Disruption and Division on Display at Mayoral Debates
The L.A. mayoral debates have shown voters what each candidate plans to do on the issues of homelessness, policing, and other matters, while also revealing the deep divides and vitriol by protestors surrounding the candidates.
Throughout the primary election cycle, news outlets and universities hosted several debates to feature a handful of candidates running for Mayor of Los Angeles in the 2022 primary election. Despite the 12 candidates on the ballot for mayor in primary, only five candidates were invited to debates at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) and California State University - Los Angeles (CSU-LA) and only three candidates were on the stage at a KCRW-hosted debate.
The first mayoral debate took place on Feb. 22 at LMU, with candidates Karen Bass, Kevin De León, Mel Wilson, and former candidates Joe Buscaino and Mike Feuer onstage. The candidates discussed their plans to address the homelessness crisis, with four out of the five naming it the number one issue impacting the city currently.
“If we can move heaven and earth to build football stadiums and basketball arenas, we can sure as hell do the same thing to get our students, our veterans, and people of color out of encampments and into housing now,” De León said.
The candidates then shared their platforms on funding the police and laid out the steps they would take to increase public safety. Candidates proposed increasing the number of police officers, from an additional 200 officers proposed by Bass to 1500 officers from Wilson.
“Ninety-nine percent of the police officers are good,” Wilson said. “They’re hardworking, they want to come home safe that night. We need to help them. We need to help ourselves.”
Several protestors disrupted the debate by shouting at the candidates, criticizing their willingness to increase police funding and their inaction on addressing homlessness. One of the protesters attempted to rush the stage before being escorted out by security.
On May 1, the CSU-LA Pat Brown Institute (PBI) of Public Affairs and ABC 7 hosted a debate between Bass, De León, Buscaino, Feuer, and businessman Rick Caruso. The candidates shared their plans to solve L.A.’s homelessness epidemic and expand public transportation, among other issues.
Absent from the debate stage were candidates Gina Viola, Alex Gruenenfelder Smith, Craig Grewe, and former candidate Ramit Varma, who all stood outside the theater doors during the debate. Viola’s support as first-choice for mayor at 2% was 1% ahead of Buscaino in an April 2022 University of California-Berkeley poll. She described the decision to not invite her as a speaker in the May 1 debate as voter suppression.
“It’s not fair to voters when they get their ballot and they open them on June 7,” Viola said. “They’re going to see 12 names on it, and they’re only going to recognize five of them.”
Before the debate, police forcibly removed professor Melina Abdullah, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles Chapter and the former chair of Pan-African Studies at CSU-LA, from the theater. An officer approached Abdullah and informed her the debate was a ticketed event. In response to him, Abdullah said that she had a right to attend the event as a professor at the university.
The group of police officers then grabbed Abdullah and dragged her from her seat to remove her from the premises. “They’re hurting me,” she said. “They’re hurting me, this is a public university.”
Later in the event, all the candidates onstage affirmed their plans to expand policing. Former candidate Buscaino attacked Viola’s abolition platform.
“What we're not going to do is one candidate that's not here, we're not going to demolish and decimate the police department,” he said.
Buscaino and Varma dropped out of the race on May 12 and May 24 respectively, both endorsing Caruso, while Feuer dropped out on May 17 and throwing his support behind Bass.
On May 20, KCRW hosted a discussion focusing solely on homelessness at the Annenberg Performance Studio on the Santa Monica College (SMC) Center of Media and Design campus. Karen Bass, Kevin De León and Gina Viola were the only candidates in attendance, with LA Times columnist and host Gustavo Yano mentioning that Caruso was invited several times, but declined to attend. There was a tight police presence, with no protestors outside.
The discussion began with a yes or no question asking if housing is a human right, with all three candidates agreeing that it was. Mutual agreement between candidates deviated when the discussion touched upon the use of tiny homes as transitional housing in De León’s City Council District 14 and in other districts. “For a human being who’s been living on the streets every single day for years if not for decades, it’s a godsend,” De León said.
Viola characterized the tiny homes as “a prison cell.” “I know people who’ve been in them for a year in CD15. I know people who have been in them for a year,” she said, remarking on councilmember Buscaino’s district. “They’ve been sexually assulted there, they’ve had their belongings trashed, the sheds flood.”
Viola then pointed out that the city budget under Mayor Garcetti for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) increased 52 percent in the last 10 years. “That's all that the city has prioritized over housing, over health care, over things that truly do keep us well and keep us safe,” she said. “There's nothing in this budget that says housing is a human right. So if we're not starting there, we'll just keep spending.”
Karen Bass talked about uniting fronts with all governments working together to find solutions to different aspects of homelessness. She said while the goal is permanent supportive housing, issues leading to homelessness such as substance abuse, mental illness, and other factors need to be considered in the response as well.
“In this atmosphere right now, people are lumping the unhoused together as a monolith, as people who are service resistant, don't want to be inside. We have to break that mentality.” Bass said. She urged the need for the county and the city to unite and work together on the issue rather than being disjointed in its approach.
According to a May 2022 poll by FM3 Research of likely primary voters, frontrunners Caruso and Bass are in a dead heat, polling at 37% and 35% respectively. De León polls at 6%, and other candidates poll at a combined 6% as well.
