A report from the interim fire chief of Los Angeles says that the city spends more on homelessness than it does on firefighters — and that the homeless start nearly one-third of fires to which the department responds.
The stunning report from Interim L.A. Fire Department Chief Ronnie Villanueva was revealed Tuesday by local ABC affiliate KABC-7:
In fiscal year 2024/2025, the city allocated about $961 million to homelessness, while the total LAFD budget for that same fiscal year was well under that – at about $837 million.
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That memo details that nearly a third of all fires – 32.91% – the department responded to in the last six years involved a member of the homeless community.
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According to the memo, in the last 10 years the number of rubbish fires [often started by the homeless] surged a whopping 475%.
Despite spending nearly a billion dollars on homelessness, L.A. has barely made a dent in the problem. The homeless count in the city dropped a mere 2.2% last year — the first such decrease in the past six years.
Villanueva took over earlier this year after L.A. Mayor Karen Bass fired Kristin Crowley over the Palisades Fire, in which the department — thanks partly to budget cuts by the city — failed to pre-deploy firefighters.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
