Mayor Karen Bass, who just started her first term, is vowing to identify and fire police officers associated with “right-wing domestic extremist organizations.”
“Well, good luck with that,” counters Randy Sutton, who leads The Wounded Blue and is a former police lieutenant. “That's going to be a lawsuit waiting to happen.”
Sutton, who retired from the Las Vegas Police Department, says he is looking forward to the “arbitrary discussion” by Mayor Bass and other Democrats to define what beliefs are too extreme and too dangerous to remain on the police payroll.
Los Angeles has a population of 3.8 million spread out over 500 square miles, where approximately 9,700 police officers are on the LAPD payroll. Back in 2020, the city’s liberal city council bowed a knee to the defund-the-police movement and slashed the police budget by $150 million. Just like other cities that punished law enforcement, officer numbers plummeted and an effort is now underway to boost those numbers to 10,000.
According to a written plan of action, the Mayor’s plan to find and hire news cops means changing the current police recruitment process by “identifying obstacles” that are keeping new recruits, especially minorities, from finishing the police academy.
Tom Saggau, the spokesman for the police union, told Fox News it is “dangerous” to put police recruits in a uniform who have failed the minimum score in a physical fitness test.
“That’s just a recipe for disaster,” he warned.
Sutton says physical fitness is a requirement for street policing, when an officer can be overpowered by a suspect, but he finds it unbelievable for L.A. to lower standards after the Memphis police scandal.
“I'm really surprised because after the horror of the Memphis thuggery that took place,” Sutton says, “the reasons behind that were the lowering of standards, the lowering of training.”
