Two weeks ago we sent you our fourth newsletter, and new content has been hitting the site ever since. We’re going to start writing more often and keeping it shorter, with a new issue every Monday. If you found us through our Waymo piece, which got picked up by other outlets, welcome! We’ve been thrilled to see how far that one traveled.

Bleeding out

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell told the City Council’s budget committee last December that the department was down 1,300 officers. “We’re bleeding out,” he said. By the FBI’s count for 2025, though, the LAPD still has more officers per resident than 42 of the country’s 76 big-city police departments.

Losing more than a thousand officers since 2019 only cost LA three spots on that list, and the reason has more to do with the other departments than with LA itself. Read the piece →

If you missed it, we also looked at the 302 LAPD officers who cleared $300,000 last year.

Fewer crashes, on paper

Waymo reported 9.4 crashes in Los Angeles County for every million miles it drove from October 2024 through June 2025, and 5.5 over the following year, a drop of 41%. In June 2025, federal regulators stopped requiring companies like Waymo to report one common kind of crash.

Crashes that end with a tow, a trip to the hospital or an air bag going off haven’t gone down at all. Three of those tows even came from the same parking lot in Hollywood. See what changed →

If you’d rather worry about human drivers, LA’s speed camera plan mostly skips the Valley’s worst intersections.

The same company guards Runyon Canyon and moves detainees for ICE

Since August 2025, Los Angeles has paid Allied Universal about $12,000 a month for security at Runyon Canyon. Allied also owns G4S, one of the companies ICE pays to move people in its custody, and ICE has committed $157.7 million to G4S since President Trump took office. One of those contracts, in ICE’s own words, is for transportation “to process aliens at various locations in the Los Angeles area of responsibility.”

	Every Runyon Canyon payment to Universal Protection Service LP, Allied Universal’s legal name, in the City Controller’s Checkbook LA.

In April the council voted 15 to 0 to put $25,000 more toward the park’s night guards. That was four days after a new city law barring city employees from moonlighting for ICE took effect, and one of the 15 yes votes came from the councilmember who asked for that law in the first place. Read the piece →

Also new

• One LAFD administrator made 950k last year and he’ll probably make $1.1 million this year
• Woodland Hills hits 100 degrees 43 days a year… Santa Monica, less than once
• Los Angeles has 94,767 street palms, and 219,553 empty spots where a tree could stand

From the archive

• Equal turnout would have moved the mayor’s race by one point
• Downtown LA is 1% of the land and 16% of LA’s jobs
• Los Angeles County sells patrol to 42 cities. The budget unit that does it closed last year $2.67 million ahead

Keep in touch

If you need the data behind any of these, write to [email protected]. Know someone who keeps getting stuck behind a Waymo? Forward this to them! They can sign up at basin.la/newsletter.

See you next Monday.

The Basin
basin.la · [email protected]