Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said Wednesday he was proud of his six-year tenure as leader of the nation’s second-largest police department, even as critics faulted him for failing to advance much-needed reforms.
Moore has announced his retirement, effective at the end of February.
In an appearance on LAist’s AirTalk program, Moore said he thought it was the “right time” to retire — just a year after his appointment by Mayor Karen Bass to a second five-year term. He said he wanted to spend more time with his family and that he was moving to Tennessee where his daughter lives.
“I have a department that I am quite proud of,” Moore said. “I’ll miss the ability to brag about the great work that our men and women go out and do every day.”
Moore, 63, acknowledged the troubled history of the department, where he spent more than 42 years of his policing career.
“We represent the very best in policing and unfortunately we have also had some of the darkest moments in this profession … and the lasting impact that still has on communities is something a chief needs to be mindful of.”
Asked about allegations by one of his own detectives that he may have ordered an investigation into Mayor Karen Bass regarding a scholarship she received from USC, Moore responded bluntly: “It's a lie.”
Moore also sharply criticized a report by City Controller Kenneth Mejia that found most of the helicopter flight time from fiscal years 2018 through 2022 wasn’t connected to high-priority crimes. He said he believed Mejia’s report was colored by a “bias” against the LAPD.
Mejia has defended his report and said “some transportation and ceremonial flights were an inefficient, inappropriate use of city funds.”
Moore touts accomplishments
During the Wednesday morning interview, Moore hailed what he saw as some of his biggest accomplishments. “We just closed the year — the second year in a row — with a reduction in violent crime.”
According to department data, violent crime — including homicide, rape and robbery — is down 1.2% from two years ago.
When he announced his retirement at a Friday news conference, Moore said he’d had success “across a broad spectrum of topics unmatched by any other law enforcement agency in the county.” Among his accomplishments, he has touted limits on officers’ use of pretextual traffic and pedestrian stops, efforts to diversify the department and the creation of a new Community Safety Partnership Bureau.
Moore has called the bureau “the evolution of community-driven policing.” Under the community safety partnership model, officers are assigned to housing projects for several years to focus on community safety through problem-solving rather than arrests.
Rice not a fan of Moore
But the woman who was one of the driving forces behind the model gave Moore low marks, despite the creation of the bureau.
“I think Michel Moore is a great example of a spectacular enforcement chief who didn’t really like a lot of the progress that had been made under community policing,” civil rights attorney Connie Rice told LAist.
She said Moore “took the department back to those days” when the focus was on arrests.
At the same time, Rice said, Moore was chief “at a very difficult time.”
“I think it was hard to be a chief anywhere because of the pandemic and because of the George Floyd protests,” she said.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets in L.A. and around the country in the summer of 2020 as a reaction not only to Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis on May of that year, but to speak out against the killings of Black and brown people by law enforcement and call for significant police reform.
Moore took a knee
The demonstrations produced a moment that left many of Moore’s own officers with a bad taste in their mouth. To this day, many remain offended that he took a knee with protesters.
The protests also produced what many see as one of the LAPD’s biggest failures under Moore. An independent report found the department was ill-prepared and in disarray during the early intense days of summer protests, leading to improper use of force against peaceful protesters and unlawful detentions of thousands of demonstrators.
Advocates of police reform expressed an array of concerns about Moore’s tenure, including three killings by officers involving people in apparent mental health crises during the first three weeks of 2023. One was the killing of Keenan Anderson, a mentally ill man who went into cardiac arrest after officers repeatedly tased him in a Venice intersection.
“I have not seen meaningful reform under Moore,” said Tim Williams, a former detective with the LAPD’s elite Robbery Homicide Division who is now a police use-of-force expert. Williams said he hopes the new chief will eliminate a lingering “us-versus-them mentality” within the department toward the community.
Moore won praise from a range of police leaders after he announced his retirement, including former Chief Charlie Beck, who told the Los Angeles Times Moore “did a very difficult job very well.”
What’s next
Because of its prominence, the position of LAPD chief is one of the most coveted in law enforcement.
“The LAPD chief is a person that agencies nationwide and really worldwide look to,” said Emily Owens, professor of criminology at UC Irvine. She hopes the new chief of the department will take seriously identifying strategies that both reduce crime and end racial and other disparities in policing.
“That could be revolutionary,” Owens said.
Under the charter, people who want to be chief submit their applications to the city personnel department, which then forwards the names of at least six qualified candidates to the civilian police commission. That panel then provides the mayor with three candidates ranked in order of preference. The mayor can pick from those three or ask for more names.
Because the mayor appoints the police commission, she essentially picks the next chief.
Rice said candidates from around the country are already contacting her for information about the process and the department.
“The campaigns are on,” she said.
Moore told LAist he’s looking forward to moving on.
“I want to value the next 10, 20, 30 years — whatever God gives me — in my life and spend it with the people who have given me so much and supported me,” he said, referring to his wife and daughter.
