Squawk Box: Thursday, May 7, 2026

What’s happening today: The Los Angeles City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee resumes their budget hearings today at 10 a.m. They’ll be taking up budget memos, which respond to the many questions they submitted during previous hearings. The nearly 200 memos are being posted up here.

“It’s a simple yes or no question”: Spencer Pratt made his debate stage debut at Wednesday’s mayoral debate with Mayor Karen Bass and Council member Nithya Raman. The debate, televised on NBC4 and Telemundo, moved briskly with the three candidates being asked to give mostly brief, and occasionally “simple yes or no,” responses to meaty questions on topics like the 2025 wildfires, the size of the police force, their strategies for solving homelessness, and whether they support an ordinance to ban encampments in front of schools.

At one point, the moderator, KNBC anchor Colleen Williams, asked each of the candidates if they would end a city-run needle distribution program, with a prompt of “Yes or no?” She said this question came from the owner of Langer’s Deli. Bass answered that yes she would. Raman said she would not. Pratt said, “Absolutely no needles and pipes for drug addicts on the street, ever.” Williams said she would take Pratt’s answer to mean a “yes.”

The replay of the debate can be viewed here. The LA Times provided live coverage of the debate, breaking out the questions asked and answered into separate posts.

Gustavo Arellano at The LA Times crowned Karen Bass and Pratt the winners of the debate, while declaring Nithya Raman the loser, with Arellano citing that Raman became tongue-tied at different moments in the debate.

Pratt won’t be at another debate/candidate forum, to be televised by Fox 11, that’s scheduled for less than a week later, on May 13. The debate debate/fdebate/forum will feature two additional candidates not featured in Wednesday’s —  Adam Miller and Rae Huang. Raman and Bass will be participating, but not Pratt.

Also, the recording of an earlier debate, featuring just Karen Bass and Nithya Raman held the night before in Sherman Oaks, has been posted.

DOJ does drug enforcement at MacArthur Park: Earlier on Wednesday, the Department of Justice conducted a drug enforcement raid in MacArthur Park, with authorities arresting 18 people. Those arrested were expected to appear in court on Thursday, according to Sam Levine of The Guardian. The DOJ’s press release can be read here.

LA City Council sends pretextual stops ban to the police commission: Also on Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council approved a motion calling the Los Angeles Police Department to stop pulling people over for minor violations as a pretext for searches and other more serious enforcement activity. Such pretextual stops have long been considered discriminatory, and multiple members of the City Council shared stories of how such stops affected themselves and their loved ones.

They include Council member Heather Hutt, who said that she has had to instruct her sons who are Black on how to behave around police officers in order to avoid being killed or injured by an officer during a stop. Hutt, who was in tears as she spoke in anticipated of voting on the proposed ban, said those talks she has with her sons are “born out of love, but fueled by terror.” 

And Council member Ysabel Jurado said that as a “as the daughter of Asian American Filipinos, and even though this issue does not disproportionately affect us, I stand in solidarity.” She added that “as a queer woman whose trans community is disproportionately impacted by interactions with PD [the police] and how this breaks trust, I think this vote is so important.” 

Since the LA City Council is not authorized to set policy, as they are with most other city departments, on policing matters, the motion they approved actually requests, rather than instructs, the Board of Police Commissioners, the body that does have authority to issue policy instructions to the police chief, to adopt a pretextual stops ban.

Although the effort to ban pretextual stops has been going on for many years, this latest version grew out a now six-year-old motion authored by Council member Harris-Dawson and now-former City Council member Mike Bonin.

“We have a society where we enforce lots of rules. Tenant harassment, embezzlement, wage theft, tax evasion, illegal demolitions. We do all of those things,” Harris-Dawson said before the vote. “Those people never get confronted with a worker with a gun. We never send a person with a gun to say you took away their overtime pay. We don’t do that. And the suggestion that we should do it would be immediately viewed as absurd. Well, it’s just as absurd to do that to people who cross a double yellow line or have a broken taillight or couldn’t afford to pay their registration.”

Streetsblog LA’s Sahra Sulaiman noted that Council member Traci Park was absent during the vote on the issue, which passed unanimously without her. She also pointed out that Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor and considered a progressive-leaning candidate in that race, was the only member of progressive bloc on council who did not make remarks prior to the vote.

Bonin came back to the council chambers on Wednesday to give some remarks and to witness the moment. He has an adopted son, who is Black. He said Harris-Dawson had told him that he was “committed to doing this work and wanted to get it done before my son got his driver’s license. He’s 12. Thank you.”

The effort has been backed by by advocacy from groups like Push L.A. Coalition, Catalyst California (formerly called the Advancement Project), and Community Coalition. Push L.A. recently released a report on LAPD’s pretextual stops that found that Black and Latine residents were over-represented among people pulled over in situations where minor violations were used as a pretext.

What else just happened: DSA-LA released their voter guide. Unrig LA spotted a $250,000 contribution that City Controller candidate Zach Sokoloff poured into his own campaign challenging the incumbent, City Controller Kenneth Mejia. Torched LA’s Alissa Walker highlights a recent April 17 motion on reimbursements to the city for costs of hosting the Olympic Games (Walker recently did a write-up on the Capital Infrastructure Program released this week by Mayor Karen Bass, and that focuses on Olympics Games-related projects). And the LA County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission held a public forum on automated license plate readers — the replay of which can be found here. The LA County Board of Supervisors held a hearing on the county budget, and that can be viewed here.

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