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Fire union chief’s lawsuit against Karen Bass an overdue public service

LA firefighters union chief Freddy Escobar didn’t set out to become the latest casualty in Mayor Karen Bass’s endless game of political self-preservation.

A thirty-six-year veteran of LAFD, he simply did what any decent union president would do when thousands of homes were reduced to ash and firefighters were stretched to the breaking point: he told the truth.

The Palisades Fire of January 2025 wasn’t some unavoidable act of God. It was the predictable result of chronic understaffing, slashed budgets, and a mayor who treated public safety like an inconvenient line item on her path to re-election.

Escobar said it out loud: Bass, apparently, couldn’t stand it.

So she went after him. That’s the heart of the federal lawsuit Escobar just filed this week.

The complaint lays it out plainly: after Escobar backed former Fire Chief Kristin Crowley’s warnings about resource shortages, after he kept repeating that the department was “understaffed and under-budgeted,” Bass summoned him to her office and demanded, with all the petulance of a cornered politician, reportedly demanded, “When are you going to stop?”

When he refused, when he allegedly told her, to her face, that Crowley had simply spoken the truth, the retaliation machine lurched into gear, according to the complaint.

City officials, at the mayor’s direction, cooked up a “comprehensive review” of........

© New York Post