LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and City Council member Nithya Raman traded verbal blows on Tuesday, scrapping over public safety, the Palisades fire and the fate of police Chief Jim McDonnell in the only televised head-to-head debate of the Nov. 3 runoff election.

Bass, now in a tough battle for a second term, portrayed Raman as someone who isn’t ready to lead the city. Raman, she said, has “a tendency to take different positions on different days of the week” — and has struggled to work collaboratively with others at City Hall.

“Now is not the time to turn the city over to Nithya Raman,” she said.

Raman, for her part, said the mayor had been “missing in action” during the massively destructive Palisades fire in January 2025 and the more recent Lineage cold storage warehouse blaze in Boyle Heights. City Hall, Raman said, is now experiencing “a crisis of trust.”

“We cannot afford another four years of decline, of mismanagement, of excuses,” Raman said.

Some of the sharpest exchanges in the one-hour debate, hosted by NBC4 and Telemundo 52, revolved around McDonnell, who was appointed by Bass to lead the Los Angeles Police Department in 2024. At the time, Raman voted with a majority of her colleagues to confirm McDonnell.

Raman, seated across from Bass, called for McDonnell to be replaced, saying the LAPD appeared to be protecting federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during their operations in L.A., striking “fear in the heart of immigrant communities here.”

Raman declined to give a timeline for McDonnell’s removal — even after NBC4’s Conan Nolan pressed her on whether she would replace him before the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in L.A.

“It is not a unilateral decision by the mayor,” she said. “It takes agreement with the Police Commission, even agreement with the council. It’s not something I can immediately set a timeline on,” she said.

Bass warned that removing the police chief before the Olympics would send the LAPD into “disarray.”

“It’s absolutely in the power of the mayor to fire the police chief,” Bass said. “You have said that you would get rid of him before the Olympics. What worries me about that is, I don’t think you have any idea what it takes to identify a police chief.”

The LAPD is overseen by a five-member Board of Police Commissioners, whose civilian members are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the council. Under the City Charter, those commissioners have the power to remove the police chief at any time prior to the expiration of the chief’s term.

Bass also criticized Raman for appearing last week in an Instagram video in which she criticized McDonnell and uttered the phrase “only you can stop fascist liars.” Raman has said since then that an Instagram influencer edited her remarks in a way that distorted her message.

“As soon as we realized it was a mis-edited video, we took it down,” Raman said Tuesday night. “It was up maybe an hour or two. That’s it. Yes, we made an error. But it was an error, and I have never, I would never imply that the city is fascist, or that this mayor is fascist, or that our police chief is fascist. That’s not what I said at all.”

Bass accused Raman of dishonesty.

“You called the police chief, you called me fascist. It made me wonder whether you understood what the word fascist meant. But it also just showed that you are not ready for prime time,” Bass said.

Raman and Bass emerged as the top two vote-getters in the June 2 primary, with the mayor winning 34% of the vote and the council member receiving 29%. Reality television personality Spencer Pratt came in third.

Since then, several polls have put Raman in first place, although the size of that lead has varied depending on the survey.

A poll conducted last month by the University of California, Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times, showed Raman with support from 39% of likely voters and Bass at 28%, with a third of the electorate still undecided. Weeks later, a poll conducted by the firefighters’ union showed Bass trailing by a much smaller margin.

With Bass trailing Raman in multiple polls, the mayor and her allies have attempted to portray Raman as unprepared for the job. Raman, in turn, has sought to show she is ready to lead immediately, staging a rally last week at which she unveiled plans for her first 100 days in office.

During that event, she promised to hire a chief financial officer to improve coordination between city agencies and appoint a new recovery czar for the burned areas of Pacific Palisades.

Bass selected a recovery czar in January 2025, weeks after the fire broke out, but he lasted only 90 days. During Tuesday’s debate, Raman criticized the mayor for being out of the country when the Palisades fire erupted, saying she had been missing in action.

“The question that I heard over and over ... across the entire city was, ‘Where is our mayor? Where is our mayor?’” She said. “If there is another emergency, you will not have to ask — if I am mayor — where our mayor is. I will be on the front lines.”

Bass said she has cut red tape to ensure that Palisades residents can rebuild their homes, and apologized for being gone when the blaze broke out.

“I am so profoundly sorry that I was not in my city when my city needed me,” Bass said. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of the lives lost, the families that lost their home or the families where the home is still standing but they’re not able to be in it.”

Raman and Bass were once political allies, campaigning together in 2024 as Raman faced a tough reelection fight in a district stretching from Silver Lake to the San Fernando Valley. Bass endorsed Raman and helped her secure the backing of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party.

Things were sharply different Tuesday. Bass told the council member she had been “contemptuous of her constituents,” forcing residents of her district to reach out to the mayor’s office for city services.

“I made a deal with you four years ago because you had so many problems with your constituents, and I offered to take care of your constituents,” Bass said.

Raman called that claim “a lie.” She questioned the mayor’s decision to give her personal phone number out to residents of Sherman Oaks, a neighborhood in her district.

“She said that things get responded to when you call her personally,” Raman said. “This is a sign of departmental dysfunction.”

“Do the residents of Boyle Heights have your number?” Raman asked the mayor.

“They do,” Bass said.

“That’s not what they told me,” Raman said.

Raman said she has shown concrete results in her Hollywood Hills district, cutting unsheltered homelessness — the number of people living outside or in their cars — by roughly half compared to the previous year. That progress occurred, she said, even as homelessness went up citywide.

Raman also took aim at Inside Safe, the mayor’s program to move homeless people indoors, saying the city had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a program without any accountability.

“There has been no adaptation,” Raman said. “There (have) been no changes to the program to make it more cost-effective.”

Bass said unsheltered homelessness had fallen by 11% since the start of her term, even with this year’s citywide increase. And she pointed out that Raman, as head of the council’s powerful housing and homelessness committee, regularly signed off on the reports showing the expenditures on the mayor’s program.

“Every dollar that was spent on Inside Safe was approved by you,” Bass told her opponent.

Raman and Bass have been mostly evenly matched in their most recent campaign fundraising reports, with each collecting about $2.5 million for the runoff. Meanwhile, powerful interests have been waging much more expensive campaigns on behalf of their chosen candidates.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which supports Bass, has committed at least $3.5 million this year, running ads that have highlighted Raman’s opposition to a law barring homeless encampments near schools. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor is also waging an independent campaign supporting the mayor.

Meanwhile, the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters has put $9 million into a campaign supporting Raman, running commercials that slam the mayor over this year’s increase in citywide homelessness and her handling of the Palisades fire.

Two-thirds of that money has come from hedge fund manager Aaron Sosnick, who has been pressing city leaders on the expansion of bike lanes and bus lanes.

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