Mayor Karen Bass said she would conduct a nationwide search for the next chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, but in the end it seems she found three finalists close to home.
Deputy Chief Emada Tingirides and Robert “Bobby” Arcos, a former LAPD assistant chief who works in the L.A. County district attorney’s office, were seen arriving at Getty House, the mayor’s residence, for their candidate interviews over the span of a few hours Tuesday. The third candidate is said to be former Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell, who also served in the LAPD, leaving as assistant chief.
McDonnell was not seen at the Getty House on Tuesday, but according to multiple sources he is also being considered by the mayor to replace Interim Chief Dominic Choi, who has run the department since Michel Moore retired unexpectedly in February after after 5 ½ years on the job. The sources asked not to be identified because the final stages of the search process have been kept confidential and they were not authorized to discuss it.
A spokesman for Bass declined to comment when asked by The Times if she interviewed chief candidates on Tuesday.
All three of the contenders have deep ties to the LAPD even amid growing calls from within the department for an outsider to bring change.
On Tuesday, Bass released a report detailing the results of a months-long survey about what civil rights groups, neighborhood council members, LAPD officers and others want in their next chief.
Some who met with Bass called for a chief attuned to the distinct — and often at odds — challenges of policing in a city as vast and diverse as L.A. Others spoke of the importance of picking an innovator willing to prioritize de-escalation and transparency.
For rank-and-file cops, the top issue at the department is low morale, driven in part by a disciplinary system that they view as unfair, the report said. Officers also reported what they see as a lack of operational experience among command staff, which leads to “a disconnect in understanding what officers deal with daily.”
Bass seemed willing to consider candidates with ties to her former mayoral opponent, Rick Caruso. McDonnell once appeared in a campaign ad for the billionaire developer, and both Tingirides and Arcos are on the board of directors of Operation Progress, a Watts-area nonprofit of which Caruso is a founding board member.
Arcos, who left the LAPD in 2021, is currently the chief of the Bureau of Investigation in L.A. County District Atty. George Gascon’s office. When approached by two Times reporters outside the mayor’s residence on Tuesday, Arcos said that being considered for the position “really is an honor of a lifetime.” He said he wouldn’t comment further out of respect for the mayor’s wishes to keep the search private.
“The mayor and her team have been really strict about confidentiality,” he said. “It’s completely up to the mayor and I respect that process.”
A third-generation Mexican American, Arcos grew up in Texas and moved to L.A. with his mother and siblings at the age of 10 to flee an abusive relationship, eventually settling in Atwater Village.
Xiomara Flores-Holguin, a longtime social worker who teaches at Cal State Northridge, said that Arcos rejected the traditional LAPD “nobody-but-us” mindset in favor of working closely with child protective services and community groups to solve crime problems.
“We weren’t always welcomed into these spaces because we were civilians,” she said.
During his career at the LAPD, Arcos was a lieutenant in the department’s elite Metropolitan Division, and was in command during May Day melee in 2007 in which police were accused of using excessive force to clear immigration rights demonstrators and journalists from MacArthur Park. He later served as the deputy chief over Central Bureau, earning high marks for promoting officer de-escalation training, while also tackling homelessness and assuaging fears of deportation among the city’s immigrant residents.
In 2006, Arcos’ daughter killed two people in a drunk driving accident on the 5 Freeway. Soon thereafter, allegations surfaced suggesting that Arcos, then an LAPD lieutenant, pressured the probation department to alter a report in his daughter’s favor. He denied the allegations and was eventually cleared following an Internal Affairs investigation.
Arcos, who was also among the finalists for the LAPD chief job in 2018, remained at Getty House for nearly two hours before departing in a black SUV. Less than an hour later, Tingirides arrived and made her way inside, where she also remained for roughly two hours.
Tingirides joined the LAPD in the early 1990s and gained national prominence for her community policing efforts in 2015, when she and her husband attended the State of the Union address at the invitation of former First Lady Michelle Obama.
A Watts native who spent her teens in the San Fernando Valley, Tingirides enjoyed an unusually brisk rise through the department ranks. After stints in the stations that patrol downtown and southwest L.A., she was promoted to sergeant in 2006 and went to work in the Harbor area. She soon took over the community relations office at the police station that patrols Watts and surrounding areas. While there, she worked for her future husband, when both were married to other people.
Moore promoted her from captain to deputy chief in 2020, placing her in charge of the newly formed Community Safety Partnership Bureau, which has been credited with reducing violent crime and improving relationships in some of the city’s most troubled housing developments.
She said in a panel discussion that she joined the police force soon after the “Rodney King incident,” donning the uniform with the goal of helping “heal mistrust between law enforcement and community” after LAPD officers were filmed beating the Black motorist.
Fernando Rejon, a longtime gang interventionist, said that Tingirides possesses a “cultural fluency” that allowed her to work in communities where many residents don’t trust law enforcement over past abuses. Such credibility was hard-earned, he said, recalling Tingirides showing up at homicide scenes to console grieving parents and talk down upset neighbors.
“The credibility and support she had in Watts was earned, and that’s because of years of being willing to engage, and not backing down, and being able to engage the community in difficult conversations, and also being able to apologize when needed,” Rejon said.
In an panel discussion in 2021 moderated by actor-director Nate Parker, Tingirides said that reverence for human life should be a central pillar for all policing, and that relationships were vital to her work.
Her relative lack of command experience has drawn concern from some within the department, as has the potential influence of her husband, retired deputy chief Phil Tingirides, if she were to become chief.
The only finalist not seen at the mayor’s house Tuesday was McDonnell, who has been an LAPD chief candidate twice before, in 2002 and 2009. He served in the department for 28 years, often as the department’s public face while working as chief of staff for former Chief Bill Bratton.
McDonnell helped implement the federal consent decree that arose largely out of the Rampart corruption scandal, in which dozens of officers were accused of serious misconduct, including perjury and evidence tampering. He left to take the chief’s job in Long Beach in 2010, before being elected sheriff, where he went toe-to-toe with the department’s union over disciplinary issues.
He served one term before being replaced by Alex Villanueva, marking a stunning upset for a seat that hadn’t seen an incumbent lose in more than a century. He later joined an exodus of high-ranking law enforcement officials moving into academia, taking a job at USC, where he worked alongside Police Commission president Erroll Southers.
While with the university, a group of researchers began looking into the possibilities of using artificial intelligence to assess officer behavior and improve training.
Some inside the department have questioned whether McDonnell has been away from the department too long, and whether he is up for handling the demands of modern-day policing.
Keith Swensson, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s commander, said that McDonnell had the rare quality for a leader of seeking out and heeding opposing points of view in the name of improving the department. But, he also lost the support of some beat cops by taking a far more aggressive approach to discipline, Swensson said.
“I think the mayor and the City Council would absolutely love him. I don’t know about the rank and file. That is the big question mark in my mind,” he said. “That’s serious tightrope walking.”
