A new low in the Palisades Fire fallout defamation and defunding

The men and women of the LA Fire Department (LAFD) are so desperate for the equipment they need to do their jobs that they’re reaching into their own pockets to fund a sales tax measure they say is the only way to protect the communities they love.They were underfunded and understaffed on the eve of the Pacific Palisades fire last year, with trucks out of commission due to maintenance and firefighters told to stand down because the city did not want to pay overtime.Now, Freddy Escobar, the president of the firefighters’ union, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Mayor Karen Bass claiming her office conducted a smear campaign to stifle critics of the city’s response to the fire.Escobar has publicly contradicted the city’s official narrative of who’s at fault for the disaster, and his lawsuit alleges the mayor retaliated by directing her staff to leak damaging but discredited stories about him to the press.Escobar’s allegations certainly match the broader behavior of the Bass administration, which has relentlessly prioritized minimizing the city’s legal liability and salvaging the mayor’s re-election bid over meeting basic obligations for transparency and accountability.Their beef started shortly after the fire, when Bass sacked LA Fire Department Chief Kirstin Crowley. Escobar denounced the move as a flashy public sacrifice intended to obscure Crowley’s complaints about systemic under-investment in her department.Crowley had a point.Since the 1960s, the population of Los Angeles has jumped from 2.5 million residents to nearly four million.

Meanwhile, the city’s firefighting core has expanded by a total of eight positions.Yes, just eight: from 3,379 in 1965 to 3,387 today. And the total number of firefighter stations has actually decreased, falling from 112 to just 106. Then the Mayor made some gentle “refinements” to the city’s official “after action” report that just so happened to scrub away mentions of chronic underfunding and...