Developing: LA Fire Chief Reportedly Says She Is Going to Be Fired After No-Holds-Barred Interview, Mayor's Office Denies
The chief of Los Angeles’ fire department says she was going to be fired by the mayor in the middle of the catastrophic blazes that have killed at least 11 and burned thousands of buildings to the ground.
The reason? She told the truth about what Democrat Mayor Karen Bass had done to the fire department.
According to both Fire Chief Kristin Crowley and Bass’ office, she’s still on the job — but that allegedly wasn’t to be the case after a Friday afternoon interview with KTTV-TV.
During the interview, the station’s Gigi Graciette asked Crowley if the city had failed her.
“Yes,” she said, referencing the cuts to funding that Bass’ office had made.
“We are screaming to be properly funded to make sure that our firefighters can do their jobs so that we can serve the community,” she said.
“Since day one, we’ve identified huge gaps in regard to our service delivery and our ability of our firefighters’ boots on the ground to do their jobs since day one.”
“This is no longer sustainable,” she added.
“So when you talk about sounding the alarm and asking and requesting budgets that are easily justifiable based off of the data, real data shows what the fire department needs to serve this beautiful city and the beautiful community that we swore that we would. That’s what that is about.”
Full interview here, if you want to sift through it:
This was enough that Crowley thought she was going to be dismissed, “telling everybody goodbye, because she was told the whole purpose of the meeting was to fire her,” a source within the office said, according to a report by the U.K. Daily Mail.
“When she was summoned into the meeting, it was with the direct purpose to fire her,” the source said. “Whatever happened in that meeting, minds got changed.
“Either Bass realized it would be suicide to fire her, and came to her senses, or Crowley talked her out of it.”
Whatever the case, she came back Friday evening telling her people that she was “not fired yet.”
The mayor’s office also came back with a statement calling reports that Crowley had been fired “false.”
“The Mayor and Chief met. The priority remains fighting these fires and protecting Angelenos,” the statement read.
Whatever the case, it seems that people in Los Angeles’ power structure seem genuinely shocked that Crowley had the effrontery to tell the truth about a rudderless city.
If you haven’t seen the clips of Bass and the LAFD that she engendered before the fires, or how the mayor has dealt with the situation since the blazes broke out, it’s a truly astounding thing.
Start with the fact that she was in the country of Ghana — not part of her constituency, last I checked — as part of a delegation when the blaze broke out, despite the fact ample warning was given by the National Weather Service that a high-wind event was going to create the perfect conditions for blazes in drought-stricken Southern California.
When she returned, she didn’t feel anyone deserved answers, apparently:
‘Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent whilst their homes were burning? Do you regret cutting the fire department’s budget?
@skydavidblevins questions the mayor of LA, Karen Bass, as she faces backlash regarding the California wildfires.https://t.co/Nkz8onjC7V pic.twitter.com/WwRwp6Imqz— Sky News (@SkyNews) January 8, 2025
Then there were the clips of what the LAFD is spending its insufficient resources on: woke culture as opposed to, you know, fighting fires. In fact, one LAFD fighter admitted as much, saying that it was more important to have someone that looked like you responding to a fire and saying that if your husband needed saving, he shouldn’t have gotten himself into trouble in the first place. (Seriously.)
LA County recently posted this video on how they make their firefighters train in cultural inclusivity, equity, diversity pic.twitter.com/nvB3RRjTQK
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 8, 2025
The scariest part of this woke nonsense is when she admits she’s not strong enough to carry a man out of a fire, but it’s really the man’s fault for being in that situation to begin with.
— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) January 9, 2025
Yet, we’re supposed to be upset that Crowley went on TV and noted the LAFD had “identified huge gaps in regard to our service delivery and our ability of our firefighters’ boots on the ground to do their jobs,” but that the city did nothing about them?
“We know we need 62 new fire stations. We need to double the size of our firefighters,” she said. “The growth of this city since 1960 has doubled, and we have less fire stations.”
We’re supposed to be upset that she said this and not about the fact that it’s part of the reason the response to the fires has been anemic at best?
This is what you voted for, Angelenos. I’m not saying Crowley herself is perfect, but at least she understands that part of responding to this disaster is to rightly call out those who mismanaged the city into this state. For this, she apparently was going to get fired.
Karen Bass, notable praiser of the Castro regime in Cuba, is apparently taking a page out of the communist handbook. Remember, in the lead-up to the Nazi invasion of the USSR, Joseph Stalin purged his most adept generals because he considered them insufficiently ideologically aligned with him — thus hampering the Soviet reaction to the attack.
If the reports about Crowley are to be believed, Bass wanted to can her for stating the facts. What a telling sign of a failed leader.
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