Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) Chief Kristin Crowley, the first woman and openly gay person to serve in the position, is facing calls to resign as the destructive wildfires rage on in Southern California.
Crowley has found herself in an awkward situation with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D), who has also received demands to step down, after she said the city “failed” her department and claimed that budget cuts “limited” their ability to respond to “large-scale events.”
The fire chief, who was appointed by then-Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) in 2022, then “disappeared” into a closed-door meeting in Bass’s office last Friday “for so long that they missed an evening news briefing,” the New York Times reported.
Sources close to the situation told the Daily Mail that the mayor summoned Crowley to her office to fire her but said, “Whatever happened in that meeting, minds got changed.”
“[Crowley] was going into the meeting, telling everybody goodbye, because she was told the whole purpose of the meeting was to fire her,” the source told the U.K. outlet.
By the next morning, the Times reported that the chief and the mayor were “projecting a unified front, though the tension was apparent.”
“The chief and I are in lock step,” the mayor, who also entered her role in 2022, said. “And if there are differences that we have, we will continue to deal with those in private.”
Firefighters are still trying to extinguish the nearly 40,000 acres of active wildfires, which have killed at least 27 people since they began on January 7, NBC News reported.
The drama intensified when active and retired LAFD battalion chiefs and administrators wrote a scathing letter demanding that Crowley step down:
Arguing that the chief’s statement that the city “failed” her department was “ill-advised” and “poorly timed,” the coalition of unnamed current and former local fire officials concluded that Crowley has “lost the confidence of the Mayor and more importantly you have lost the confidence of many Chief Officers of the LAFD.”
The group also claimed in the letter that the controversial chief knew about the LAFD’s budget issues before she entered the role but “went along” with the budget cuts, per NewsNation:
Another large portion of criticism directed at the department’s leader stems from the fact that a shift of about 1,000 firefighters were “not on standby” when powerful winds swept through Los Angeles, picking up embers and rapidly spreading the flames, the California Globe reported.
There also were not any additional firetrucks positioned in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood — where the initial major blaze sparked last Tuesday — in advance, the outlet noted.
“Positioning firefighters and equipment near fire zones in significant numbers well in advance during periods of high wildfire danger has long been a key strategy in the department,” said former LAFD assistant chief and current Redondo Beach Fire Department Chief Patrick Butler.
“It’s unfathomable to me how this happened, except for extreme incompetence and no understanding of fire operations,” he said.
Los Angeles County pollster Manny Rodriguez told the Globe that he does not see a scenario where both Crowley and Bass “are still in office by the end of 2025.”
Jesus Christ is King
