Real Safety

Los Angeles calls itself a sanctuary city, but that promise remains unfulfilled. Federal agents can access private City data, coordinate with local police, and tear families apart without warning. The City’s broken shield only appears after people are already in danger. Our City’s lack of a proactive plan leaves over a million members of our community at risk of being abducted. 

It is time for the City to live up to its claim. As mayor, Rae will end LAPD's collaboration with federal immigration enforcement. That means appointing Police Commission members who will prohibit officers from honoring administrative ICE warrants, close the SB 54 loophole that allows jail staff to tip off ICE about release dates, and, if necessary, withdraw LAPD from the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, as Portland did in 2019.

She will stop your tax dollars from funding businesses that contract with ICE or CBP, through changes to procurement standards, executive directives, and, where necessary, vetoes of non-compliant contracts.

Los Angeles will also guarantee universal legal representation for any Angeleno facing deportation, regardless of immigration history or ability to pay. That means dedicated City funding, removal of criminality exclusions from legal service contracts, and appointing a Right to Counsel Coordinator within the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs to connect residents with legal advocates before they can be transferred to federal custody.

Unlike past mayors, Rae will turn community resistance into official City policy by directly funding and partnering with the thousands of brave Angelenos who have already stepped up to protect their neighbors. She will champion City-funded citizen observers to monitor federal actions and the creation of a City-run platform for uploading footage of misconduct to a civilian review board, ensuring your grassroots efforts finally have the full weight of the Mayor’s Office behind them.

Every time an Angeleno drives past a Flock camera, dropping a kid at school or heading to work, their movements are logged into a national network shared with thousands of agencies. This creates a "digital dragnet" where AI contractors like Palantir link your location to your tax records, utility bills, and social media to build a searchable, predictive map of your private life. By bypassing the need for a warrant, these companies are effectively building secret dossiers on our neighbors, operating with zero civilian oversight and violating our City's own laws.

As mayor, Rae will conduct the first-ever audit of contractor compliance with current data protection policies to ensure private vendors are not facilitating a 'backdoor' for federal agencies to bypass City law. Without a rigorous, independent review of these digital contracts, Los Angeles risks inadvertently subsidizing the very surveillance infrastructure that compromises the constitutional rights of its residents. 

Rae will prohibit all City departments, including the LAPD, from purchasing personal data from third-party aggregators to bypass our Fourth Amendment. This policy ends the practice of using taxpayer funds to buy access to privatized databases of location history and utility records that would otherwise require a judicial warrant. 

Rae will terminate the City's contracts with Flock Safety and other data brokers to stop the automated tracking of residents' daily movements. By enacting a binding Municipal Surveillance Contractor Ordinance, Rae will require a judge’s warrant before any City data is shared with outside law enforcement agencies. This move ensures that private technology companies can no longer bypass our local laws to facilitate mass surveillance across state lines.

Rae will leverage the California Delete Act to protect residents from identity theft and AI-driven scams by making data removal a City priority. Starting with Los Angeles’s 50,000 employees, Rae will provide the training and tools necessary to scrub personal information from predatory broker databases. By using the mayoral bully pulpit, Rae will lead a public campaign to ensure all Angelenos know how to exercise their legal right to delete their digital footprint and secure their private lives.

Rae will establish a civilian AI Accountability Commission with subpoena power to oversee how City departments and private tech firms use resident data. This commission ensures that as AI technology evolves, the public has a direct seat at the table to investigate and block invasive surveillance practices. By giving citizens the power to demand transparency, we ensure that new technology serves the community instead of secretively tracking it.

Real safety begins when we stop using armed law enforcement to manage non-violent social crises like homelessness, substance use, and at-risk youth. This outdated approach only creates dangerous escalations and diverts police from investigating serious crimes. Previous City leaders shied away from the structural reforms needed to solve these problems. Instead, they hung on to the same failed solutions, while ignoring the structural neglect that created these crises in the first place.

Rae will deliver transformative change by establishing a permanent Department of Community Safety to replace the fragmented approach of the past. This new department will serve as a centralized hub to coordinate and deliver care-first, community-focused interventions at the scale required to finally meet the safety needs of every Los Angeles neighborhood.

Rae will expand the proven Unarmed Model of Crisis Response (UMCR) across all 21 LAPD Areas, ensuring that every neighborhood has 24/7 access to specialized clinicians who successfully resolve 96% of calls without police involvement.

As mayor, Rae will lead a prevention-first approach organized around three pillars: keeping at-risk young people from joining gangs in the first place, supporting current members who want a way out, and reducing recidivism for those returning from incarceration.

That means investing in job training, paid internships, and apprenticeship programs in the neighborhoods most impacted by gang violence — and building real pathways from those programs to stable employment through partnerships with local businesses and community colleges. It means funding community-based organizations that provide mentorship, counseling, and individualized case management, and ensuring every young person has access to positive social networks, leadership development, and safe spaces regardless of their zip code.

Rae will champion community violence interruption teams to stop shootings before they happen by using trusted neighbors who have lived experience. Unlike police who usually arrive after a crime occurs, these teams work around the clock to stop rumors, help victims in the hospital, and keep kids safe on their way to school.

To achieve real public safety, Rae will build coalitions to scale proven initiatives like the Urban Peace Institute’s peacemaking network and Homeboy Industries’ work-therapy model into a permanent, Citywide infrastructure. By transitioning these from temporary pilots to a centrally coordinated municipal system, the City can finally move beyond the failed, high-cost cycles of enforcement and invest in the community-led strategies that actually save lives.

We know that real safety begins with people having their needs met. Crime prevention starts with making sure people are fed, housed, get mental health support, and live in a clean and healthy environment where they have the opportunity to thrive in well-resourced communities. But despite historic taxpayer investments, Los Angeles still lacks resources to help neighbors in a mental crisis or family members who struggle with substance use disorder. Even when resources are available, behavioral health services can be almost impossible to navigate, especially in the moments of crisis when they are most needed. Instead of getting the care they deserve, thousands of Angelenos are left to suffer on the street or caged in a jail.

We must build a centralized, "Care-First" system that puts doctors, specialists, and trained community members where we currently put police. By creating a Department of Community Safety, and a Citywide network of behavioral health stabilization centers, we will replace our fractured network with coordinated, easy-to-reach care that treats mental health and addiction as public health issues, not crimes. We will stop wasting money on failing strategies and instead invest in modern facilities and professional staff that heal our neighbors and keep our streets safe.

Always focused on the people, Rae will redirect funds to hire hundreds of mental health clinicians and launch a specialized academy to train and hire people who have personal experience with mental health or addiction challenges. By turning lived experience into a professional career path, Los Angeles can create a workforce of outreach workers who truly understand the needs of the people they are serving on our streets.

From fires and floods to earthquakes and industrial accidents, Southern California is a uniquely disaster-prone region, a vulnerability now compounded by climate change. The 2025 wildfires showed Los Angeles’s emergency management and response systems are inadequate to meet the needs of people impacted by natural or human-made disasters. As Mayor, Rae will work with communities, developers, utility providers and relevant departments to reduce losses from natural and human made disasters.

When disaster strikes, professional responders will be overwhelmed, leaving neighbors as the true first line of defense for one another. As Mayor, Rae will move beyond the current landscape of timid, opt-in programs and commit to a massive, City-funded mobilization that transforms fragmented volunteerism into organized networks of trained and ready Angelenos.

Starting in the City's Most High Fire Hazard Severity Zones, Rae will direct the LAFD to lead the rapid formation and certification of Firewise USA neighborhood committees. Certified committees can be directly resourced to drive the essential work of home-hardening, fuel reduction, and neighborhood-led evacuation planning. These common-sense interventions provide immediate relief, including lower home insurance premiums and protection against rate hikes, while building the long-term, block-level organization we need to survive the next crisis and hold City Hall accountable.

Following the 2025 wildfires, Los Angeles must stop just reacting to disasters and start building for the future. Rae will launch a new Disaster Recovery Framework that makes it faster and more affordable for families and local businesses to rebuild. By providing clear plans and community-led support, we will ensure that when a neighborhood is hit by a fire or storm, we don't just put things back the way they were, but rebuild stronger and more fire-resistant.

At the same time, Rae will ensure the Los Angeles Fire Department and Emergency Management Department have the full funding they need to do their jobs safely. This means hiring enough staff and buying the best equipment to protect our residents during a crisis. We will also create a new Service Restoration Task Force that brings together City departments and utility companies. This team's sole mission is to get your power, water, and essential services back turned on as quickly as possible after any major emergency.

Los Angeles faces growing risk from heatwaves, catastrophic winds, torrential rainfall, and compounding climate emergencies, and our City government is not equipped to see them coming. Today, the City of Los Angeles has no dedicated meteorological staff. Departments monitor weather independently, but the City is doing the bare minimum in terms of translating forecasts into coordinated operational decisions. During the January 2025 fires, that gap was fatal. Equipment wasn't pre-staged, departments weren't coordinating, and the City was reacting instead of preparing.

Other cities have solved this. New York City employs in-house meteorologists within its emergency management office. Seattle maintains a staff meteorologist and contracts with university forecasting teams. SoCal Edison uses ensemble weather modeling — the same technology used by the National Weather Service — to determine when to initiate preventive power shutoffs before fire conditions peak. But Los Angeles, one of the most climate-exposed cities in the country, has none of this.

As mayor, Rae will establish a City Meteorologist position within the Emergency Management Department, dedicated to translating weather data into actionable guidance for City departments. Rather than simply passing along National Weather Service forecasts, this role will produce impact-based alerts — telling LADWP when to pre-stage repair crews, advising the Bureau of Street Services when to deploy drainage equipment, and coordinating with the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office before conditions deteriorate.

We will also direct the City meteorologist to develop ensemble forecasting capability, giving Los Angeles the same anticipatory tools that utilities and peer cities already use. Weather intelligence is public safety infrastructure. We will treat it that way.

Los Angeles is home to millions of animals, and how we treat them says something about who we are as a City. We believe that animals deserve to be treated with compassion and that the people who care for them deserve support. In the current FY 26 budget, Mayor Bass proposed drastic cuts to the Department of Animal Services. After a massive outcry from animal-loving Angelenos in public comment, some of those cuts were scaled back, but the department’s budget was still cut by $8.2 million dollars, a 13.5% reduction.

Los Angeles has one of the largest municipal shelter systems in the country, and it is shamefully underfunded, representing less than one percent of the City's total budget. The result is a shelter system under serious strain. Rae will fight to adequately fund LA Animal Services and the Animal Sterilization Fund, which has been so severely underfunded for so long that our dog and cat population has grown far beyond what our shelters can absorb. Investing in spay and neuter access now is far less expensive than managing the consequences of not doing so later.

We also know that people surrender animals not because they stop caring, but because the finances and logistics become too difficult. In particular, it can be very difficult to find housing that allows pets, and to afford additional charges like pet rent. We will work with City Council to enhance tenants’ ability to sustain their housing while caring for the animals in their lives. We support setting an upper limit on pet deposits and banning pet rent. We will also seek to bar landlords from refusing pets, unless there is clear, documented evidence that a rental unit needs to be pet-free to accommodate onsite medical needs. A serious approach to animal welfare means addressing these barriers directly, keeping animals with the families who love them rather than cycling them through an already overburdened system.

We will also take seriously our responsibility to the wild animals that share this City with us.
Rodenticides are moving up the food chain and poisoning the mountain lions, bobcats, raptors, and coyotes that are part of what makes Los Angeles extraordinary. Studies have found that the overwhelming majority of tested wildlife in and around the Santa Monica Mountains show exposure to rat poison. Rae will work to restrict rodenticide use in parks and sensitive habitat areas and protect the biodiversity that defines this region.