“There’s just no room for ideological bullshit, because it’s affecting us in the here and now,” a startup founder with deep ties in Hollywood told me. She, too, was backing Caruso.

"After George Floyd, we all had passion for what we thought were the right things, but then it became impossible to have candid conversations about things like race relations, crime, equality,” the startup founder told me. “It felt like a game of gotcha if you misspoke, even if your intentions were in the right place.”

“Two years ago, I couldn’t have voted for him,” Lysa Heslov told me, referring to Caruso. Heslov was the director of the 2017 documentary “Served Like a Girl,” about female veterans; her husband, Grant Heslov, had produced “Argo” and co-written, with George Clooney, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” 

But since then, she and others said, there had been a tectonic shift. Everything had gotten worse—the crime, the homelessness, the feeling that the city was spiraling, that the bottom was falling out from under it. 

Everyone in L.A. has had that moment when something awful and crystallizing happens. Perhaps it was the UCLA graduate student stabbed to death in a furniture store. Or the college student shot and killed near USC. Or the 12-year-old in Wilmington struck by a stray bullet.

For many in Hollywood, it came on December 1, 2021, when a robber—a repeat offender—broke into the Beverly Hills home of Nicole Avant’s parents. He shot Avant’s 91-year-old mother in the back, killing her—and later, according to court records, laughing and bragging about it. He did not expect to spend the rest of his life in prison; he figured Gascon’s office would be lenient. (He was wrong.)

The message was like this neon billboard hovering over the city, the Hills, the tennis courts and Michelin-star restaurants: You can live in a beautiful neighborhood several freeway stops from the poor and the violent. You can wall yourselves off with gates and security systems. You can even hire a personal security guard, as Avants’ parents had. And it still doesn’t matter. 

only 67% of the vote counted as of Sunday morning; as the local reporter says it's basically a "deadlock" right now

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/los-angeles-mayors-race-karen-bass-surges-into-lead/

as is the race for sheriff

A.P. has called it for Bass: