Karen Bass

And so to me, when you're in the land that has everything, why can't that be shared?

And that has defined my life and never, ever thought about running for office.

But when I did decide to take that step, it was with the same values and frankly, the same issues in mind.

Well, you know, it really involved flashbacks to the 1990s.

And I was at, for me, where I am now is full circle to where I started 35 years ago, when I started Community Coalition in 1990.

And

Those years were characterized by a terrible epidemic in the African-American community.

It was the epidemic of crack cocaine and gang violence.

And elected officials, policymakers, the only response they had was to sentence young people was what eventually we would call mass incarceration.

When it was happening, we didn't call it that.

But I certainly knew that it was the wrong way to go.

that crack cocaine was a health crisis, it was an economic crisis, and it was a crisis of divestment from the social safety net, and all three of those converging, and we had a thousand homicides in our city.

We had people dying from crack because at the same time the crack epidemic happened, that's when AIDS exploded as well, and it wasn't called HIV, then it was AIDS.

And so what I tell younger people who don't remember that time period to visualize it, think about COVID affecting one population.

And that's the way it felt like.

It was the desperation and the fear.

And that led to me leaving a very comfortable faculty position at USC Medical School, going to the center of the crisis and starting an organization to try to shift the debate away from criminalization

to a more comprehensive approach.

And so the way the homeless problem exploded in our city, I had flashbacks to the 1990s where the population of Los Angeles was angry

And had tried to tax themselves twice and the problem just got worse.