The Australians, a hearty and assured group, have a saying for people who are beyond saving: ”They’re dead but they won’t lie down.” This euphemism encapsulates the present state of Los Angeles County Fire and its seeming preference for nonwhite employees and citizens. Layering into this preference has everything to do with situating race and DEI within its mantle of governance.
Please don’t misunderstand, I was born and raised in the Los Angeles area; my grandfather on my mother’s side moved to Los Angeles in 1887 with his father and other family members from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Early on, my grandfather saw and helped Los Angeles develop from a sleepy town into a major urban center. He did so by taking over and building Howe Brothers Plumbing and Air Conditioning into the largest business of its kind in Los Angeles County. He was known for helping Los Angeles grow by providing the air conditioning and plumbing design and installation for venues like Los Angeles’ City Hall, Sports Arena, Union Station and other public and private landmarks.
Early in his life he experienced and participated in Los Angeles’ phenomenal growth. In 1965 things started to go south racially with the onset of the Watts riots in L.A.’s Southcentral area. During this time, I was a competitive swimmer for the Los Angeles Athletic Club and had daily summer workouts at the Los Angeles Swim Stadium adjoining the L.A. Coliseum in the middle of the Southcentral area. On the many drives there and back home, I would see young men being stopped and frisked, sometimes beaten on the street by rival gang members or by policemen. Sometimes the police were beaten as badly as the black youth were. We knew that if you wanted to survive, you had to keep your car windows rolled up tight and be careful stopping at traffic lights or run them if gangs approached your car.
Recommended
Southcentral L.A. became a “no-man’s land” for white people and would raise its ominous head yet again in 1992 during the Rodney King riots resulting in senseless violence, murder and job losses in South-Central Los Angeles. Sixty-three people were killed and an additional 2,383 people were injured. More importantly, while the race riots ended after the national Rodney King racial violence from April 29 to May 3, 1992, racialism in the form of color-preferred racial inequality still exists but is being perpetrated in Los Angeles County by government officials.
L.A. County Fire and Rescue Needs Real Leadership, Not DEI
The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo has become the go-to expert on DEI in colleges and universities across the United States. Rufo believes the Trump administration should use every tool at its disposal to ensure that America’s elite universities adhere to the principle of colorblind equality. One of Rufo’s tenets is that institutions of higher education have eschewed core conservative values, replacing them with discrimination, equity and inclusion, which is a fundamental departure from America’s constitutional tradition. Though launched with the noble intention of stopping racial discrimination, journalist Christopher Caldwell argues that the Civil Rights Act—and the bureaucracy it spawned—gradually consumed core American freedoms and became a vehicle for entrenching left-wing racialist ideology throughout American institutions. It would be fair to say that this is particularly so with Los Angeles County Fire.
L.A. Fire Places Firefighting Minority Groups above Firefighters as A Whole
It was reported recently that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, with a penchant for all things DEI, issued an executive order to rebuild homes and businesses that the city lost in the recent LA County fires that burned more than 40,000 acres and destroyed more than 12,000 residential and commercial structures. Prior to this, in consultation with the Executive Director of the Anti-Racism, Diversity, and Inclusion initiative (ARDI) she developed a plan to form a Labor Management Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee with appointed Labor and Management members including members from, but not limited to, the Women’s Fire League, Stentorians [Black firefighters], Los Bomberos [Hispanic firefighters], Asian American Pacific Islander [AAPI] Groups, and LGBTQ members. The risk is that these privileged groups self-identify with like-kind minorities and not with L.A. Fire as a whole. When their firefighting job is done, there is no Kumbaya experience save for that of each identity group instead of the whole, as it should be. To further Bass’s goal of diversifying the department, each gender and ethnic group was also guaranteed a percentage of slots equal to their proportion of the initial applicant pool.
The idea was to work on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, cultural and implicit bias training, and make recommendations for policy and procedure changes directly to the Department and Firefighters Local 1014 in a transparent and meaningful structure. The problem with this is that it can and often does create worse polarization among firefighters where you aren’t a L.A. County firefighter, but rather than a Hispanic, African American, Female, Asian American Pacific Islander or white male firefighter. This allegedly involves various programs that promote diversity throughout L.A. Fire. But this commitment to racial differences, by definition, flies in the face of unity and teamwork, both of which are critically important in effective firefighting. Fires have no racial identification. When mistakes are made, their policies, both implicit and explicit, hold that it is never Ernesto, Javier or Nancy’s fault but rather some white guy’s. L.A. County Fire should make every effort to ensure that it adheres to the principle of colorblind equality instead of by politically correct policies that make it less capable of serving the interests of all Los Angeles residents.
As horribile dictu as it is to say, Los Angeles County Fire like Los Angeles is dead but it simply won’t lie down. The citizens whose taxes fund its continuing operation and whose wellbeing are dependent on it are the ones paying the unacceptably real price with racialist preferences, policies and procedures. This mirrors a Public Policy Institute of California public opinion poll which further shows that two in three southern Californians have major problems unaddressed by L.A. County government. According to a survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The L.A. Times, more than four-in-ten registered voters in the city of Los Angeles thought Mayor Bass did a “poor or very poor job in responding to the Palisades and Malibu fires.” A major part of her failure was her paid junket to Africa during the Palisades and Malibu fires where no one was left to effectively manage the fire and rescue department.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Steven Soboroff, the L.A.’s fire recovery czar, who had been hired for a three-month term at a salary of $500,000 funded by nonprofits, had been excluded from Mayor Bass’ inner circle within two weeks of his appointment, when the mayor neglected to inform Soboroff of her decision to reopen the Palisades to the public. Tasked with creating a comprehensive strategy for rebuilding the Pacific Palisades, Soboroff was unaware of Bass’ reopening plans, then candidly expressed his disapproval—a highly unusual move for a mayoral appointee. Bass reversed her decision the very next day, amid criticism from City Council member Traci Park and others. As Christopher Rufo has cautioned, DEI often infringes upon effective government operation, creating more problems than it portends. The 2025 L.A. County Fire is the quintessential example of this.
Truly, with L.A. County’s current racialism, it is dead but refuses to lie down.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member