Squawk Box: Wednesday, May 6, 2026

What’s happening today? The City Council is meeting at 10 a.m. an they will be taking up an item requesting that the Board of Police Commissioners adopt a policy to ban police officers from conducting pre-textual stops. The most recent committee report detailing what is being brought to the City Council for a vote can be read here. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Oversight Commission is holding a town hall on Automated License Plate Readers. An the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will be meeting at 9:30 a.m. to discuss the county budget. NBC4 will air a mayoral debate at 5 p.m. featuring Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Spencer Pratt (that will be followed by a gubernatorial debate at 7 p.m.).  

Some frustrations got aired out at Tuesday’s Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association mayoral debate between Council member Nithya Raman and Mayor Karen Bass. It was the first time the two have directly faced off in a debate since Raman made her surprise, last-minute entry into the mayor’s race in February. They had been political allies up until then. 

The debate, held in a community auditorium set up with foldout chairs and tables, was conducted by Fox 11’s Phil Shuman in an unstructured, free-flowing fashion. Things got heated almost immediately, with Bass going after Raman almost immediately for criticizing how the city was run, and arguing that Raman has spent more time at City Hall than and has held a leadership positions on the City Council up until recently.

While answering a question, Bass turned to Raman and said, “Councilwoman, you are in the leadership of City Council … You have been in City Hall, actually, twice as long as I have. You chair one of the most important committees,” prompting the moderator, Shuman, to speakk up an say there was an opportunity later for the candidates to ask each other questions. But Bass responded, “I wasn’t going to ask her a question. I was just making the point."

Bass took this tack at various points in the debate, with Raman responding to one of those times by saying that the mayor was deflecting her responsibility as the city’s leader.

Raman, who up until recently, served in the number three spot on council, also said she was never on the Planning and Land Use Management Committee (PLUM), commonly thought of as one of the more powerful committees to sit on, although Bass later pointed to the committee that Raman does chair, the Housing and Homelessness Committee.

Bass also brought up at least three time that her opponent has been in a city elected office “twice as long” as she has, which Raman ended up correcting. Raman, who first took office in December 2020 and is less than halfway into her second term, for a total of five years compared to Bass’s three, told her opponent, “I’m a little confused. I was on council for two years before you got there, not in leadership, never on PLUM.”

Raman also pushed back by saying that her role as a member of a 15-member City Council, in which she could be in the minority on some issues, does not afford her the same kind of power a mayor enjoys. And a mayor, Raman said, has more power over the city’s departments than a council member does. “To pretend that a council member has the same powers as a mayor to create a system is patently false and is an abdication of the responsibility and power that the mayor of the city has,” Raman said.

Bass responded by saying that Raman shouldn’t sell her role short, telling her, “I don't know why you diminish yourself, because you are one of the most powerful members of the council. Before you stepped down to run, you were third in line for the presidency.”

“You chair the committee on housing and homelessness,” Bass said. “And we have worked until just a couple of months ago, shoulder to shoulder on this issue, in spite of our differences.”

At this point, someone in the audience appeared to have commented that Raman endorsed Bass in a previous election, which Bass responded to by saying, “There is the little detail of that.”

“And you endorsed me too,” Raman said. “We have worked together. I’m just frustrated now.”

Speaking of what powers the mayor and council has, a motion introduced on Tuesday highlights one big power the mayor has… In that motion, some Los Angeles City Council members want to put a check on the mayor’s ability to issue executive directives, which unilaterally sets policy. The motion, authored by Monica Rodriguez and seconded by Tim McOsker, calls for putting a measure on the November ballot that would give the City Council the ability overturn executive directives through a 2/3rd vote. 

In the wake of a massive data leak in the City Attorney’s Office, the Los Angeles Police Protective League — the influential police officers’ union — took the extraordinary step of revoking their endorsement of City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto’s re-election bid, saying she “willfully failed” to disclose the leak during a March 25 interview with the union’s political action committee seeking their endorsement. The leak, which Feldstein Soto’s office became aware of on March 20, had involved the release of internal records about police officers. On Tuesday, the union announced they will be throwing their support to Feldstein Soto’s opponent in the City Attorney’s race, John McKinney. 

McKinney, a deputy district attorney, announced the influential police officers' union's endorsement during a news conference Tuesday at the police union’s headquarters, where he also announced that he had also earned the endorsement of his boss, District Attorney Nathan Hochman. He is one of three candidates seeking to deny Feldstein Soto a second term. The other two are Deputy Attorney General Marissa Roy and Human Rights Attorney Aida Ashouri.

On the same day as McKinney’s LAPPL endorsement news, Stop LAPD Spying, a group that’s been looking into the LAPD’s ties with Flock Safety, which makes and sells automated license plate readers, filed a lawsuit to compel the police department to release memorandums of understandings, or agreements, that the police department has with that company. The company’s surveillance software has come under scrutiny amid concerns it’s being used to assist in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

The group writes in their complaint that at the same time the department has delayed providing the MOUs, department officials have been “promising a forthcoming ‘report on its relationship with Flock’ … If that report is released while LAPD continues to

suppress the records sought here, then LAPD will have defied the Public Records Act to ensure a highly one-sided debate on a time-sensitive matter of urgent public concern.”

“The documents sought here — ‘all contracts, MOUs, MOAs, or other agreements with Flock Safety’ since 2017— should take no more than a few hours to find. Yet this request has been pending for over two months while LAPD has refused to provide anything more than a single, expired agreement. LAPD then went completely silent on this request since March, leaving Petitioner no choice but to sue,” the complaint reads.

Los Angeles County officials are getting ready to pull funding from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a now three-decade-long joint powers partnership with the city of Los Angeles, on July 1, and they appear to also be going after a more powerful role on providing homeless services, based on a motion introduced Tuesday by Council member Monica Rodriguez and seconded by Bob Blumenfield.

Rodriguez’s motion states that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors “will be hearing a motion to change the terms of the Joint Powers Authority (JPA) agreement, making HSH [Los Angeles County’s new Department of Homeless Services and Housing] the lead and removing the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.” The motion calls for a report back on “the impacts of the County’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing becoming the lead of the region’s Continuum of Care and the Coordinated Entry System.” 

(A “continuum of care” refers to a body or agency that applies for federal dollars to spend on homeless services and decides on how those funds are used, with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority now serving in that role for both the county and the city of Los Angeles. The “coordinated entry system” is a prioritization system for distributing homeless services.)

“Although it is necessary for the city to create its own response, we must act with greater urgency to put an effective system in place,” Rodriguez’s motion reads. “This action by the county, without working with the city, could cause confusion in programming and negatively impact residents in the city.”

Another motion authored by Councilmember Tim McOsker, and seconded by Ysabel Jurado, also appear to be seeking some action to “protect the city’s interests.” McOsker and Jurado both joined Mayor Karen Bass last month on a letter layinig out a 90-day roadmap for responding to the county pulling funding from LAHSA by July 1 that includes working out a way for the city of Los Angeles to have a more dominant role at LAHSA, “with a clear majority governance authority over the LAHSA Commission, including greater representation, oversight, and decision-making control.”

Their motion reads: “I MOVE that the City Council request the Office of the City Attorney to explore and report on all legal options available to the City of Los Angeles, including any potential claims, defenses, and strategies to protect the City's interests, as expressed through Council File 26-0514, and that the City Council be scheduled for a closed session pursuant to applicable provisions of California Government Code Section 54956.9 to confer with legal counsel.”

LAHSA’s commission is made up of 10 members, half of whom are appointed by the County’s Board of Supervisors, and the other half by the LA city mayor.

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