view Friday when the council rebuffed the mayor’s request to significantly increase police hiring.

The face-off between the mayor and some council members has been brewing since the council voted in May as part of the city budget to reduce LAPD hiring to 240 officers this year — half of the 480 officers requested by Bass — in order to close a $1-billion budget shortfall and prevent layoffs of other city workers.

Then, when Bass signed the budget, she mentioned she had reached an agreement with Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson to find additional money to restore police hiring. The duo said they would find the money within 90 days.

The 90 days came and went. Then another 90 came and went. All the while, the LAPD continued hiring.

As of this month, nearly halfway through the fiscal year, the LAPD has already brought on all 240 new hires accounted for in the budget. To continue hiring officers, the City Council would need to allocate more money.

Against that backdrop, Bass sent a letter to the council Wednesday, calling on them to fund up to 410 new hires over this fiscal year, which ends in July. Some council members balked, saying they feared the hiring would cause a continuing deficit, since the new police officers will be on the city payroll for decades to come.

Bass’ push was backed by Councilmember John Lee, who called on his colleagues to fund the 410 hires by peeling $4.4 million away from other parts of the city budget, including the Human Resources Benefits Fund, the Police Health and Welfare Fund and the Innovation Fund.

The cost of the extra hires would jump to $24 million next year, and it was not clear how the city would fund their salaries in coming years.

Karen Bass at a farmers market on Nov. 4, 2022.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

“Here we are, considering an unvetted funding proposal none of us saw until this morning,” said Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who chairs the council’s Budget and Finance Committee.

Yaroslavsky has said she would support hiring the 410 new officers if funding is available. She said the Budget Committee has repeatedly reached out to the mayor and the council president to find funding solutions but did not receive a response until this week, right before the council goes on recess for the holidays.

Yaroslavsky introduced her own proposal Friday to hire one additional class of 40 police recruits in January for $1.7 million — bringing the number of police hires up to 280 this fiscal year. She also requested that the LAPD and the city administrative officer return in January with ways to pay for more police hiring that does not come from one-time sources.

The council passed Yaroslavsky’s plan in an 11 to 4 vote.

Harris-Dawson, who supported the mayor’s goal of 410 officers, said that tensions over police hiring date back a half century. He cited a 2003 dispute between then-Mayor James Hahn and then-Council President Alex Padilla, with the council voting to delay police hiring due to the city’s financial issues.

“What we’re going through today is consistent with how the city of L.A. runs,” he said.

Bass had hoped to keep the department from shrinking significantly this year. The LAPD is anticipating losing 552 officers to attrition. If no more officers are hired beyond the 240 already brought on, the department could fall to 8,386 officers, the lowest number since 1995.

“Stopping the hiring of new police officers will have drastic and lasting consequences for our city,” Bass wrote in her letter to the City Council.

The mayor cited the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics as reasons the city needs to grow its police force.

“We cannot knowingly and willingly increase the demands on our officers while reducing their workforce to the lowest levels in more than 20 years,” she said.

The city’s police union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, supported Bass’ efforts to fund the 410 officers.

“Angelenos need this Council to understand that neighborhoods are clamoring for more police, not less, and it is time to end the political posturing and put their money where their mouths are and grow the force,” the union said in a statement Friday.

Times staff writers David Zahniser and Sandra McDonald contributed to this report.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday linked the seizure of an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela to the Trump administration’s counterdrug efforts in Latin America as tensions escalate with the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

Noem’s assertion, which came during her testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee, provided the Republican administration’s most thorough explanation so far of why it took control of the vessel on Wednesday. Incredibly unusual, the use of U.S. forces to seize a merchant ship was a sharp escalation in the administration’s pressure campaign on Maduro, who has been charged with narcoterrorism in the United States.

Trump officials added to it Thursday by imposing sanctions on three of Maduro’s nephews. The Venezuelan leader discussed the rising tensions with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday. The Kremlin said in a statement that Putin reaffirmed his support for Maduro’s policy of “protecting national interests and sovereignty in the face of growing external pressure.”

Asked to delineate the U.S. Coast Guard’s role in the tanker seizure, Noem called it “a successful operation directed by the president to ensure that we’re pushing back on a regime that is systematically covering and flooding our country with deadly drugs and killing our next generation of Americans.”

Noem went on to lay out the ”lethal doses of cocaine” she said had been kept from entering the U.S. as a result.

Asked Thursday whether U.S. operations in the region were about drugs or oil, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also gave a bifurcated answer, saying the administration was “focused on doing many things in the Western Hemisphere.” She noted that such seizures could continue, arguing that the commodities being transported were used to fund the illegal drug trade.

“We’re not going to stand by and watch sanctioned vessels sail the seas with black market oil, the proceeds of which will fuel narcoterrorism of rogue and illegitimate regimes around the world,” she said.

The Justice Department had obtained a warrant for the vessel because it had been known for “carrying black market, sanctioned oil,” Leavitt said, adding that “the United States does intend to get the oil” that was onboard the tanker.

Trump told reporters a day earlier at the White House that the tanker “was seized for a very good reason.” Asked what would happen to the oil aboard the tanker, Trump said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.”

The U.S. has built up the largest military presence in the region in decades and launched a series of deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, a campaign that is facing growing scrutiny from Congress.

Trump, who has said land attacks are coming soon but has not offered more details, has broadly justified the moves as necessary to stem the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the U.S.

Venezuela’s government said in a statement that the tanker seizure “constitutes a blatant theft and an act of international piracy.” Maduro has insisted the real purpose of the U.S. military operations is to force him from office.

Kinnard writes for the Associated Press.