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Mayor Bass pushes back on Trump’s vow to make LA 'safe'
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass speaks to President Trump during a briefing in Los Angeles back on Jan. 24, 2025.
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Mandel Ngan
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AFP
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LA's Mayor has this to say about President Trump's latest claim
LA Mayor Karen Bass issued a statement to LAist. Our Kevin Tidmarsh explains the back-and-forth of it all.
Topline:
President Donald Trump said in his State of the Union address he would make L.A. “safe” ahead of the 2028 Olympics — triggering a quick response from Mayor Karen Bass and a fact check: homicides and violent crimes are down in L.A. and nationally, a trend that started before Trump assumed office.
What Trump said: “We’re going to do a good job in Los Angeles,” Trump said Tuesday night. “And Los Angeles is going to be safe, just like Washington, D.C., is now one of the safest cities in the country.”
Mayor Bass’s response: “L.A. is safer than it’s been in decades, including declines in violent crime for the last two years and homicides at a 60-year low,” Bass said in a statement to LAist. “We will be even safer when ICE is out of Los Angeles.”
What the data show: L.A. already has fewer homicides than Washington, D.C., when population differences are calculated in. In 2025, the homicide rate was 5.9 per 100,000 residents, according to data from the Los Angeles Police Department. That’s the lowest homicide rate since 1959. In D.C., there were 127 homicides last year, which means there were roughly 18.3 homicides per 100,000 residents.
The context on Trump’s claims: Fact checks by the New York Times and PolitiFact have found that Trump has made false and misleading claims about crime data in the past, including when he sent the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and took control of the local police there in August 2025.
A national decrease: The causes of any national trend in crime are complex, but violent crime was already trending sharply downward in 2023 and 2024 before Trump assumed office, according to analysis from the Brookings Institution. The same analysis found violent crime started to spike in 2020, during Trump’s first term.
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