In a marathon meeting on June 10, 2025, Los Angeles City Council members were preoccupied with the LAPD’s role amid the ICE raids that turned their city upside down just four days before, as they questioned Police Chief Jim McDonnell in council chambers. Were the city’s officers in any way helping the Donald Trump-directed federal authorities as they abducted Los Angeles residents?
They hoped not. Toward the end of the public portion of their conversation, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson requested that McDonnell not describe federal authorities as “partners,” as the chief had done earlier in the meeting, in light of what those authorities were doing to Los Angeles residents at the moment.
If LAPD officers were helping federal officials, that would seem to contradict what the council intended when they adopted a “sanctuary” ordinance, aimed at prohibiting city officials from helping to carry out federal immigration enforcement.
That same day, a different meeting was taking place several floors up, also at City Hall, in a smaller room. The newly formed Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission was meeting for the first time, and they were getting to a late start. Mayor Karen Bass had dragged her feet on appointing her picks for the panel, which delayed the work of the commission by at least six months. Now, this panel had less than a year to come up with a set of recommendations to send to the City Council and Bass by April 2026 to consider for placement on the November 2026 ballot.
A charter reform process is not a frequent occurrence, and usually considered momentous. The last time such a charter revision process had taken place – in which the panel was tasked with doing a comprehensive review of the entirety of the charter – was 26 years ago. At this first meeting, some ideas were pitched for what the commission could take up came from a City Hall watchdog, Rob Quan, in the first public comment made to the panel.
He noted that as the commission met, the City Council was in their own chambers, stuck in a bind. The problem was that the City Council could not seem to get the police chief and LAPD officers to listen to them. He told this citizen panel that this was something they might be able to do something about.
He had included the topic of the LAPD as part of a list of big reasons for why the charter reform’s work was important at that moment.
“We've seen an endless stream of corruption scandals,” he told the commission. “In the last six months, [there have been] historic fires, budget deficits, and now, downstairs, our council members are talking about how the charter does not give them the ability to actually regulate our police department.”
Almost seven months later, the subject of the LAPD is finally being taken up, but it’s happening late in the commission process. Some say this puts efforts to reform policing, as well as change how the city approaches creating public safety, at a disadvantage, despite this being considered an obvious topic for the charter reform commission to take up.
The commission’s Personnel and Budget Committee is meeting today, Dec. 11, for a study session on police reform. The issue had been placed on the agenda after some were losing faith in the commission’s willingness to take the issue up and had organized a letter writing campaign to the commission.
Chauncee Smith, Associate Director of Reimagine Justice and Safety at Catalyst California, had called the delay in getting the topic taken up a “great injustice” during a Nov. 20 teach-in over Zoom hosted by LA Forward Institute that propelled dozens of people to send in letters urging the commission to take up police reform.
Smith was among those who had asked in recent months for policing issues to be taken up by the commission, including around including a ban on pre-textual stops, and he is concerned that with the commission already on a tight schedule, the topic could be given short shrift.
“It creates a much more cabined discourse and less of an opportunity to wrestle with some of the most important public policy issues that the city of Los Angeles is facing,” Smith said in an interview with The LA Reporter.
Smith and an organizer with Black Lives Matter, Sheila Bates, are now scheduled to present at the Dec. 11 meeting.
The groups Catalyst California, Ground Game LA, LA Forward Institute and the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles have submitted a set of recommendations that include putting into the charter prohibiting pre-textual stops, protecting protests, improving accessibility of meetings for providing public input, placing the burden of proof on the police chief for not disclosing records, and annual audits of police uses of force.
LA City Council member Tim McOsker, who is also scheduled to speak to the commission at the meeting, also submitted a letter urging the panel to “include within its scope a comprehensive review of the Los Angeles Police Department’s disciplinary system as part of your broader work on governance and accountability reform,” and he is pushing the commission to give the subject ample time for engagement.
In his letter, McOsker urged the committee to “prioritize broad community engagement.” He called for the engagement to include “police officers, community organizations, oversight bodies, civil rights advocates and residents across Los Angeles.”
McOsker was a passionate advocate for putting a charter amendment measure on the November 2024 ballot that would have asked voters to give the police chief greater power to fire officers for the most egregious misconduct cases. His fellow council members agreed and moved forward with placing the issue on the ballot. But the mayor put a stop to the effort, with a rare use of her veto powers.
Peter Bibring, who was a staff attorney at ACLU when a charter amendment measure was placed by police officers’ union on the ballot in 2017 that changed the disciplinary appeal process to include only civilian panelists, said it would seem to make sense for policing to be taken up by the Charter Reform Commission, with this “very public disagreement between council members and the mayor over the charter, over whether the charter should be amended on the charter's procedures for disciplining officers,” he said.
The charter is relevant to policing in terms of what’s laid out in it around the disciplinary process, he said, as well as in the governance structure of the LAPD.
Bibring added that with the growing conversation over the last few years around alternatives to policing, the charter reform process might be an opportunity to consider putting other types of safety approaches on equal footing with the police department.
“When the police department is enshrined in the charter, and potentially some other alternatives [to policing] are not, that's something that the city might want to address, given all the conversation about that issue, about those approaches over the past decade,” Bibring said.
The mayor appoints the five members of the Board of Police Commissioners, which is the body that has direct authority of the police chief. The mayor-appointed police commission gets to recruit and recommend a pool of candidates for police chief, with the mayor and City Council then sharing roles in picking the chief. The charter sections that lays out the governance structure are sections 570 through 576.
Council member Eunisses Hernandez recently described the awkward position that governance structure puts the City Council into, and how that has played out during the ongoing federal immigration raids. She told commissioners at a Nov. 8 committee meeting held in Highland Park that the “LAPD answers only to the mayor, the appointed Board of Police Commissioners, and let me tell you, it’s been a little bit difficult to deal with, particularly with the federal immigration raids.”
“We're trying to pass motions to have LAPD identify federal agents, have LAPD set policies around not engaging or enabling unconstitutional acts,” Hernandez said. “As a council member, I have to draft a motion to get the Board of Police Commissioners to … write the policies so the LAPD does what we all want it to do.”
Hernandez made a request to the commissioners to “look at a path for joint oversight, so that we have multiple people at the table to hold the department accountable and that the council can work directly with the police department.”
The Zoom teach-in revealed some of the bumps along the road to getting LAPD put onto the charter reform agenda. Godfrey Plata, deputy director of the progressive political group LA Forward Institute, which hosted the Nov. 20 teach-in, said he had emailed the commission’s executive director, Justin Ramirez, on Aug. 27 to ask if the topics of climate justice and police reform could be included as subjects for the commission. The response they got back, less than half an hour later from Ramirez, was that for now, “those topics don’t have a natural fit or place in the short timeframe the commission has to do the work.”
Ramirez responded to a request for comment about that email, telling The LA Reporter, that he hadn’t closed off further discussion on the issue, and had invited people to meet and discuss further. He also said that when that email was written, police reform had not yet been formally adopted as a topic by the commission, and it was taking more time because the issue had not been on the original “engagement plan” for the commission.
By the time of that email, at least one commissioner had already started asking for policing issues be taken up. In an Aug. 9 meeting, Commissioner Martin Schlageter suggested to the commission’s chair that it would be “valuable” to find someone to present on LAPD oversight and accountability so they can “understand what’s in the charter about that.” Schlageter told The LA Reporter in an interview that he had brought it up “to make sure it wasn’t ignored.”
Schlageter, who is not assigned to the Personnel and Budget Committee, described the subject of policing as “contentious.” He said he doesn’t have “preconceived notions about what the reforms should be.”
“I just know if you’re interested in the workings of the city, its efficiencies, its liabilities, its liability payouts, its hiring practices, its firing practices, you have to look at the police,” he said.
The process of getting policing on the commission’s agenda spanned over at least a couple of months. Raymond Meza, who chairs the Charter Reform Commission, has been running point on what gets taken up by the committees and had announced that the LAPD would be assigned to the Personnel and Budget Committee.
Meza then announced at an Oct. 8 meeting that he was going to talk to Mac, the chair of the Personnel and Budget Committee, about getting a meeting set up to hear the topic. But this committee did not get its first meeting scheduled until Dec. 3. At least two other committees had held several meetings by this time, including multiple study sessions on various topics and meetings to deliberate over what the committee would recommend to the full commission.
When Plata and others checked in late November to see if policing was on the Dec. 3 Personnel and Budget committee meeting agenda, they learned it had not been placed on there and there was not yet any word about when it would be taken up, Plata said.
When asked when they had planned to report back on the scheduling of the issue, Ramirez said that they “never promised a date” for getting back to people. Ramirez added that the last time policing reform was taken up, that commission was led by a “distinguished American,” Warren Christopher, who served as Secretary of State and worked under two presidential administrations. The commission was also convened during a “very turbulent time.”
“The last time, they actually tackled it in a big and important way,” Ramirez said. “Are we set up in that way? No. It’s a late-added issue. We’re going to … it’s being agendized. We don’t have the runway that Warren Christopher had.”
The chair of the Personnel and Budget committee, Andrea Mac, told The LA Reporter that she had been consistently asking for updates about when the committee would meet and when policing reform would get placed on the agenda. She added that there are dates being added for January for the committee to meet.
Baba Akili, national field coordinator for Black Lives Matter Grassroots, did not express any surprise that the issue of policing has taken this long to get onto the charter reform’s agenda, despite its importance. Policing is a political “third rail,” something that can be politically dangerous to touch, he said.
“Talking about significant, real police changes is something that we don't like, and the police certainly don't like it because they like things as they are,” Akili said. “But for the rest of us, who … have had to deal with over-policing and this over-emphasis on containing us in our community, it's not fine.”
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