The former Los Angeles fire chief, who was fired by Democratic Mayor Karen Bass in February after the deadly Palisades fire raged for weeks, filed a legal claim against the city on Wednesday, accusing Bass of orchestrating a “defamation and retaliation campaign” to save her political image.
Ex-fire chief Kristin Crowley said that Bass “orchestrated a campaign of misinformation, defamation, and retaliation” in an effort to move the spotlight off of herself, “while concealing the extent to which she undermined public safety,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Crowley’s legal claim noted that Bass was taking the brunt of the criticism over her decision to leave the country and attend a ceremony in Ghana when the fire first broke out.
“As the Fire Chief, for nearly three years, I advocated for the proper funding, staffing and infrastructure upgrades to better support and protect our Firefighters, and by extension, our communities,” Crowley told the Times. “The lies, deceit, exaggerations and misrepresentations need to be addressed with the only thing that can refute them — the true facts.”
California requires a legal claim to be filed before a lawsuit against a government entity, according to the Times.
The rift between Crowley and Bass began after the former fire chief blamed the mayor’s $17.5 million cuts to the L.A. fire department’s budget, while Bass said that Crowley sent 1,000 firefighters home before the Pacific Palisades fire broke out, despite the drought conditions and high winds creating a high-risk fire environment. Twelve people died in the Pacific Palisades fire, and around 7,000 homes were destroyed.
A month before the fire broke out, Crowley wrote in a memo that the budget cuts “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”
In the legal claim, Crowley’s lawyers said that Bass “initially praised the department’s preparedness” after fire crews responded to the fire.
“But as criticism mounted over her absence, Bass reversed course,” the legal claim added. “She sought to shift blame to Crowley, falsely stating that Bass was not aware of the nationally anticipated weather event, that Crowley sent 1,000 firefighters home who could have fought the blaze, and misrepresenting the department’s budget.”
The claim also stated that the “LAFD did not have sufficient operating emergency vehicles to safely and effectively pre-deploy 1,000 (or anywhere near 1,000) additional firefighters on January 7.” Bass accused Crowley of allowing 40 available engines to sit “idle” before the fire erupted, but the ex-fire chief’s lawyers are pushing back against that claim too, saying that “the LAFD staffed all its front-line fire engines (including all the 40 engines that Bass later falsely stated sat ‘idle’).”
Bass reportedly summoned Crowley to her office on January 10, and Crowley expected to be fired during that meeting. The fire chief, however, wasn’t ousted until February 21, six weeks after the Pacific Palisades fire was finally extinguished. During the January 10 meeting, Crowley’s lawyers claimed that Bass chewed her out for complaining about the fire department’s funding. Bass allegedly told her, “I don’t know why you had to do that; normally we are on the same page, and I don’t know why you had to say stuff to the media.”
Bass also said that Crowley refused to conduct an after-action report after she was ordered to, but Crowley’s lawyers insisted that she was only asked about an after-action report and never instructed to produce one. During the back-and-forth with Bass, Crowley was defended by the 3,000-member L.A. firefighter union, which stated, “While we haven’t agreed on everything, you’ve been the only fire chief in decades to repeatedly demand adequate resources.”
