Former Fire Chief Kristin Crowley loses bid to get her job back, winning just two votes
- Share via
The Los Angeles City Council rejected former Fire Chief Kristin Crowley’s bid to get her job back, despite fierce support for her from the firefighters’ union.
The council voted 13 to 2 Tuesday against Crowley’s reinstatement, handing embattled Mayor Karen Bass a much-needed political victory. Bass was in Ghana when the Palisades fire broke out, leaving council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson as acting mayor, and delivered a choppy performance in the days after she returned.
Crowley used Tuesday’s hearing to push back publicly, for the first time, against the arguments that Bass offered for terminating her from her post as the head of one of the nation’s largest fire departments. Seated before the council, Crowley argued that she was facing retaliation for publicly highlighting a lack of resources at her department.
“The truth is that the fire chief should not be prevented from, or punished for, speaking openly and honestly about the needs and capabilities of the LAFD, or for doing her best to protect our firefighters and our communities,” she told the council.
Councilmember Imelda Padilla, who represents the central San Fernando Valley, criticized Crowley for her decision last month to discuss the fire department’s budget with the news media while the Palisades fire was still raging.
“The chief chose the wrong time and wrong place to raise an issue,” she said.
Crowley’s bid for reinstatement was almost certain to fail, given the fact that she needed 10 votes, or a two-thirds majority. Only Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez and Traci Park, who have been strong Crowley supporters, voted in her favor.
Nevertheless, Tuesday’s proceedings created a headache for Bass, who ousted Crowley as chief nearly two weeks ago. During public comment before the council vote, firefighters repeatedly aired complaints that their department has been underfunded for too long, with some saying that Bass was trying to deflect blame from her own actions.
Chuong Ho, who serves on the board of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112, urged council members to reinstate Crowley, saying she was fired for “telling the truth” about the lack of resources.
“She stood up, she spoke out, and she had our backs,” Ho said. “I’ve never seen a fire chief in my career consistently speak out about the constant understaffing and lack of funding for our Fire Department.”
Crowley’s appeal, which she submitted Thursday, has only added to the sense of volatility that has engulfed City Hall since the fire erupted Jan. 7, destroying thousands of homes and killing 12 people. For more than a week, Crowley’s backers have accused Bass of scapegoating the fire chief.
Bass supporters, in turn, have accused Crowley of mismanagement and insubordination, calling her push for reinstatement part of a much larger political attack on Bass, the city’s first Black female mayor.
Sylvia Castillo, who worked for Bass while the mayor was in Congress, said that “divisive” political actors were trying to do a “public lynching” of Bass.
Benjamin Torres, president and chief executive of the South L.A.-based group CD Tech, called the proceedings a “political move to cut off Black leadership.”
“This would not be done if [Bass] was a white male of privilege,” he told the council.
Bass fired Crowley on Feb. 21, citing two major reasons. She said the chief had failed to pre-deploy as many as 1,000 firefighters on the morning the blaze exploded in size amid hurricane-force Santa Ana winds. She also accused Crowley of refusing to participate in an internal after-action report after being asked to do so.
In the days leading up to Crowley’s ouster, Bass said that the chief had failed to warn her of the increasingly dire wind forecasts.
Fire officials made the critical decision to forgo calling in scores of extra firefighters and equipment in the hours before the fire, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
Crowley’s defenders, in turn, accused Bass of firing a veteran firefighter well before the completion of the after-action reports that would assess the city’s preparation for, and response to, the Palisades fire. They said the mayor’s staff had received warnings about the coming winds and the heightened wildfire risk from the city’s Emergency Management Department, which tracks dangerous weather conditions.
Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley, said Crowley has been unfairly scapegoated by a mayor desperate for a reset after the fire. She said the council, under the City Charter, has the power to reverse the firing of a general manager.
Crowley’s firing sends a bad message to city employees and department heads — that it’s “safer to stay silent than to call out what’s wrong,” Rodriguez said.
“The only failure I believe Chief Crowley had was thinking people had their back. And so, for that I apologize,” Rodriguez said, addressing Crowley. “Because as a leader of this department, you don’t deserve it.”
Dozens of Los Angeles firefighters packed the council chambers to show support for the former fire chief. After she finished her remarks, the room erupted with applause and shouts of “Reinstate! Reinstate!”
Crowley, the first woman to lead the LAFD in its 139-year history, was picked for the top job in 2022 by then-Mayor Eric Garcetti, after rising through the ranks of a department where female firefighters had complained about harassment and hazing.
Tensions between Crowley and Bass quickly emerged after the fire started. On Jan. 10, Crowley went on multiple television stations to decry what she described as insufficient funding for her agency.
In one interview, she said the city had failed her and her department. In another, she drew a link between cuts to her department and the city’s handling of the fire.
The firefighters’ union praised Crowley as a truth teller — someone with the courage to call out decades of under-investment in their agency. Bass responded by summoning Crowley to a meeting that went so long that the mayor missed her own news conference to update the public on the fire.
“Chief Crowley had the guts and the courage to speak out, to make sure her troops on the ground have what they need to do their jobs,” said firefighter union President Freddy Escobar. “But her honesty cost her her job.”
In recent days, Bass picked up support from an organization representing the city’s Black firefighters, which argued that a change at the top was “necessary.”
In a letter to the council, the Los Angeles City Stentorians said the department under Crowley has seen an increase in reports of discrimination and harassment, along with an increase in discriminatory hiring practices.
“Over the past six months, her lack of accountability has only worsened,” the letter said.
Critics of Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley — a gay woman leading an overwhelmingly male department — call her a “DEI hire” and have questioned her tactics on the morning of the Palisades fire. But to many of her firefighters, she’s already a folk hero.
Crowley used Tuesday’s hearing to offer her first major rebuttal of the mayor’s allegations. She said she did not refuse to conduct an after-action report on the fire, but rather supported having state officials, who are slated to produce an outside review, do the job.
“The LAFD is not capable, nor do we have the proper resources to adequately conduct an after-action report for the Palisades fire, due to the sheer magnitude, scope and complexity of the incident,” said Crowley, who now has a lower-level position in the department.
Crowley also asserted that her department could not have deployed an extra 1,000 firefighters to the Palisades because it lacked sufficient fire trucks, ambulances and other vehicles to transport them. Because the city has reduced the number of mechanics, she said, those trucks were “broken down in our maintenance yards, unable to be used to help during one of the worst wildfire events in our history.”
Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, welcomed the vote, saying that the city is “moving forward.”
“After testimony by the former Chief confirming she sent firefighters home on the morning of January 7th, her appeal was rejected 13-2 by members of the City Council,” Seidl said in a statement. “This is an issue of public safety and for the operations of the Los Angeles Fire Department.”
Tuesday’s proceedings appear to be virtually unprecedented in modern city history, with the closest parallel being Bernard C. Parks’ bid for a second term as police chief in 2002. That year, appointees of Mayor James Hahn on the Board of Police Commissioners declined to renew Parks for a second five-year term.
The City Council declined to overturn the commission’s decision, during a debate that inflamed racial divisions in the city. The council’s three Black members sided with Parks, the department’s second Black chief, and against Hahn, who was politically wounded by the battle. Parks won a seat on the council the following year, while Hahn lost reelection in 2005.
Councilmember Tim McOsker, who was Hahn’s chief of staff during the Parks battle, said he didn’t want to force two people who don’t get along — Bass and Crowley — to work together. He said he had lived through that, and “it can be disastrous.”
“I’m going to put a functional city above what might be more politically expedient for me,” McOsker said.
Park, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, supported the move to reinstate Crowley, saying neither she nor her colleagues have received any after-action reports that would show who was to blame for an array of failures — a lack of firefighters, a lack of water in fire hydrants and a lack of an orderly evacuation.
Getting those answers “might very well mean firing everyone who has culpability across multiple departments, and I have no problem with that,” Park said.
“But I wouldn’t do it without a well-informed record and actual evidence to support that decision,” she added. “And I don’t have it today.”
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
