Photo credit: Eric Leonard
Los Angeles Mayoral candidate Mitchell Schwartz says Mayor Eric Garcetti appears to be hiding from a public discussion of the City’s rising crime rate in the weeks before the primary election.
"The crime stats are not good and he’s got a mayoral race election coming up in two weeks and he doesn’t want to talk about any bad news,” Schwartz said.
2016 ended with double-digit increases in violent and property crime, according to the LAPD, which released the numbers several weeks ago.
2017 is the first year in at least two decades in which an L.A. mayor and police chief failed to hold a news briefing about the last year’s statistics, according to KFI and news agency archives.
Garcetti told KFI NEWS it was up to the LAPD to schedule a briefing on the year end numbers and he would have appeared had he been invited.
"I don’t know, you’d have to ask the Police Department, I come to their thing,” Garcetti told KFI News reporter Andrew Mollenbeck.
The number of violent and property crimes reported to the LAPD increased at a lower rate in 2016 than in 2015, the total increases for the last two years are significant.
"This isn’t a small uptick,” Schwartz said. “Three straight years of violent crime increases, almost a 40-percent increase in violent crime in the last two years alone.”
Schwartz has called for an expansion of the LAPD by another 2,500 officers - an increase LAPD Chiefs have called for since William Bratton held the office.
Garcetti addressed the rising violent crime rate at a news conference last June, in which he endorsed plans to assign more officers to the roving Metropolitan Division and create specialized domestic violence units at each police station.
— Eric Leonard (@LeonardFiles)