The Brief

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.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Homeless outreach workers are now roaming daily across the Eastside, including Boyle Heights, to provide hygiene kits and tents and connect unhoused residents to temporary housing.

The effort is part of a new year-long program launched last Thursday by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, which works in partnership with Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that provides services to unhoused people.

The program — Leading Outreach with Valued Engagement, or LOVE — will be in effect through March 2027. The program costs $300,000 and is funded through Jurado’s discretionary funds. The team is made up of three people, which includes two on-the-ground outreach practitioners and a third person directing their operations.

Boyle Heights has seen a recent rise in homeless encampment reports. In the first quarter of 2025, 635 encampments were reported in Boyle Heights, compared with 379 during the same period in 2024, according to an analysis by The Eastsider.

Homeless encampments were also a source of discussion at January’s Community Police Advisory Board hosted by the Hollenbeck Community Police Station. 

Attendees expressed frustration about unhoused people living in an alley behind the Benjamin Franklin Library and a growing encampment near Hollenbeck Drive and South Boyle Avenue, according to a summary of the meeting. 

Encampments move from one place to another, said Susana Betancourt, a member of the Community Police Advisory Board. Betancourt talked about pressuring property owners to clean up. “They not only have tents, the encampments there, but they put their vehicles,” she said.

Jurado, in a statement to Boyle Heights Beat, said her office works with service providers “to respond to encampments thoughtfully.”

“We coordinate every two weeks to prioritize areas of greatest need, making sure neighbors get consistent support and that unhoused residents are connected to housing, health care, and other services,” she said. 

Jurado touts the new program as giving unhoused residents better access to “life-saving health care, stable housing, [and] pathways to recovery.” The LOVE program, Jurado said, will help “reach neighbors before situations become emergencies.”

“Addressing homelessness isn’t one-size-fits-all. I invested in the LOVE Team because every person’s needs are different,” Jurado said. “The team is out in the community every day, visiting every neighborhood in the district each week, building trust, and connecting neighbors to housing, health care, and support services that help them regain stability.”

Outreach workers are tasked with providing crisis intervention and de-escalation, assessing individual needs and connecting people to interim housing referrals. They will also distribute food and Narcan, as well as offer “post-placement follow-up to help people remain housed.”

Jurado said workers will exclusively offer daily outreach to CD 14 neighborhoods, which include El Sereno, Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights, Eagle Rock, Highland Park and downtown Los Angeles. 

Mason Santa Maria, a spokesperson for Jurado, said outreach workers have already identified unhoused residents who are not yet logged into the Homeless Management Information System, an online database tracking services accessed by people who are unhoused or at risk of homelessness. 

“It’s hard to keep track of people when they don’t have a stable address,” Santa Maria said. “This is a way to keep track of them.”

The post Outreach team hits Eastside streets with health kits and housing referrals for unhoused residents appeared first on LA Local.

Los Angeles County broke ground Friday on a project that will bring dozens of new mental health beds and supportive housing to the sprawling, 110-year-old Metropolitan State Hospital campus in Norwalk.

Led by Supervisor Janice Hahn, the project includes a renovation of some of the decaying buildings on the site into 32 treatment beds within locked facilities. The $65 million in funding comes from Proposition 1, the state’s mental health funding bond passed in 2024.

“One of the biggest challenges we face in Los Angeles County right now is that we simply do not have enough places where people can get the compassionate, professional mental health care that they need,” Hahn said before the groundbreaking.

In all, county leaders plan to have 162 beds at the so-called Mental Health Care Campus, ranging from locked psychiatric beds to permanent supportive housing.

California State Senator Bob Archuleta (L) and LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn stand in front of a rendering of a remodeled bedroom at the Metropolitan State Hospital Campus in Norwalk.

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Robert Garrova

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LAist

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Hahn said part of the idea is to get help for people who have been cycling out of emergency rooms and incarceration.

“This Care Village really is a big step forward showing people that there’s a different way that we can get help to the people who need it most,” she told LAist.

At a meeting last year, county supervisors voted to sign off on a lease with the state for a 13-acre portion of the campus. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill from Sen. Bob Archuleta in 2024 that cleared the way for the lease.

One of the buildings that will be renovated into supportive housing at the Metropolitan State Hospital campus in Norwalk.

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Robert Garrova

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LAist

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The historic site 

Run by the state, the psychiatric hospital opened in 1916 and at its peak housed thousands of patients. These days, with its 162 acres, overgrown grass and boarded up buildings, the place feels mostly abandoned.

Some of the buildings feature large windows that architectural mock ups provided by the county show will remain intact, allowing light to flow into large indoor communal spaces. Officials have also said the plan is to preserve the architectural features of the buildings, which have historical landmark status.

The interior in one of the future 16-bed facilities at the Metropolitan State Hospital.

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Robert Garrova

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Laist

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What’s next

The plan is to bring several levels of care together on one campus. In all, the project calls for renovating six of the buildings on the site.

That includes:

• 32 locked psychiatric care beds, which will serve young adults between 18-25 who have acute mental health needs.
• 70 interim housing beds and short-term housing with on-site mental health services.
• 60 permanent supportive Housing apartments. These will be reserved for adults with serious mental illness who were previously unhoused.

The county’s plan also includes a shared community building with a kitchen and communal dining space.

The county estimates the interim housing will be completed late next year, with the locked beds coming in early 2028. The county did not yet have a timeline for the permanent supportive housing beds.

Long Beach residents can now receive harm reduction supplies like fentanyl test strips and overdose reversal medication for free — in the mail.

This represents an expansion of the city’s harm reduction program, launched in December 2023, which already offers in-person pick-up of supplies at several locations. More than two years later, the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services has distributed over 6,500 doses of Narcan — an opioid overdose reversal medication — and over 21,000 test kits to check for fentanyl and xylazine — a veterinary tranquilizer that has made its way into the illicit drug supply.

Mailing supplies will allow the Health Department to reach more and different people, said Ish Salamanca, with the Health Department. The hours and locations of the department’s distribution sites don’t work for everyone, Salamanca said. And discreetly delivering the kits by mail allows the city “to reach folks who might feel a little stigmatized” picking up supplies in person.

In a November 2024 city council meeting, council members recommended expanding access to harm reduction resources in order to address what Councilwoman Suely Saro called “the crisis of our time.”

“We don’t want to take our eye off the ball on fentanyl and opioids,” Mayor Rex Richardson said in the meeting.

Months later, council members allocated $70,000 from the California Opioid Settlements, a pool of money from pharmaceutical companies and others found responsible for fueling the opioid epidemic, to fund a pilot program to mail fentanyl detection kits to 5,000 residents.

Now that pilot program is live. Within hours of the launch, Salamanca said he had received 30 requests to mail kits, compared to the five to ten requests that come in daily for in-person pick up.

Preliminary data show that fentanyl-related overdose deaths are declining in Long Beach, which the Health Department partially attributes to expanded prevention efforts, and free testing and overdose reversal supplies.

Yet non-fatal overdoses are “not dropping as much as I would want them to,” Salamanca said. And while the city’s efforts have been focused on people experiencing homelessness and using substances, he is also “seeing folks overdosing at their homes or residences,” he said, according to data from first responders.

Despite all the inroads Salamanca and his team have made, “there’s a huge hurdle that we’re about to have to overcome, which is stigma,” he said, describing future plans to hold workshops and presentations in settings ranging from high schools to senior living facilities. While the focus on fentanyl has increased awareness of its dangers, Salamanca called for broader, more transparent conversations on substance use and access to resources.

Long Beach residents can order (and customize) harm reduction kits from the Health Department and access resources here.