Do we like them?

Do we like Karen Bass?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent and on the right side of the harm test, but a contested fire-report story and a lost re-election keep her short of the top.

Karen Bass came to the mayor's office after a long run in Congress, where she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus. Nationally, she's best known for the police reform bill she drafted in 2020 with senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris after the killing of George Floyd. That's the through-line of her career: working inside the system to try to fix it.

The story that dogged her this year started in February, when the LA Times reported, citing two sources, that she allegedly altered an after-action report on the January 2025 wildfires. The allegation was that she wanted language softened about failures to staff and deploy resources before the fire. Her office says she only asked the fire department to check accuracy, that she and her staff made no changes to the drafts, and it called the reporting “muckraking journalism at its lowest form.”

Then there's the sacked fire chief. Kristin Crowley has sued the city alleging retaliation over her firing, and later filed a second suit accusing Bass of defamation. Bass's office has called the first suit meritless, and the City Council earlier voted 13-2 to uphold the firing. None of it has been decided in court, so it stays in the allegation pile for now.

On the harm check, we found nothing nasty. No remarks against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet turned up, and the company she keeps is mainstream Democrat politics. She backed the city suing the Trump administration over immigration raids in 2025, and she visited the TransLatin@ Coalition in 2024. That coalition welcomed the visit but said it must lead to concrete action. Honestly, her trans-specific record is thin, and we could find no big policy fights either way.

The campaign itself got scrappy. In the August debate, Raman said Bass had spent $400 million on Inside Safe and refused audits. Bass hit back on policing, telling her “You have a lot of nerve talking about the hiring of police officers.” Bass disputed the cost figures and credited Inside Safe with falling homelessness in Raman's district.

The good stuff is more modest than the headlines. Drafting the Justice in Policing Act took real effort, and showing up to a trans advocacy group's offices is a real gesture. But we couldn't verify a long list of charity or personal-cost stands, so we're not going to gush.