The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents LAPD officers up to the rank of lieutenant, spent $9.3 million on city races this year through committees it sponsors. About $8 million of it was spent on the losing side. The biggest share by far, $7.4 million, paid for ads against Nithya Raman, who beat the union’s choice, Karen Bass, for mayor and takes office in December.
John McKinney, the union’s pick for city attorney, lost to Marissa Roy by more than 370,000 votes, and Tim Gaspar, its pick in the West Valley’s 3rd District, trails Barri Worth Girvan by 2,332 votes with most ballots counted. Girvan has declared victory. The union’s biggest win came in the Westside’s 11th District, where it spent about $916,000 helping Traci Park keep her seat. Its one race still open is in South LA’s 9th District, where its pick, Jose Ugarte, leads Estuardo Mazariegos by 347 votes.
On top of the $9.3 million, the union gave $2 million to the campaign against Measure FD, a half-cent sales tax for the Fire Department that’s passing with about 54% of the vote. Outside donors put about $2 million into the union’s committees, $1.5 million of it from the Westside landlord Douglas Emmett.
The contract
The union’s current contract with the city, known as MOU 24, expires at midnight on June 26, 2027. Since Oct. 1, either side can formally ask to open talks on the next one, and bargaining starts whenever both agree. That puts the negotiations in Raman’s first months in office, when she also has to write her first budget, due April 20.
The City Administrative Officer estimated the 2023 contract would cost $994 million over four years. This fiscal year, its last, it adds about $384 million to officers’ pay. On Aug. 23, 2023, the council approved it 12-3, with Raman voting no alongside Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez. She argued that the cost “potentially prevents us from being able to build out an alternative response.”
This year LAPD’s own budget is about $2.1 billion of the city’s $14.9 billion, and it pays for 510 recruits meant to hold the force near 8,555 officers. Raman has said she doesn’t want the department to shrink from its current size, and she campaigned on sending unarmed crisis teams to every neighborhood. She’d pay for those teams out of the same city budget as the next raises. Any multiyear contract would also run through the 2028 Olympics.
Public comment
The city’s negotiators work for the City Administrative Officer and bargain in private, taking instructions in closed session from the Executive Employee Relations Committee, which is made up of the mayor and council leaders. Its meetings don’t appear on the city clerk’s public calendar.
Once officers ratify a tentative deal, the City Administrative Officer files a cost report and the contract text with the city clerk under a council file number. From there it goes to the council’s personnel committee and then the full council, where anyone can speak during public comment, in person or by phone, or send written comment to the file online. Neighborhood councils can submit community impact statements, which go into the record. In 2023 the report and contract were posted on Aug. 18, and the committee and the full council both approved the deal five days later.
The contract bars both the union and the city’s negotiators from asking councilmembers to add or drop anything while the council considers a deal, so by the time one is filed its terms are mostly set. Residents who want a say before then can contact the mayor’s office and the council leaders on the bargaining committee, who set the city’s instructions while talks are underway.
Sources. Spending comes from City Ethics Commission filings through Nov. 6 by the committees the League sponsors. Contract dates are from the text of MOU 24, and costs are from the City Administrative Officer’s 2023 report.