Today, Explained - The Los Angeles city council meltdown

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Leaked audio revealed elected officials, including City Council President Nury Martinez, making xenophobic, homophobic, and racist statements about their colleagues and constituents. The city has united in fury. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Los Angeles City Council held its regular Tuesday meeting today, and we have to assume it was very awkward for all involved because someone, we don't know who, leaked a year old recording of three members of that council behind closed doors discussing redistricting, a dry topic that could have been kept dry. Except the three of them made racist, xenophobic and homophobic comments about their constituents and their colleagues, and also a colleague's young son. Nury Martinez, the council's president, resigned within days. Gil Cedillo and Kevin de Leon are refusing to go despite calls for their resignations from President Joe Biden's camp and Mayor Eric Garcetti. The acting city council president has stripped them of their committee

assignments and still they persist. In doing so, they've managed to unite the off-divided city of Los Angeles in anger, but as we'll hear, that's something. Coming up on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season.

Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today, today explain. Today explain. Today Explained Today Explained Hi, my name is Julia Wick, and I am a Metro reporter at the Los Angeles Times. I cover City Hall and local elections.

So you have been busy lately. Yes, I have. This story really begins in October 2021. At the time, L.A. was in the midst of its once-every-decade redistricting process, which we'll talk more about later. But some of the most powerful people in city politics sat down to have a conversation that was ostensibly about redistricting, but went into a lot of different avenues and included some incredibly racist and offensive remarks. Breaking news from Los Angeles. Embattled city council member Nury Martinez has resigned from her seat

days after a recording surfaced of her making racist and offensive comments about a fellow council member's son. There are growing calls now for two other members on that recording to step down. And that audio has stayed kind of secret for almost a year and has since just exploded L.A. politics as we know it. Resign! Resign! You're a racist politician! All of us resign! Resign! You're a racist politician! How many times have you heard the recording?

Oh gosh, I've lost count a lot. I keep on going back in to kind of hear different specific parts. Can you take us to that meeting? How did it start? When did the racial abuse start? What was said about various racial and ethnic and religious groups in Los Angeles? Just give me the rundown as you remember it. The conversation is a little over an hour long. I think it's about 80 minutes long. And what's pretty unnerving about it is that it really cycles in and out from terrible racist comments, and then they'll kind of get back to business on a variety of things. But the thing I think that people have had perhaps the most visceral reaction to in the city

was the deeply racist way that then city council president Nury Martinez talked about a white council member's young Black son. And at one point, she's discussing being on a parade float with the boy who at the time was a toddler. This kid's going to tip us over because he's literally hanging on the rails. And at one point says he deserves a beat down for having kind of misbehaved on the float. This kid needs a beat down. Let me take him around the corner and then I'll bring him back.

Yeah. She compares the way that Councilmember Mike Bonin, the boy's father, handled his young son to an accessory. And that's the point where, you know, a couple other people are jumping in. Councilmember Kevin DeLeo jokes that it's like Martinez with her Louis Vuitton bag. And then Councilmember Martinez also calls him a little monkey in Spanish. And that's one thing that it's been a bit controversial because, you know, that can be in some Spanish speaking households a term of endearment, but once it's in public, I think even if she meant it that way, it's incredibly hard to separate out the use of that word from the fact that monkeys and apes

have been used as an anti-Black racist trope for centuries. That's kind of one section of the conversation that I think has reverberated the most. But overall, they really take aim at a rainbow coalition of groups with racist or derogatory or crude remarks about Black people, Jewish people, Armenians, Indigenous people, and gay people. Anti-Black racism is one of the largest threads throughout the tape. At one point, Martinez curses the district attorney, George Gascon, and says he's with the Blacks. And I think that kind of othering and that ugliness is something that comes up quite a few times beyond any of the isolated comments. So at a certain point in the discussion, they turn to the neighborhood of Koreatown, which is actually now more of a Latino neighborhood than

it is Korean in terms of who lives there. And it's specifically home to a great number of Oaxacans, which are people from a region in Mexico. And in speaking about who lives in this area, Martinez goes, I see a lot of, quote, little short dark people. And then she makes some reference, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's a little bit like, I don't know where they came from. I don't know how they got here. And then people are kind of laughing. And then at one point she says, which is ugly. And this is something that has really sent shockwaves through L.A.

L.A. is home to one of the largest concentrations of Oaxacans outside of Mexico. And the community has really rallied against what was said. And people from, you know, across the city have rallied in support of Oaxacans. There was, you know, a massive rally on Saturday that, you know, included Oaxacan music, traditional Oaxacan clothing, just celebrating the Oaxacan community and also people kind of coming together to say, we do not stand for what was said. What was this meeting about? So every 10 years, the city draws new lines for its city council districts. They were talking about the redistricting process and also consolidating Latino power and drawing lines that would be favorable for them and their allies to be winning re-election. And this is a place where I want to interject really quickly and add a little

bit of nuance. And this nuance is in no way excusing the terrible, terrible things that are said. It's just, you know, it's important to kind of understand what the backdrop here is. And the first thing to know is that in and of itself, it's not racist to talk about race during redistricting. This is a process, particularly in a multi-ethnic city like LA, that is based to some degree on racial coalitions jockeying for power and making deals with each other. So even, you know, saying a seat is a Latino seat or a Black seat or a Jewish seat, that isn't inherently problematic. It's typically part of the discussion. It's what then got said in the context of that discussion that was so unbelievably racist.

And the other thing to know is that, and kind of a real undercurrent in this conversation, is that Latinos have been underrepresented in LA political power. And that's a very real thing. And it's something that's really shaping a lot of what's going on with their thinking as they're having this conversation. Who is the woman whose voice was heard saying the most offensive things on the recording? Who is Nury Martinez? Nury Martinez, who actually resigned from her position on the recording. Who is Nuri Martinez? Nuri Martinez, who actually resigned from her position on the council last week, was the Los Angeles City Council president.

She was someone who wielded a lot of power at City Hall. She is from the Northeast Valley, which is actually a really interesting area politically. It's a very Latino working class neighborhood, and there's a whole array of politicians who have come up and really established real power in California politics and built sort of their own coalition of people they came up with. What is Nury Martinez's ethnic background? Nury Martinez is Latina. She was, both her parents are, she's a child of immigrants. Both her parents are from Mexico. She was the first Latina city council, or is the first Latina city council president, which was a very big deal a couple of years ago

when she took her post. So we have this contradiction, which is there's a tendency outside of Los Angeles in places where I think people pay less attention to think, Mexican-Americans, they're all one group. What Nury Martinez essentially proved is, no, they are not. Within the Mexican-American community, there are lots of prejudices. She put voice to some of them. And then the tape comes out. There are calls for her to resign.

She does resign. But not everybody in the room does. Can you tell me the timeline from when the tape emerged to the political fallout as you experienced it? The political fallout was pretty immediate, at least it started pretty immediately. But at first, a lot of politicians issued kind of a first set of statements where they were not yet calling for resignations. And then I think within the next day or two, it kind of became very clear which way the wind was blowing and also the temperature in the city, which by that point was just blazing white hot. And a lot of these same politicians issued another set of

statements where they called for all of these people to resign. And this kind of kept picking up steam within the next couple of days. President Biden actually called for all of them to step down. He believes that they all should resign. The language that was used and tolerated during that conversation was unacceptable and it was appalling. Some of their closest allies have called for them to step down. Senator Alex Padilla, who went to high school with Martinez, was one of the voices calling for her to step down. So she first stepped down from her council presidency

and then altogether resigned from the city council on Wednesday. The two other council members on the recording, Council Member Kevin de Leon and Council Member Gil Cedillo, have both not yet resigned. And that is something that there is just a huge amount of agita in the city about that fact. Can you talk about whether you see a city that is united in its response or whether you see a city that is further divided, having known what was going on behind closed doors? You know, to me, I see a city that is in a hell of a lot of pain right now. Obviously, this kind of put a lot of attention on deep divisions, and those deep divisions do exist,

and I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish about the existence of those divisions. But I do feel like the kind of immediate sentiment in the response is not one of division. It's one of people, A, being horrified, and also kind of wanting to protect and heal the city they love. Coming up, Los Angeles' city council may be uniquely messy, but could LA's problems writ large be coming to your city? Thank you. frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday. And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little

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It's killing me It's Today Explained. We're back with Erica D. Smith. She's a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Erica, what went through your head when you first heard this tape? Well, first I was like, wow, this is racist. And I will say that the longer the recording goes on and went on, the more I was thinking the more racist this is, and just how many different groups they managed to insult in an hour. It's kind of amazing, actually. But I also thought, you know, it kind of confirms a lot of the suspicions that I've heard among Black Angelenos since the redistricting process last year about some members of the city council, namely then-Council President Noreen Martinez, and about how she thought about Black people and about political power.

And so, you know, it was kind of eerie in a way because I think I had hoped that a lot of what I was hearing was, you know, more fodder for conspiracy theories than like reality. But I think that hearing the words, hearing the tape, you know, it was like it made it more real. And it's disappointing, I think. But at the same time, also not entirely surprising. The Los Angeles Times has been reporting on how, as bizarre as the situation is, it's kind of standard LA City Council messiness. Why historically has Los Angeles' City Council been such a mess? I don't know if I could answer the why has it always been such a mess. I think some people would say LA, because of its size, is almost ungovernable, something that I've heard quite a bit. But I think that when it comes to things like corruption in

general, or this broader question that we're talking about with power and the desire for power, I think it's in some ways maybe the policies and the way that we kind of apportion power. One of the things that's come up a lot with this recording is redistricting and the idea of drawing maps for council districts. And L.A. is one of those cities where the city council has a lot of control over what those maps look like. And so when you have the people who directly benefit from the way that maps are drawn making the decisions in a lot of ways about the way that maps are drawn, there's bound to be some meddling and some efforts and some corruption there. Two things are happening in this conversation. One of them is that these three city council members have met to talk about redistricting.

And as they talk, we hear them trying to preserve Latino power in Los Angeles. They want to keep themselves in office. And now it's on tape, and we've all heard it. So where does redistricting stand right now? I would say they didn't just want to keep themselves in office. I think they wanted to really consolidate Latino political power across the city and to do it at the expense of other racial groups. And particularly with this recording, it was talking about Black political

power, which I think is really the crux of the matter. These comments are not just vile. They're not just racist. They're also potentially legally problematic. What we have are discussions not just about increasing Latino voting power, but taken in context, potentially also about diluting African-American voting power. And that's where you get a potential legal issue. A lot of anger in Los Angeles is that not that Latinos want more political power, which given the percentage of the population that makes up the Latino population, I think everybody gets that. But I think that the idea of doing it at the expense of other groups is what is so hard and so upsetting, I think, to a lot of people.

But as far as redistricting, I mean, I think from the public standpoint, I think there's a lot of mistrust in the redistricting process for some of the reasons that I had mentioned before about how the city council has a lot of control over what redistricting looks like, where the maps are, who gets what in their district. There's a couple proposals out there right now, one of which would basically throw out the current redistricting maps, which were devised last year and it came about in this conversation. They would appoint an independent commission to basically redraw the maps ahead of the 2024 election. From what I hear, there's a lot of support for some sort of systemic change like that to, number one, bolster public confidence

in redistricting, two, to kind of address what many perceive as problems with the current maps, things that this recording only highlighted. Okay, so when we ask why is the city council such a mess, we get to Los Angeles is a very complicated place. And historically, that has been the case. Racial politics have always been a part of LA's politics. Frankly, just because the city is so diverse, particularly in the last 50 years. We are a divided city today, divided on the basis of race and religion and on the basis of neighborhood, on the basis of age. And it's about time that we begin to pull together. I think that when LA.A. got its first black mayor in Tom Bradley several decades ago, he won notably by building coalitions between black Angelenos and Jewish Angelenos and to an extent Latino Angelenos.

This is a picture of the coalition of Los Angeles, a coalition of conscience, a coalition of those people in this city who reject the politics of irresponsibility, who reject the politics of corruption, who are determined to see in this city a government that extends justice and dignity to every man. And what came out of that administration was this notion or this idea that in order to implement good public policy, in order to really get elected, you're going to have to build coalitions across racial lines because of the strata decades or so, the Latino population has grown. It's grown to about 50% of the city. Meanwhile, the number of Black Angelenos have shrunk to roughly about 8% of the population down from about, I think it's about 17% or so. So on the one hand, there's this understanding that to get anything done in the city, you're going to have to build alliances. But on the other hand, there is this kind of fear that as Latinos grow in number in the city, that, you know, political power is going to be given specifically to Latinos just because of sheer numbers and that, you know, they, quote unquote,

won't really care about anybody else. So it was this kind of like undercurrent of us versus them. And I think it all just comes back to this idea of struggle for power and how it intersects with race. And I don't really think that's necessarily any different than how it plays out across the rest of the country. I just think it's in some ways unique to LA because of who are the residents of LA. Angelinos will elect a new mayor next month. This is all happening awfully close to that election. Can you tell me about who's running? Yeah, so there's two candidates who are the finalists who are going to be on the ballots. One of them is Rick Caruso, who's a developer known for kind of building high-end, upscale

malls. The whole office market has changed dramatically, and we can convert a lot of these office buildings to livable units for the homeless. The other one is Congresswoman Karen Bass, who is Native Angeleno, has been in Congress for years, the state assembly before that. We need to house people quickly in temporary housing. Then we need to address why they were unhoused to begin with. Both candidates have called for all three members of the council to step down. That happened pretty quickly. There needs to be an investigation and those officials must resign, but that's not enough. We need a new direction in

LA and new leadership. We cannot tolerate hate speech or racism in our city. Certainly we can never tolerate at the leadership level. What's happened is completely unacceptable and those that did it need to be held accountable. Both mayoral candidates have been pretty clear about wanting to kind of start anew and saying that basically the council really can't continue to function if those other two members and Nury Martinez were still there. And so, yeah, they want them gone. Why do you think what happens in Los Angeles, what's happening now in L.A., matters to the rest of the country?

Because I know you think it does. Well, I mean, I may be biased, but I do think that what happens in L.A. eventually happens in most cities in the country. It's just that it happens here first. And I think it happens here first because we are kind of this like big experiment in some ways. All of the clashes that happen between people of different races, ethnicities, they happen here first. You know, you go to almost any city in the country. I mean, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana for years. You know, you go to almost any city in the country. I mean, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana for years. You know, I go back to these places and I see the

same problems there that I did here. They just have taken five, six years for that to happen, you know, around homelessness and affordable housing in particularly. The same thing with race and, you know, and ethnicity and how all of these problems intersect with race and ethnicity. Black people, for example, here in Los Angeles, and this is true across the nation as well, we are disproportionately represented among the homeless population. That's no matter what city you're in, no matter what state you're in. Same with Latinos. Disproportionately shot by police, criminal justice reform, all of these things. And so

when you have three council members confirming the worst fears of other people that they want to consolidate electoral political power and wield it and build it just for the sake of Latinos and not really care and do it at the expense of people of other races, particularly Black people who are disproportionately represented among kind of like every socioeconomic indicator that there is, all on the bad side. That's scary. And I think that the way that we choose to address this by building alliances, by, you know, rebuilding any sort of solidarity, I think that also sets an example for what can be done

when the next city confronts this. You know, the faces might be different, the race and ethnicities might be different, but the same problems are going to crop up in cities across the country. Just give it time. Today's show was produced by L.A.'s own Avishai Artsy and Hadi Muagdi.

It was edited by Matthew Collette and engineered by Afim Shapiro. It was fact-checked by Amina El-Sadi and Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you