Karen Bass' Team Finds Damaging Internal Fire Reports Online, Quickly Erases Evidence
Trouble continues to escalate within Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ administration.
Just days after revelations surfaced about her alleged plan to dismiss Fire Chief Kristin Crowley following Crowley’s public critique of the city's fire department funding, Bass is under fire once again. A recently unearthed memo on a city website reveals that just months ago, Crowley implored city leaders to halt budget reductions impacting fire services.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the memo, dated Nov. 18, was directed to the city’s fire commissioners—five individuals personally appointed by Bass.
In her message, Crowley warned commissioners of the critical situation and urged them to inform Bass and the city council.
“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s,” Crowley wrote.
She highlighted the sharp rise in emergency calls and emphasized that with staffing levels falling short of recommended standards, slower response times were inevitable.
“In 2022, Crowley said, 61 percent of the department’s firefighters failed to meet the 4-minute first response time, a national firefighting standard,” the Free Beacon reported.
“The National Fire Protection Association, meanwhile, recommends that cities like Los Angeles employ some 1.51 to 1.81 firefighters per 1,000 residents. But Los Angeles, Crowley wrote, only staffs 0.91 firefighters per 1,000 people.”
Now, the consequences of these warnings are being felt. More than 12,000 buildings have been reduced to ashes, 40,000 acres have burned, over 150,000 residents remain under evacuation orders, and as of Monday, 24 lives have been lost, according to The Wall Street Journal.
So how has Bass’ Los Angeles responded? By erasing the document, of course.
Despite its inclusion in multiple media reports—including a New York Times article from Thursday that originally linked to it and a KNBC segment referencing it around the 3:30 mark—the memo has since vanished. Now, anyone attempting to access it is met with a “404! We are sorry, but the page you requested was not found” error message.
When confronted about the document’s disappearance, Bass’ office avoided addressing the issue directly. Instead, they pointed the Free Beacon to an article in the Los Angeles Times detailing a $53 million firefighter pay raise negotiated through “additional salary costs.”
However, it’s widely known that Bass slashed the department’s budget by $17 million last year. While costs have surged, they haven’t been directed toward improving services but rather sustaining the existing system post-budget cuts.
While a higher salary could attract more firefighters in the future, this wasn’t the intent behind Bass’ budget—nor does it resolve the urgent concerns Crowley has raised.
When Crowley publicly voiced these concerns last week—something that would have come to light anyway given the likelihood of the memo being uncovered—Bass was reportedly furious, leading Crowley to believe she was about to be fired.
Before their meeting, Crowley was “telling everybody goodbye, because she was told the whole purpose of the meeting was to fire her,” a source revealed to the Daily Mail.
“When she was summoned into the meeting, it was with the direct purpose to fire her,” the source continued. “Whatever happened in that meeting, minds got changed.
“Either Bass realized it would be suicide to fire her, and came to her senses, or Crowley talked her out of it.”
If Bass considered firing Crowley political suicide, what does deleting a report that exposes the severity of the crisis under her leadership amount to? It’s a move that could make her the poster child for mayoral recalls, forever linking her legacy to the devastating wildfires and the destruction they’ve wrought.