Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is expected to announce that she has selected Jim McDonnell to serve as the city’s next police chief, ending a months-long search process and ushering in a new era for one of the country’s largest police departments.
In picking the longtime lawman — who helped implement a federal consent decree as an LAPD assistant chief and later was elected Los Angeles County sheriff — Bass is getting a steady hand as the massive security challenges of the World Cup and the Olympic Games loom on the horizon.
However, the appointment of McDonnell, who is white, came as a surprise — and a disappointment to some — who hoped Bass would appoint the city’s first Latino or woman to serve as chief.
Bass is set to formally announce McDonnell’s hiring at a news conference Friday morning at City Hall. Multiple sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the announcement, confirmed he was the mayor’s choice.
McDonnell was with the LAPD for 28 years, sometimes serving as the department’s public face while serving as an assistant chief under Chief William J. “Bill” Bratton. After an unsuccessful bid for a second term as sheriff, McDonnell took a job with USC. While he was widely viewed as a potential successor to former LAPD Chief Michel Moore, who stepped down earlier this year, McDonnell has kept a lower public profile than other candidates.
McDonnell, who heads the Safe Communities Institute at the USC Price School of Public Policy, was one of the three finalists chosen by the civilian Police Commission from a field of more than 25 applicants to lead one of the nation’s largest police departments.
The other finalists also had strong LAPD ties: Deputy chief Emada Tingirides, who runs the department’s South Bureau, and Robert “Bobby” Arcos, who left the department in 2018 and took a high-ranking position in the L.A. County District Attorney’s office.
Bass has made clear she wants the next police chief to focus heavily on improving officer morale, while also removing obstacles to recruitment at the LAPD.
A report released by Bass last month focused heavily on complaints from the rank-and-file about the department’s disciplinary process, its complaint system, high stress, “inadequate” staffing and the level of support provided after “critical incidents,” such as shootings by officers.
“We will use this information not just to find our next chief of police but also as guidance as we press forward with reforms that make Los Angeles safer while supporting our officers,” Bass said last month.
During his tenure with the LAPD, McDonnell made a mark by working with the city’s diverse communities and political leaders to restore confidence in the department after the Rampart corruption scandal of the late 1990s and early 2000s, where officers committed robberies and murders.
In 2002, during his first run for the chief’s job, McDonnell won praise for presenting a blueprint for a more grassroots style of policing that sought to strike a balance between crime-fighting and community relations; the strategy was later adopted by Bratton and served as the foundation for overhauling the organization.
As chief, he faces the difficult task of continuing some of his predecessor’s reforms around de-escalation and pretextual traffic stops while addressing more entrenched problems. The department is hundreds of officers below the number it had even two years ago, and recruitment efforts have so far failed to pay off.
Most violent crime categories are now even with or below their numbers at this time last year, after a surge of incidents to start the year. And yet a string of high-profile incidents, including most recently the alleged hijacking of a city bus that led to the slaying of one man, have made growing lawlessness a constant theme on nightly newscasts and on social media.
Police shootings have similarly leveled off, but the department continues to face criticism that it isn’t doing enough to curtail officer uses of force.
Colleagues within the LAPD have described McDonnell as a gracious, well-liked leader.
Even though he’s been away from the department for more than a decade, McDonnell brings a “wide breadth of experience” to the job, according to Sandy Jo MacArthur, a retired LAPD assistant chief who like McDonnell went into academia after leaving law enforcement.
The fact that he has already led one of the largest law enforcement agencies, in the Sheriff’s Department, bodes well for his ability to step into his new position and be effective from Day 1, she said.
Now he is chief of the LAPD — a job he was passed over for twice.
The son of working-class immigrants from Ireland, McDonnell grew up in Boston before relocating to Southern California more than four decades ago.
He attended Don Bosco in Boston, where he considered drafting and architecture but realized he could not sit at a table for the rest of his life. So he headed off for St. Anselm College near Manchester, N.H.
During his senior year, he landed an internship with the Boston Police Department, and was hopeful of being hired after graduation. But then came a tax-cutting measure that cut the Boston police, so McDonnell moved out west.
He joined the LAPD in 1981 at the age of 21 and worked his way up the ranks, holding a variety of assignments in patrol, detective, vice, gang, organized crime, homicide and other divisions.
For McDonnell, it was a long-awaited vindication.
Twice before he applied for the LAPD chief’s job, losing out to Bratton in 2002 and Charlie Beck in 2009. He was appointed police chief of Long Beach in March 2010.
In 2014, he was elected Los Angeles County sheriff, following soon after Lee Baca, the longtime sheriff who retired under a cloud of scandals that included the federal indictment of sheriff’s officials for allegations ranging from assaulting jail inmates to hiding a jailhouse informant from the FBI. Under Baca’s watch, 18 employees were criminally charged and the department was found to have hired deputies with criminal histories, including Baca’s own nephew.
A year before winning the election, McDonnell publicly weighed a run, but ultimately did not enter the race because the task of fundraising for a countywide election would have taken him away from his family and his duties in Long Beach. He entered the race following the surprise retirement of embattled former sheriff Baca.
Some detractors argue that McDonnell was an effective leader but didn’t do enough to address the problems that surfaced during the Baca administration.
At Long Beach, McDonnell led a force that, while far smaller than the LAPD, faced the same concerns about staffing shortages. He has been criticized for a rise in officer-involved shootings, as well as the 2013 beating of an unarmed man.
He served one term as L.A. County sheriff before being replaced by Alex Villanueva in a stunning electoral upset for a seat that hadn’t seen an incumbent lose in more than a century. He later joined an exodus of high-ranking law enforcement officials moving into academia.
At a USC forum last year about crime on the Metro system, McDonnell talked about the need for a multi-faceted crime response, which started with hiring more police officers and pushing for stronger penalties, while connecting those seeking help with services.
A Loyola Marymount University survey of Los Angeles residents showed stronger satisfaction with the LAPD’s overall performance than in recent years, even if swaths of the Black and Latino population see disparities in the way the department polices them.
Finding the city’s next police chief is one of the most closely watched decisions made by any mayor.
Bass has said she was surprised by the general feedback she received from rank-and-file officers, who unlike in other recent chief searches, seemed to openly favor an outside chief.
“I expected the officers to be pretty dug in to an inside, an internal candidate and that was not the case,” she said. “I would say the No. 1 concern from the officers’ perspective is their morale, and I thought that was going to be because of community perception around law enforcement — that is true, but what was more significant was low morale because of the internal workings of the LAPD.”
During the community forums, many attendees pushed for the selection of an insider who is attuned to policing in a city as vast and diverse as L.A. Bass said it was critical that the next chief address one of officers’ main gripes: the view that the department’s much-maligned disciplinary system has created a double standard for high-ranking officers.
Last month, Bass released a report detailing the results of a months-long survey about what civil rights groups, neighborhood council members, LAPD officers and others want in their next chief.