Jim Newton

It's fun for mayoral candidates to imagine eliminating potholes or building new trains to link the Valley to the Westside. It's not hard to support a spiffed-up LAX (really, what's hard to believe is that it's taken this long) or legions of new police...

The complaint I hear most often about this race for mayor of Los Angeles is that the candidates, Controller Wendy Greuel and Councilman Eric Garcetti, spend too much time talking in generalities without providing details about what they'd do. But when...

Over the past few weeks, the race for mayor of Los Angeles has been less a contest of ideas and leadership than it's been an endorsement roulette, with Controller Wendy Greuel and Councilman Eric Garcetti trotting out their latest pledges of support as...

Imagine if Los Angeles, with a population that is roughly half Latino, had just one or even no Latinos in elected office. There would be protests and political recriminations in every election cycle. There would be lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. The...

Over the last couple of weeks, I've spent considerable time with the leading candidates for mayor, asking them about their approach to governance, watching them campaign and trying to get a feel for what distinguishes each from the others. Specifically,...

City Councilman Dennis Zine has never struck me as a controller type. He's garrulous, outgoing, street-smart — the remnants of his first career as a Los Angeles police officer and union representative. He was a forceful personality at the Police...

At first glance, the county's Measure B, which would require the use of condoms in adult films shot in Los Angeles, seems fairly hard to rebut: Other than a few self-interested pornographers, who could be against mandating safe-sex practices? And yet,...

Eric Garcetti is one of the city's more likable public officials. He's smart, dapper, quietly confident, attentive to detail, seasoned enough to be taken seriously by power brokers but boyish enough to tend his Twitter feed. He's quite liberal but also...

There are a couple of assumptions guiding much of the civic conversation about public employee pension reform: first, that organized labor would fight any reform tooth and nail; and second, that labor's strong presence in Los Angeles would doom such...

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors oversees a vast operation: It incarcerates thousands of inmates; it cares for children whose parents have abused or neglected them; it runs hospitals, clinics, beaches, harbors, parks and a welfare system. So...

In a large conference room at City Hall East, more than 100 gang-intervention workers gathered last week to hear about a new approach to heading off gang violence and the destruction it causes. They had come to hear a family tell its story. The mother...

There is no more consistent refrain among elected officials and candidates these days than that they will do everything they can to create jobs. It's a worthy goal given the sluggish state of the economy, and it's particularly crucial in California, which...