The Brief

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced Friday that Jim McDonnell will be the city’s next police chief, ending a months-long search after Michel Moore said he was retiring from the department’s top job.

McDonnell is familiar to many Angelenos. He served with the Los Angeles Police Department for 29 years, and later was elected to L.A. County sheriff. He most recently served as the director of the University of Southern California's Price School’s Safe Communities Institute.

"Chief McDonnell is a leader, an innovator, and a change maker, and that's what we need in L.A.," Bass said at a Friday morning news conference. "I'm appointing Chief McDonnell because he and I have aligned in our desire to change the direction of Los Angeles by preventing crime in the first place — responding urgently when crime takes place and to hold people accountable and bring down crime."

But some community activists were less than enthusiastic about the choice. For example, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles was critical of McDonnell's tenure as sheriff, and said Bass had other, more progressive, options when selecting the next chief.

“It's a betrayal of the progressive values that Karen Bass claims to hold,” Melina Abdullah told LAist.

Bass said at the news conference that she will work with McDonnell on expanding the police force, deploying more officers on the street and modernizing the department's technology. She said she also wants to strengthen community relations with the LAPD.

As the new police chief, McDonnell will be tasked with making sure the department is ready for the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics. LAPD is the nation’s second-largest police department, with nearly 9,000 officers.

"After visiting France and seeing the games, the magnitude of what L.A. needs to prepare for is crystal clear to me," Bass said. "And I trust that Jim McDonnell will make sure that we are prepared and vigilant for anything that comes our way."

The City Council will have to confirm the hiring of McDonnell as chief. It's not yet clear when that will happen or the specific date he is expected to start in his new role.

What McDonnell says

Speaking at the news conference, McDonnell recited a list of his goals as LAPD's new leader, including expanding the department and build community trust.

"In simplest terms, my goals are to enhance public safety, to grow our department back to full strength through a solid recruitment and retention campaign, [and] to strengthen public trust, the foundation of all we do," he said.

McDonnell stressed that he wants to "ensure respectful and constitutional policing practices" and work with the community to address concerns.

"I will go out, we will talk to everybody who will listen, we will engage, and I will listen to the concerns of every community in this city... ," he said, adding that he would look to other police departments across the country for "best practices" that could be deployed in L.A.

Increasing recruitment, he said, will help with department morale.

In a statement released as the announcement was made, McDonnell also said he understands the challenges officers face in working to protect the city.

“It is a tremendous honor to lead the men and women of the LAPD," he said in the statement. "I will work hard to make sure their work to keep Angelenos safe is supported. Mayor Bass’s efforts on public safety reflect thoughtful, compassionate, and solution-oriented approaches to policing. I greatly appreciate her confidence in me and I look forward to working closely with her to make Los Angeles a safer city.”

Reaction to the new chief

After nearly three decades with LAPD, McDonnell was hired as chief of the Long Beach Police Department in 2010.

In 2014, he was elected sheriff of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, becoming the first non- member in 100 years to serve as the department's leader. He was elected at a time when the department was plagued by allegations of deputies beating and humiliating people held in the county jails, convictions of several deputies for obstructing an FBI investigation into the jail system, and general low morale within department ranks.

During McDonnell's time as sheriff, he was credited with setting up accountability systems and working to restore public trust, Bass said in a news release.

However, he lost his bid for reelection in 2018, the year that Alex Villanueva won in an upset. McDonnell was voted out of office with the help of big spending by the labor union that represents deputies, who did not like his disciplinarian ways.

The decision to select him for police chief came with input from city's Personnel Department, LA Police Commission, community leaders, residents as well as a recruiting firm, city authorities said.

"Chief McDonnell understands the need to embrace the guardian mindset, both within the department and with the public," said Erroll Southers, president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, at the news conference. "I've spoken with many people who have worked with him during his career and the descriptions I hear have consistently included honest, seasoned, and a man of integrity."

In selecting McDonnell, the mayor passed over two other finalists — one of whom would have been the first woman chief and the other the first Latino chief of the LAPD.

When asked about increasing representation in the force, Bass said, she has been speaking to officers and "a lot that needs to be done" particularly in increasing Latino representation in department leadership, given the city's population is half Latino. That said, she indicated she is satisfied with the decision to select McDonnell.

"I feel very confident in one of the top law enforcement professionals in our country who is willing to come back to the department and lead us in a time when the department internally needs to be transformed," she said.

Civil rights attorney Connie Rice praised the mayor’s decision to appoint McDonnell.

“Jim is a deeply decent, honest, very skilled executive policing leader,” said Rice, who knows McDonnell personally. “It doesn't mean he shares a vision for progressive policing but he’s always been open to good ideas that work.”

Rice added: “He may not have the good ideas but he’s not afraid of having people around him who have more of what he doesn’t have.”

Others were more critical.

Abdullah, of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, said McDonnell failed to improve horrible conditions inside Men’s Central Jail when he was sheriff, failed to rid the department of deputy gangs, and handed over unauthorized immigrants in jail to immigration agents.

How we got here

Michel Moore, who had served as the LAPD chief since 2018, announced in January that he would step down from the department's top job, but said he would stay on as a consultant until Bass found his replacement.

Assistant LAPD Chief Dominic Choi stepped in as interim chief in February.

At the time of his announcement, Moore said he had made mistakes as chief, but was proud of his achievements.

“During my tenure, I know I’ve made mistakes and missteps,” he said. “But I’m also confident that my work has seen success across a broad spectrum of topics unmatched by any other law enforcement agency in this country.”

Under Moore’s tenure, the department faced criticism for alleged excessive use-of-force, the botched handling of an illegal fireworks cache that caused an explosion that ripped through a South L.A. neighborhood and a lack of preparedness during the summer protests in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

When Choi took over as interim chief, he announced he would focus on officer training, employee mental wellness, preparation for public demonstrations, and a smooth framework for transition when the next chief is picked.

Choi’s short time as interim chief was marked by the encampment protests at universities across the city, including at USC and University of California, Los Angeles.

Civics and Democracy Correspondent Frank Stoltze contributed to this report.

A federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop using “coercive” and threatening language to convince unaccompanied immigrant children to agree to deportation, court documents show.

The judge said earlier this week that by using threats of prosecution and coercive language, the U.S. government violated a 40-year-old court order that bans immigration agents from attempting to coerce unaccompanied children to voluntarily leave the country after being detained.

In a separate order, the court also denied government lawyers’ request to end those same longstanding protections.

The two decisions were issued Monday by Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald, who wrote in the orders that the government’s threat of prolonged detention for immigrant children who choose not to self-deport “disturbingly mirrors the testimony” of Jose Antonio Perez-Funez, whose trial in 1985 led the court to first order the protections for children the following year. Perez-Funez and others in that class action case testified that they were not informed of their rights to apply for bail or asylum, leading them to involuntarily waive their rights while they were detained by immigration agents as children.

Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel has been representing immigrant children who were detained by the government for decades and helped win the 1986 court order in the Perez-Funez case.

He said the case has now shown new evidence that the Trump administration has no intention of respecting the rule of law.

The administration’s goal, as Rosenbaum sees it, “is to amp up [deportation] statistics of children who represent no threat to the national interest, who are among the least culpable individuals on the planet.”

LAist reached out to DHS for comment but has not heard back.

The language that has been banned

Last October, LAist reported that DHS had begun targeting unaccompanied children with a “voluntary option” to return them to their countries of origin. Through court documents in the current case, more has been confirmed about how this so-called “voluntary option” was actually presented to children.

Unaccompanied children who are detained for suspected immigration violations are first held by DHS, before generally being turned over to Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. At ORR, children are required by federal law to be provided a confidential legal consultation within 10 days, along with other support.

Court documents show DHS was presenting children with the option to self-deport, along with threats of prosecution and prolonged detainment if they refused, before they were transferred to ORR and guaranteed the chance to speak with an attorney.

Fitzgerald wrote that presenting this ultimatum to children violated the 1986 court order.

“It is difficult to imagine a scenario more coercive than the one faced by [unaccompanied immigrant children] in the 72 hours before they are transferred into ORR custody,” Fitzgerald wrote in court documents, “particularly for noncitizen children who likely do not know whether they possess any rights at all.”

According to evidence presented in court, children were told that if they did not accept voluntary deportation, they would be detained “for a prolonged period of time” and if they turned 18 years old while in custody they would “be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for removal.”

They were also told they may be “barred from legally applying for a visa” and that their sponsor in the U.S. “may be subject to criminal prosecution” if they didn’t agree to voluntary deportation.

This information was read to children or presented to them in a document DHS called the “UAC Pathway Processing Advisal”, but Rosenbaum told LAist he sees even the document’s name as misleading.

 ”It wasn't an advisal, it was a coercive document,” Rosenbaum said. The government has admitted it used the document since September 2025, according to the court order that now bans its use.

How did it come to this?

Rosenbaum said that after the 1986 court order, which also requires unaccompanied children to be allowed telephone access to relatives or legal support, organizations like Public Counsel and  the National Immigrant Law Center monitored the government’s compliance with the order.

Other than a few exceptions, he said, the injunction had been followed until recent years.

“  When the Trump administration began its immigration activities in the second term of the president,  that all changed,” Rosenbaum said, “and it changed in a hurry.”

Court records show that DHS notified the court last November that they would be asking for the 1986 court ordered protections for children in the department’s custody to be ended. When organizations monitoring compliance with the order saw this, Rosenbaum said they investigated and found that in nearly all circumstances, children were no longer allowed to talk to lawyers and were being coerced to take voluntary departures from the country.

Despite the court order, Rosenbaum said, children were “separated from family, separated from their communities and separated from their constitutional rights.”

Peter McGraw, deputy legal director at the National Immigration Law Center, told LAist that the court order was issued to specifically protect children’s Fifth Amendment rights to due process.

He said that when unaccompanied children arrive in the U.S., they don’t have an adult there with them to help them understand their decisions about whether to pursue a number of protections that may keep them from being deported.

“ What due process requires is that the government provide children with notice of their ability to apply for asylum or for other protections — withholding from removal or protection from removal under the convention against torture — to ensure that they are not sent back to countries where they would be in danger,” McGraw said.

The Aquarium of the Pacific is putting out a call for donations to raise $50,000 for a surgery to save the front flipper of its newest green sea turtle, Meatloaf.

The 240-pound turtle was taken to the aquarium in January after being found entangled in fishing line and rope in the San Gabriel River.

For two months, she has undergone rehabilitation and several surgeries to nurse her front-right flipper back to health. Dr. Lance Adams, the aquarium’s director of veterinary services, said the plan is to keep Meatloaf for at least another six months as they redress her wounds.

Dr. Lance Adams watches Meatloaf, a green sea turtle, swim in a rehabilitation tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach on Wednesday. The turtle was rescued from the San Gabriel River after she got tangled in fishing line and rope.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Wide as a manhole cover and several times the size of the facility’s former tenant, Porkchop, Meatloaf is the latest ward at the aquarium’s newly expanded turtle rehabilitation center — one of two able to care for them in Southern California.

Right now, Meatloaf’s swollen flipper is more than twice the size it should be. Adams said aquarium staff repeatedly have cleaned out the wound and used a number of methods to drain it. Past surgeries were done to remove scar tissue that had built up.

But Meatloaf’s fluid buildup, called edema, persists and likely will require reconstructive surgery. It’s hard to tell, Adams said, as turtles are slow to heal.

Turtles tended to at the aquarium include loggerheads, leatherbacks, ridleys and green sea turtles, which arrive on the coast and warmer waters each summer to mate, nest and battle natural and human-made threats: speedboats, water skiers, baited hooks, urban runoff, tons of garbage and harassment.

Green sea turtles like Meatloaf can grow up to five feet long and weigh 500 pounds. They typically have tropical haunts — sandy beaches along the Mexican coast where they lay eggs.

But in recent decades, the chunky oddballs have continued to wander upstream, usually in search of food, toward the San Gabriel River’s mouth in Long Beach. Aquarium officials say there can be a dozen to nearly 100 turtles in the river at a time.

They eat almost anything they can clamp their mouths on, including snails, eel grass and — to the ire of scientists — rotting garbage along the waterway floor.

It’s an unfortunate circumstance that volunteers with the aquarium’s Southern California Sea Turtle Monitoring community science program see on a weekly basis.

But it’s not all bad. Adams said workers have seen their most recent graduate, Porkchop, at least three times since the three-flipped turtle left their waters and ventured out on her own.

Each time, they’re sure to say hello.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Boyle Heights residents have seen it all when it comes to finding a place to park: cars in the red, blocked driveways, double parking and even people sitting in lawn chairs to save a spot. At times, disputes over parking spots have escalated into arguments between neighbors. 

The longstanding struggle for parking in the neighborhood only seems to be getting worse as more developments go up across the city — often with limited parking — and multi-generational households share space. Many people have memorized their block’s street sweeping schedules and no-parking zones to avoid a ticket. 

That frustration is showing up in the data.

A city of Los Angeles parking violation sits on the windshield of a car near Michigan Avenue and Cummings Street in Boyle Heights on Wednesday, March 18.

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Laura Anaya-Morga

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Boyle Heights Beat

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Parking tickets in Boyle Heights have increased at a rate much higher than the city of Los Angeles as a whole, making it one of L.A.’s most ticketed neighborhoods, according to an analysis of city data by Crosstown. Residents say they aren’t sure what could help remedy the issue but acknowledged that multiple parking tickets feel even heavier as gas and grocery prices rise. 

What the numbers show

Last year, Boyle Heights was the sixth-most ticketed community among the city’s 114 neighborhoods, receiving a total of 60,695 citations, an average of 5,057 per month. 

Between 2023 and 2025, the number of parking tickets handed out across the city of Los Angeles increased by 4.9%. In Boyle Heights, however, the rise was more than three times that — the 60,695 citations dispensed in 2025 was 17.6% more than two years prior, the Crosstown analysis of public parking citation data shows. 

A bar graph showing years 2023 through 2025 where parking tickets increase by year from 51,627 to 60,695.

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Courtesy of Crosstown LA

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That is likely an undercount, as city citation data is not available after Dec. 14, 2025 (the Los Angeles Department of Transportation was unable to identify why this happened or when it will be fixed). Even so, the increase in Boyle Heights surpasses that in some other frequently ticketed neighborhoods. Van Nuys registered an increase of 4.5% during that time, while citations in Hollywood fell by 9.6%.  

Some areas suffered even sharper rises: Tickets in downtown and Koreatown rose 21% and 33.5%, respectively.

Hernan Gabriel, who has lived in Boyle Heights for 10 years, said parking hasn’t always been easy, but tickets have been part of his routine. 

On a recent afternoon, he stood outside his home near Cesar E. Chavez Avenue and Chicago Street, keeping an eye on the time before street sweeping restrictions began.

“This is my first ticket of the year,” Gabriel said, as he pulled a $73 parking ticket from the dashboard of his truck that he received in February.

Hernan Gabriel received a $73 parking violation in February for failing to move his vehicle for street sweeping near Cesar E Chavez Avenue and Chicago Street.

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Laura Anaya-Morga

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Boyle Heights Beat

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But it hasn’t been his only one. In 2023, he racked up over $2,800 in parking tickets while working deliveries downtown.

“Since I received those tickets, I’ve been paying closer attention,” Gabriel said. While he has access to a parking spot at his home, many of his neighbors don’t. 

A disproportionate impact

Not only are tickets increasing in Boyle Heights, but residents are being cited at higher rates than in much of the city. 

People in the neighborhood of roughly 81,000 residents received 60,695 citations last year — about 0.75 tickets per resident. 

Citywide, the rate is significantly lower: 0.48 citations per resident, based on 1.87 million tickets issued across Los Angeles. 

The types of violations also mirror city trends but at higher concentrations.

Approximately one of every four tickets written in Boyle Heights is for parking in a street sweeping zone — a $73 infraction. Last year, 16,776 such tickets were issued.

The second-most frequent infraction is parking in a red zone — a $93 hit. In Boyle Heights, these made up 20.9% of the community’s total, well above the citywide rate of 12.4%.  

A pie chart showing types of parking violations in 2025.

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Courtesy of Crosstown LA

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Stephanie Sanchez, a lifelong Boyle Heights resident, has gotten used to the struggle of looking for a spot and avoiding parking tickets.

“It’s expensive,” she said. “I’ve noticed people from a couple blocks away coming to park here or people who live here going a couple blocks away just to park because it is so cramped.”

Last year, Sanchez received five parking tickets totaling over $350. 

“[I could] buy more groceries, lots of things for my day-to-day living. It would help with gas because gas is ridiculous right now,” she said.

What LA officials say

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) said the number of citations issued across L.A. is a “direct result of posted restrictions, driver behavior, and officer staffing.” According to the department, of the 502 traffic officers deployed citywide, 115 serve the Central Division, with 24 officers specifically assigned to Boyle Heights.

In response to community concerns regarding street congestion and parking, LADOT said in a statement, “street improvements require identifying specific locations and coordinating between multiple City departments. LADOT remains committed to collaborative solutions that address the needs of every neighborhood.”

A spokesperson from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office echoed the community’s sentiment about parking issues in the neighborhood and said Jurado is looking into addressing them.

Boyle Heights hot spots 

The most ticketed location in Boyle Heights is Cesar Chavez Avenue and Chicago Street, where 1,070 tickets were dispensed for illegally parking in a bus lane, a $293 infraction. 

Just south is the neighborhood’s second-most ticketed location. A 76-space public parking lot at 249 Chicago St. produced 669 citations in 2025. Most were for an expired meter.

On the stretch of Cesar Chavez between Boyle Avenue and Fickett Street, more than 3,200 bus-lane parking tickets were given out. On a recent visit to the area, there were no easily visible signs warning about bus zone infractions.

No easy fixes in sight 

For many residents, solutions feel limited while the problem gets worse. 

Maria Solis and Orlando Cervantes have lived in Boyle Heights for 30 years and said finding a spot to park in their neighborhood is harder than ever before. After 5 p.m., it is nearly impossible, Cervantes said. 

They suggested limiting how many cars a single person can have. 

Another more obvious solution would be for the city to create more parking lots but that comes with its own problems. “The more parking there is, the more cars you will see,” Solis said.

Sanchez echoed that concern. 

“Theres no space to even create like a parking lot, even then I feel like that would be expensive to pay for a spot,” she said.