Politics
Commentary: For mayoral candidates and all of L.A., here’s the homelessness conversation we must have
Ron, a West L.A. resident, thinks he knows why former reality TV star and political newcomer Spencer Pratt won so much support in his run for mayor.
People are frustrated, frightened and angry about homelessness “and the crime associated with it,” Ron said in an email. He added that he voted for Mayor Karen Bass, but “almost everything Pratt said about the homeless resonated with me. … The homeless run wild here, without consequence.”
“Many of us support him not because we think he’s perfect,” said Kathy, “but because we are deeply dissatisfied with the direction of Los Angeles and feel that traditional politicians have not delivered the results we were promised.”
Bob, “a left-leaning Palisades resident,” said the issue is not Pratt’s lack of credentials, but the failures of incumbents. “There was a columnist … who documented in depth the situation at MacArthur Park,” Bob wrote in reference to me. “What was his name and what happened to him? Did he change his tune?”
These are all fair points, and if Pratt holds onto one of the top two spots and makes it to the Nov. 3 general election, or he’s overtaken by late-charging Councilmember Nithya Raman, we’re going to hear a lot more about homelessness in coming months.
So whether we’re looking at a Bass-Raman contest or a Bass-Pratt showdown, here are some random musings, and I’ll begin by responding to Bob’s question about whether I have changed my tune.
Not in the least.
The situation in MacArthur Park — targeted Thursday in a crackdown that involved multiple arrests — has long been a disgrace, and the same is true of many other places I’ve written about for the past quarter of a century. Last month, I visited a Hollywood neighborhood where one frustrated resident hired her housekeeper to document chronic problems related to homelessness, illegal dumping and criminal activity.
Residents have good reason to ask why they haven’t gotten better results after responding to politicians’ pleas for more money over the years.
It’s no surprise that Bass had high unfavorability ratings and why, despite leading in the primary vote count, she’ll fall far short of the 50% needed to avoid a second election phase. I still can’t believe that when I first asked her about the sad state of MacArthur Park, she told me she was fully aware, because she often drove through the area on her way to work.
Then why hadn’t she led the charge to address the problems and return the park to the community?
It shouldn’t take months, let alone years, to take back control of public spaces, and Pratt’s criticism is warranted, no doubt. And my main issue is not the hypocrisy of him saying God wants him to be mayor while calling his opponents demonic entities and villainizing homeless people he intends to shoo away to Seattle. It’s that his “fixes” demonstrate a lack of understanding.
Let me make a confession. From one angle or another, I’ve been writing about the intersection of homelessness, mental illness and addiction for a couple of decades, and I still have a lot to learn.
And on a personal note, I lost my son to a drug overdose. He had a job and wasn’t homeless, but like a lot of people who struggle with depression and other demons, he was resistant to help, and even to the idea that he needed help.
There are a lot more substance users like him, living out of public view, than there are on the street. We notice only those who don’t have the means to pay the rent or the mortgage as housing prices rise. So when Pratt says we don’t have a homelessness problem, but a drug problem, he’s missing a critical component in understanding why L.A. has tens of thousands of unsheltered people.
Pratt said on his website that his “treatment first” approach would direct resources into mental health and drug treatment care, which sounds good except that those responsibilities are primarily under county jurisdiction, not city control.
He and others have attacked harm reduction practices, such as distribution of needles and other paraphernalia. And I have to admit that it seems counterintuitive to enable further drug use. But the idea is to prevent death, engage clients and start a relationship that might lead to transformative care.
The county reports that in 2024, fentanyl-related deaths decreased by 37% and meth-related deaths by 20%. Harm reduction can be “absolutely invaluable,” addiction specialist Rick Rawson told me when I was working in MacArthur Park, but we need much more than that.
“When you have someone who becomes so incapacitated that they can’t stand up,” Rawson said, “to say that you’re just going to provide them with harm reduction and hope they don’t die, I think that falls short of the responsibility we have to each other and to the sickest people.”
I’ll add here that I firmly believe we should intervene more aggressively with people who are gravely ill, or are a threat to themselves or others. I recently profiled two San Diegans who are advocating for use of an existing law to allow for deeper evaluations and longer-term treatment plans for people with chronic drug and mental health issues.
It’s worth noting that drug and alcohol rehab is seldom a quick or surefire remedy. As for mental illness, it took me one year, along with the help of trained professionals, to convince my friend Nathaniel to seek help after he’d spent decades on the street following a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
What I’ve found over the years is that many of those living in tents and cars and alleys and parks are damaged in numerous ways.
I’m less inclined to judge people from a distance after having met a man on Skid Row who said he fell apart after his young daughter drowned. I’ve met women who are victims of domestic abuse or sexual assault. People in the grip of killer drugs like meth or fentanyl don’t think as clearly as we’d like them to, and they repeatedly sabotage their own self-interest.
To see people take over public spaces, openly sell or use drugs, lash out and scare those around them is disturbing and sometimes scary. But to say they choose to live on the street, as Pratt has, is to miss the point, to excuse our own complicity, to overlook historic policy failures, and to choose contempt over compassion.
Homelessness can cause mental illness, and mental illness can cause addiction, and vice versa. One condition alone can be difficult to address, but intertwined maladies further complicate matters.
I recently checked in with a guy I wrote about who had been addicted and homeless in Koreatown, and he said his recovery took more than half a year. He was in residential treatment for a few months, then in intensive outpatient treatment. There are no shortcuts, he said.
I’m not here to defend Bass, or Raman and the rest of the City Council, which shares responsibility for the current state of the city. Limited progress has been made in the last 3½ years, with a marginally lower number of homeless people.
But there’s a long way to go in moving people indoors and restoring a sense of order and public safety. The many needs include smarter enforcement of existing laws, faster development of low-cost interim and permanent housing, better coordination of outreach and follow-up services and more people willing to do all of this work.
Let’s hope that in the coming months we’ll get an honest conversation about what’s working, what isn’t, and how to do better.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
A senior House Democrat is joining the growing chorus of critics questioning Senate candidate Graham Platner’s claim that he was unaware of his tattoo’s Nazi origins.
“There’s no way he didn’t know what the tattoo was,” Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., said Friday in remarks reported by Punchbowl News. “Own it and move on.”
“He’s not willing to do that,” Schneider, the chairman of House Democrats’ largest caucus, lamented.
Schneider’s comments make him one of the most high-profile Democrats to criticize the Maine Senate hopeful, who has also faced mounting scrutiny over sending sexually-explicit messages to other women while newly married, a decades-long history of offensive social media posts and alleged abuse in previous romantic relationships.
Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., joined the growing chorus of critics questioning Senate candidate Graham Platner’s claim that he was unaware of his tattoo’s Nazi origins. (Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)
DEMOCRAT CONGRESSMAN SLAMS GRAHAM PLATNER’S NAZI-LINKED TATTOO AS ‘DISQUALIFYING’
Platner, a far-left populist, is vying to unseat Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in one of the most hotly contested races of November’s midterm elections. He is Maine Democrats’ presumptive nominee, though some party insiders have expressed doubts about the viability of his candidacy amid a string of scandals.
Schneider’s public criticism came after The New York Times reported Thursday that several of Platner’s ex-girlfriends said the Senate hopeful knew about his tattoo’s Nazi-linked design.
One of the women, Lyndsey Fifield, told The Times that Platner taught her the words behind the black skull-and-crossbones tattoo, referring to it as “my Totenkopf.”
“He would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo,” Fifield said, adding that Platner said he chose the tattoo because of his belief that his unit shared similarities to the Nazi SS paramilitary forces.
Platner vigorously denied Fifield’s account during an interview with MS NOW’s Chris Hayes on Thursday. But he struggled to answer when pressed about how Fifield sent a text to friends saying he had a Nazi-linked tattoo in August 2025, when he first publicly disclosed it two months later during an October podcast episode of “Pod Save America.”
“How does she know it’s a Nazi tattoo in August of last year, and you don’t know it’s a Nazi tattoo in August of last year?” Hayes asked Platner.
“I can’t say why,” Platner said, adding that he was not a recipient of Fifield’s message. “I certainly didn’t know, and the text messages she’s sending to friends may have recognized it. They didn’t tell me that.”
Fifield also alleged that Platner assaulted her at one point during their relationship — an allegation that Platner said was false.
U.S. Senate candidate from Maine Graham Platner speaks during a campaign event on May 17, 2026, in Portland, Maine. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
GRAHAM PLATNER ACCUSER HITS NYT FOR ALLEGEDLY SOFTENING ALLEGATIONS, SAYS COVERAGE WAS ‘GIFT’ TO DEMOCRAT
Platner has since had the tattoo covered up after it became a campaign issue in late 2025. He wore it for nearly two decades after he said he got it during a night of drinking with his fellow Marines while stationed in Croatia in 2007.
Amid Democrats’ divisions over Platner’s candidacy, Schneider indicated that he would struggle to support him at the ballot box if he were a Maine voter.
“I’ll leave it to the people of Maine to elect who they want,” he said, in remarks reported by Punchbowl News. “I’m grateful I don’t have to make that choice. I wouldn’t want to have to make that choice.”
Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., and Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., have also sharply criticized Platner’s statements related to his since-covered-up tattoo.
“All I’m saying is when I was growing up, if someone had a clear Nazi tattoo on them, you probably could conclude that they’re a Nazi sympathizer,” Fetterman told CNN earlier this week. “Are you going to continue to defend that or dismiss that?”
Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, points to a covered-up tattoo that was previously recognized as a Nazi symbol during an interview in Portland, Maine, on Oct. 22, 2025. (WGME via AP)
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Schneider’s New Democrat Coalition is the largest caucus among House Democrats, with more than 100 members.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Platner campaign before publication.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
President Donald Trump on Friday announced a major expansion of his administration’s initiative aimed at helping Americans access discounted prescription medications.
In a Truth Social post, Trump said the government-backed website TrumpRx.gov has added 160 prescription drugs, bringing the total number of discounted medications available through the program to more than 800.
“I am pleased to announce that TrumpRx.gov is adding another 160 Prescription Drugs, at highly discounted prices, for a new total of over 800 of the most commonly-used Prescription Drugs,” Trump wrote.
“TrumpRx.gov will now provide clear, transparent, and DISCOUNTED offerings for FOUR OUT OF FIVE of every prescription filled by Americans,” he added.
TRUMP ENDS BIDEN’S DRUG PRICE NIGHTMARE — AMERICANS GET REAL RELIEF WITH TRUMPRX
President Donald Trump announced an expansion of the TrumpRx program, which the administration says will provide discounted pricing on more than 800 prescription drugs. (Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP)
Trump unveiled the initiative in February, arguing that Americans have long paid more for prescription drugs than consumers in many other countries.
The website was launched after the administration finalized agreements with 16 major pharmaceutical companies under so-called “most-favored-nation” pricing arrangements.
Under the agreements, participating drugmakers received tariff-related exemptions while agreeing to lower prices for certain medications and extend discounted pricing to eligible cash-paying consumers through TrumpRx, according to the administration.
MARK CUBAN SHOOTS DOWN PRESIDENTIAL BID AS HE TEAMS UP WITH TRUMP ADMIN TO CUT HEALTHCARE COSTS
Shelves with prescription drugs inside a pharmacy in Los Angeles, California, US, on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025. (Eric Thayer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Companies including Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are participating in the program and have agreed to reduce prices on popular GLP-1 weight-loss medications.
Administration officials have also highlighted discounts on a range of other products, including inhalers, HIV treatments, diabetes medications and fertility drugs.
TrumpRx.gov allows users to search for discounted medications, view estimated savings and generate coupons for participating prescriptions.
SOARING MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG PRICES TARGETED IN TRUMP’S NEW EXECUTIVE ORDER
The Trump administration launched TrumpRx.gov, a website designed to direct patients to drugmakers’ websites. (Trump RX)
Trump said the initiative builds on efforts from his first term to reduce prescription drug costs.
“I was proud to make History during my First Term when we lowered Drug Prices, even if by a tiny percentage, because this amounted to a HUGE change compared to other presidents only raising Drug Prices, endlessly and significantly, every year,” Trump wrote.
“Then, during my Second Term, I decided to go BIG with Most Favored Nations Pricing — That is to say, we pay no more or, ideally, less than any other Country for the same exact Drug,” he continued. “Now we are cutting Prices, and cutting them by a LOT, sometimes by 400 or 500 or 600 Percent!”
HERE’S HOW TRUMP’S TARIFFS ON CHINA COULD IMPACT DRUG PRICING AND OTHER HEALTHCARE COSTS
President Donald Trump speaks about TrumpRx in the South Court Auditorium of the Old Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus in Washington on Feb. 5, 2026, as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz listens. (AP Images)
Trump also claimed the program has generated significant savings for consumers.
“These Most Favored Nations Deals have already, in fact, saved American Patients over 400 Million Dollars since the launch of TrumpRx.gov,” he said.
The president further argued that tariffs played a key role in securing the pricing agreements.
“Of course, Most Favored Nations would not be possible without my use of TARIFFS, which are getting other Countries to ‘pay up’ instead of relying on American Patients getting ripped off, as they were for decades until I ordered an immediate ‘stop’ to this very unfair and, frankly, foolish situation,” Trump wrote.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
“This is all great news, and I have instructed my Administration to secure more Most Favored Nations Deals, more Partnerships, and Lower Prices for every American Patient,” he added.
Fox News Digital’s Emma Bussey contributed to this report.
Since election night in California, a single theory of election fraud has taken root like no other — not just among online conspiracy theorists or bot accounts, but among major conservative influencers and people close to President Trump.
Late on election night, an update of vote counts in the Los Angeles mayor’s race appeared on election results pages of various media outlets including the Los Angeles Times.
It showed leading Democrats Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman receiving tens of thousands of new votes, and leading Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt receiving no new votes.
Close observers of the vote tally immediately took screenshots, with some shouting fraud. Others ran statistical analyses that showed it would be impossible for a candidate such as Pratt — running second in the race — to receive zero votes in such a large batch of ballots.
-
Share via
“They’re not even trying to hide the fraud anymore,” wrote Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one-time member of Trump’s inner circle.
The claim fit into the broader narrative being pushed relentlessly by Trump and other Republicans in recent days, that California Democrats were cheating.
But the discrepancy in the Tuesday vote count in the mayor’s race was not fraud.
What attracted far less attention than the update with zero Pratt votes was another update one minute later that showed tens of thousands of votes for Pratt, and none for Bass or Raman.
There was no batch of votes that included zero votes for any candidate, as Los Angeles County’s own data show plainly.
But voting data pushed out by the Associated Press came as two separate updates one minute apart, with Bass’ and Raman’s votes in the first and Pratt’s in the second.
“The AP vote count receives updates as provided by election officials and adds them to our vote count. What happened in this case is that there was a lag in an automated update such that some candidates’ votes were added in one update and the other candidates followed about a minute later,” the Associated Press said in a statement to The Times.
“Specifically, an electronic update from the Los Angeles County website pulled in votes for only one group of candidates, including Karen Bass and Nithya Raman. Exactly one minute later, the electronic update picked up the votes for another group of candidates including Spencer Pratt. Taken together, the updates included 21,870 votes for Pratt, 12,850 votes for Bass and 9,521 votes for Raman, along with votes for other candidates.”
The Times’ election results page relies on the AP’s data feed, and checks for updates once a minute.
According to a Times review of election night results data, The Times pulled data from the AP’s feed at approximately 8:35 p.m. that included 0 new votes for Pratt and eight other candidates. When The Times’ system next checked for new numbers a minute later, there was an update with votes for Pratt but no new votes for Raman, Bass and others.
Michael Sanchez, a spokesperson for Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office, said he could not speak for how news outlets report county data, but that he could confirm there were no batches of votes that included zero votes for Pratt.
“It is false,” he said of that narrative. “In every single result update that we released on election night and since election night, he has received votes,” Sanchez said.
Justin Grimmer, a political science professor at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who researches and evaluates claims of election fraud, conducted his own data analysis of the vote updates, and came to the same conclusion.
He said there was an initial update with no Pratt votes, but a second one 41 seconds later with no votes for Bass or Raman — leading him to believe the single batch of ballots was just reported in two back-to-back updates rather than one.
“Because they came so close together, it looks like it was just a sequence of updates,” he said.
Grimmer said news outlets are “thinking about speed” and the best way to get people the most accurate information as quickly as possible, but “haven’t quite adjusted to being in this world where there’s this group of people who monitor these data feeds as if they are official government reports.”
“It leads to these horrible tweets about there being evidence of fraud,” he said.
Grimmer said he operates under the “mantra” that such fraud claims can’t be dismissed “by mere assertion” that the fraud didn’t happen, but must be looked into — which is why he dived into the data in the first place. This claim, he said, was similar to claims about odd-seeming vote tallies that were made during and after the 2020 election of Joe Biden over Trump, so he was familiar with how to look into the data.
“You can just go to the source code for the page, and then you can find where the sort of feed is, and that’s all I did — just found the feed, downloaded it, and then just saw what the updates were,” he said.
Grimmer said it was not surprising to him that people were watching the data feeds come in closely enough to notice an apparent discrepancy in the data that lasted less than a minute.
“There is a group of individuals who are convinced that there’s lots of fraud going on in U.S. elections, and for whatever reason, this group is convinced that they’re gonna uncover this by careful monitoring of these data feeds and the data that is being reported,” he said.
Grimmer said he would not presume to tell news outlets how to do their job of delivering election results quickly in the future, but does hope they balance the need to move quickly with “this reality that their feeds are now being monitored by individuals who think that they’re able to discover instances of fraud from what’s happening in the feeds.”
Sanchez reiterated that the county’s own official results of votes have been accurate — saying that “at no point” did the county office “report an official results update in which Pratt received zero votes.”
-
Lifestyle6 minutes agoTaylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Wedding: Try Our Fantasy Wedding Planner
-
Technology16 minutes agoMeta made its own AI-generated clickbait news feed
-
World21 minutes agoJeff Bartos says UN reform is no longer an ‘oxymoron’ after $570M in cuts
-
Politics28 minutes agoTop House Democrat says there’s ‘no way’ Platner didn’t know tattoo’s Nazi origins
-
Health31 minutes agoCan alkaline water actually improve your health? Experts separate fact from fiction
-
Sports36 minutes agoMaxx Crosby plans to attend America 250 UFC fight, talks White House, Fernando Mendoza, Tom Brady and Olympics
-
Technology43 minutes agoA wheeled robot may beat humanoids into your home
-
Business46 minutes agoCalifornia falls behind Texas in Fortune 500 ranking
