Karen Bass’ cover-up shows she’s not willing to take responsibility

Mayor Karen Bass claims that she did not edit the LAFD’s after-action report on the Palisades Fire to shield the department and the city from responsibility.

She admits, however, that she told the authors to check information about weather and budgets.

That sounds like it might have been benign — until you consider that weather and budgets are at the core of what went wrong last January.

The National Weather Service predicted an extreme high wind event, with life-threatening winds, days before January 7. The mayor knew about these predictions and left the country anyway.

Ultimately, the high winds reignited the blaze known as the Lachman Fire, which had been set by an arsonist on January 1, and which firefighters did not fully extinguish.

The LAFD made decisions not to pre-deploy fully on January 6, partly due to budget constraints, after the mayor and city council had cut $18 million from the firefighting budget (the mayor had originally called for $23 million in cuts). 

Budget constraints may also have been on the minds of the LAFD officials at the Lachman Fire on January 2, who ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses despite concerns that fire might still have been smoldering in the roots of plants. 

There were worries, apparently, that the State of California would not reimburse the LAFD fully for its services on state land.

So if the LAFD report was edited simply to change weather and budget information, it might as well have been edited to remove everything.

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The mayor didn’t have to ask directly or explicitly for changes. All she had to do was ask the authors to “check” the report, and the message would have been delivered.

Throughout this scandal, there has been an odd lack of curiosity about who watered down the report, and why.

New LAFD chief Jamie Moore said, shockingly, that while the controversy was hurting morale, he was not interested in finding out who was responsible for changing the report.

This isn’t just a cover up; it’s a cover-up of a cover-up.

It is an abuse of the public trust, and it will prevent the city from learning the life-or-death lessons of the Palisades Fire.

We have already lost the opportunity to examine the decisions that Mayor Bass made during the fire itself, because her text messages were set to delete automatically. The city somehow did not maintain records of her communication, despite transparency laws. And no one bothered to preserve her records in anticipation of inevitable lawsuits.

It goes without saying that the mayor should come clean about her role in editing the LAFD report, but it is also too late for her to convince anyone that she is telling the truth.

Nor will anyone trust an investigation by the city, “independent” or not.

The investigation must be taken up by the committee run by Senators Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — and perhaps by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as well.

Angelenos deserve the truth, and accountability.