When the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission finally took up proposals to increase accountability at the Los Angeles Police Department, it drew passionate participation from not only members of the public, but several City Council members. One of those council members, Eunisses Hernandez, characterized reforming the LAPD as one of the charter panel’s central tasks.
“Los Angeles cannot have real public safety, cannot protect immigrants, cannot steward public dollars responsibly, cannot build public trust and cannot call itself a modern Democratic city, until the charter is reformed to create real, meaningful oversight of the LAPD,” Hernandez told commissioners at a committee meeting last December.
Hernandez pointed to “recent events” as making “the need for stronger oversight more urgent than ever.” Those include the “aggressive raids” ICE has conducted in her district’s communities, including in Highland Park, Cypress Park and Glassell Park.
“Families are terrified. Businesses are closing. Student attendance is down because they are afraid to leave home. Angelenos are skipping work and falling behind on rent,” she said. “Residents ask me every, single day, ‘Who is protecting us?’ because they do not feel safe and they do not trust that the city of Los Angeles is able to protect them when federal agents enter their neighborhoods.”
“These are reasonable questions,” Hernandez said. “But under the current charter, the council has no power to require LAPD to provide clear answers or to adopt policies that would protect immigrant communities,” Hernandez said.
She also pointed to provisions in the charter that make it “incredibly difficult and in some cases nearly impossible to discipline or fire officers who repeatedly violate policy or endanger the public.”
She and other council members have pointed to the existing Board of Rights process, which she said “works almost like a protective shield,” tying the police chief’s hands in removing “officers with long, documented histories of harm.”
And that inability to fire problem officers has been blamed for the hundreds of millions of dollars in liability costs each year for the city, which then eats up funding that could go to other needs. “That means less money for housing, street lights, immigration defense, after-school programs, sanitation, crossing guards, sidewalk repair,” Hernandez said.
Police reform efforts, Hernandez told the commissioners, date back to when Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley called together an independent commission, which became known as the Warren Christopher Commission, a month after the LAPD beating of Rodney King. That commission’s work – which included leading to an Office of the Inspector General getting set up to audit and investigate LAPD misconduct – was an “important milestone.”
“But nearly 30 years later, it's clear those changes did not deliver the transparency, independence or accountability Angelenos expect today,” Hernandez said.
More than a month after Hernandez spoke, another key subcommittee of the Charter Reform Commission met Saturday, Jan. 31, at Occidental College, where they voted to punt on substantive police accountability reforms, disposing of proposed changes to increase accountability and oversight of the LAPD.
The six-person “ad hoc” panel is tasked with substantially narrowing down the work before the Charter Reform Commission. The panel voted 4-2 to get rid of the reforms the panel had been considering for increasing police accountability. Instead, the commission sent along a motion for a policy recommendation that had not been previously discussed, and called for a new commission to be set up, one that would resemble the Christopher Commission to take up the policing-related reforms instead.
The proposals were part of a motion presented by Commissioner Ted Stein, the chair of the ad hoc committee, and Commissioner Raymond Meza, who chairs the full commission. Stein said he presented the motion because he did not feel the members of their commission were “equipped” to take up the issue of policing. Another commissioner, Diego Andrades, who also voted to get rid of the set of proposals that had been before the committee, described policing as a “really complex issue” and said that his main concern was that their panel did not have subpoena power to call in LAPD officers, and that they don’t have a “substantial budget.”
But Commissioner Melinda Murray, who cast one of the votes against the motion to toss out the police accountability reform proposals, said she did want their panel to tackle the issue.
"I'm ready to talk about police accountability, and I'm ready to vote on it now,” Murray said.
Murray, a deputy district attorney who focuses on advocating for victims of domestic violence, rape and human trafficking, said that while she supports adequately funding police officers’ work, she also believes there needs to be more of an ability for the public to hold the LAPD accountable. She also said that she believes “we need to convert more funds to our community programs.”
Before the vote, Commissioner James Thomas, who is president of the San Fernando Valley NAACP and one of the strongest backers of the police accountability proposals that were thrown out, described Stein and Meza’s motion as “politicky,” and pointed to political motivations for handing the reforms to another panel.
"Who wants to deal with real police accountability during an election year? Not an elected official," Thomas said. "That's what this sounds like to me."
This June’s primary election ballot features elections for mayor, controller, attorney and odd-numbered council seats. The November ballot where any charter reform measure proposed by the commission would end up, could also feature races to fill city seats, if runoff contests result from the primary election. A runoff is triggered when no candidate in a race receives more than 50% of the vote. The chances of a runoff increases when there are more than two strong contenders for the seat, which is now very likely in the mayor’s race, in which Mayor Karen Bass is seeking re-election. That race has already drawn several contenders who are aiming to seriously challenge Bass’s bid.
Murray and Thomas later also presented a motion to advance the 13 proposed reforms to the full commission. That motion failed 3-3, with Murray, Andrades and Thomas voting to tee up the proposals for the full commission. Stein, Meza and Commissioner Christina Sanchez voted to do away with the proposals.
[Updated 7:51 a.m., Feb. 4, 2026, to correct the above vote breakdown, which previously said Andrades was a “no” vote. Andrades actually voted in favor of moving the police reform proposals forward.]
The ad hoc committee’s votes aren’t final, and any recommendations by the ad hoc committee can be overturned by the full commission. Some are hoping to bring back the tossed-away reforms. Godfrey Plata, deputy director of the progressive civics group LA Forward Institute, said that they think there is an “opportunity” to convince the full commission and members of City Council to “take up the police department’s broken governance systems.”
Plata said that their group is in strong support of “Councilmember Hernandez's recommendations to strengthen the City Council’s authority to provide policy-level oversight and direction over the LAPD and strengthen the authority of the chief of police to remove officers with documented, repeated histories of harm or misconduct.”
The manner in which the motion by Stein and Meza, which offered up a new policy proposal that many had not seen before on a politically contentious issue, and other motions that were sprung up at Saturday’s day-long meeting, was troubling to close observers of the charter reform process.
The job that had been laid out for the ad hoc committee did not include making substantial new policy proposals. The ad hoc committee, which is freed from following Brown Act rules meant to ensure the public has a chance to weigh in on issues, was mainly tasked with giving up or down votes on whether any existing proposals would move forward or not. And an earlier meeting of the ad hoc committee, held on Jan. 17, did not have quite as many such surprise motions.
Among the surprises was the idea to set up a Christopher Commission-type panel to take up police reform, which diverges from other proposals that had been officially presented and analyzed in staff reports, said Rob Quan, a City Hall watchdog who tracks the charter reform process.
He said that a panel like the Charter Reform Commission that’s making high stakes decisions that result in “winners and losers” needs to operate under a fair process.
“If you don’t give people a fair shake and an opportunity to weigh in, and you stack the deck, they’re going to distrust everything you do and everything you send forward,” Quan said.
The Charter Reform Commission itself was formed in the midst of public distrust of city government. It was set up to continue work by the City Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on City Governance Reform that was set up in the wake of a political scandal in which secretly recorded audio caught three City Council members, including the president of the council at the time, and then-Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera discussing ways to rig the redistricting process taking place at the time, including drawing district lines to include pockets of voters likely to favor certain candidates in upcoming elections. That redistricting process had also been carried out through an advisory commission, and their work drawing district lines ended up being substantially re-done by the City Council after the work of the commission got called into question.
The decision by the ad hoc committee to dispense with a political “third rail” topic – as some have described the LAPD – comes as questions are being raised about politically driven interests influencing commissioners’ decision-making process.
The Los Angeles City Council recently approved an ordinance requiring that commissioners disclose private “ex parte” conversations they are having with elected officials and their staff. Such disclosures are meant to give the public more transparency on the commissioners' decisions, which should be aimed at improving how well the government works and serves constituents, but can be vulnerable to intervention from political interests.
The council’s ex parte disclosure ordinance, which did not get scheduled for consideration by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson until last December (months after the motion was introduced), will not go into effect until the final few weeks of the commission’s life. In the meantime, the Charter Reform Commission is making changes to its own bylaws to implement the disclosures sooner. A motion by Commissioner Carla Fuentes to require disclosures by commissioners was approved at the commission’s Jan. 21 meeting. A second motion by Fuentes that would have also required that commission staff disclose their conversations with elected officials was tabled to a future meeting after Meza, the commission’s chair, said he planned to vote against it. Multiple members were absent at that meeting, and there was a chance there would not be enough votes for the policy affecting commission staffers to advance. Fuentes’ motions were taken up after one that Meza had promised to present never materialized.
This proposal to require that commission staff, such as its executive director and policy analyst, disclose ex parte conversations is now expected to be taken up at this Thursday’s meeting, on Feb. 5.
Meanwhile, at the ad hoc meeting this past Saturday, after the policy affecting commissioners was to have gone into effect, the City Hall watchdog, Quan, asked commissioners at the start and close of the meeting to disclose any conversations they’d had with elected officials and their staff. Just as the committee’s chair, Stein, was about to survey members on whether they had disclosures, a commission staffer, Executive Director Justin Ramirez, responded to Quan’s question saying the ad hoc committee meeting “isn’t a commission meeting.” At the end of the meeting, when Quan again asked about disclosures, Ramirez said they were planning to meet with “city attorney staff” to get “more clarification on implementation” of the disclosures. Meza ended up volunteering that he did not talk to any elected officials.
As far as communications on the issue of police reform, elected officials supporting it have communicated to commissioners at meetings. There has been open support for it from elected officials such as Hernandez and Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez, who both spoke at commission meetings and sent written comment letters. Council member Tim McOsker, who supported putting a charter amendment on the 2024 ballot to give the police chief authority to fire problem police officers in egregious cases, has also sent a written comment to the commission urging them to take up the issue, after the council’s vote to place the issue on the ballot was vetoed by Mayor Bass.
And there had been early interest among commissioners in taking up the topic, including by Martin Schlageter, who recently stepped down from the Charter Reform Commission to take a job as a senior policy adviser in Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s office. During an Aug. 9 meeting, three months before it was finally scheduled, he had requested that the topic be explored.
Schlageter, who worked for many years at City Hall as a staffer in a council office and in a city department and who described the topic as “contentious,” explained in an interview with The LA Reporter last fall that while he didn’t have “preconceived” ideas for reforms, he’d suggested it be taken up “to make sure it wasn’t ignored.”
“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.
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