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The most important thing to know about Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley is that she is the first LGBTQ fire chief in the history of the Los Angeles Fire Department.
It’s also the only thing worth knowing about the woman in charge while Los Angeles burned.
Crowley’s status as the first LGBTQ fire chief appears at the top of her bio on the LAFD site. It’s what got her on the Kelly Clarkson show under the headline, “Meet LAFD’s First Female & LGBTQ+ Fire Chief” and made her one of the marshals of the Los Angeles Pride Parade (some of whose attendees no longer have homes after the wave of fires.)
But DEI wasn’t done with the LAFD just yet. Not until two other lesbian Kirstens were also running the LAFD.
Kristina Kepner, the first lesbian Assistant Chief and a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School for Managing Diverse Organizations, was accused of a domestic violence incident involving her girlfriend. Kristine Larson, who has a degree in Sociology, headed ‘Equity on Fire’, an organization complaining that the LAFD was sexist and racist, and was then rewarded with the title of the LAFD’s first lesbian Equity Bureau Chief with a $399,000 salary.
Diversity mandates had led to three lesbians named some version of ‘Kirsten’ running the LAFD.
Meanwhile, Jamie Brown became the LAFD’s first lesbian Training Commander. Her accomplishment was being the only one of the four lesbians running the LAFD who wasn’t named ‘Kirsten’.
Many glass ceilings were being broken, but there was no one who knew how to fight fires. Unless it was by asking the fire about its preferred pronouns.
Crowley, Kepner, and Brown were all paramedics, not firefighters. Diversity mandates led to paramedics being referred to as ‘firefighters’ and being promoted to fire captains and battalion chiefs and then to the top echelons of the LAFD.
Paramedics who did not understand how to fight fires were running one of the biggest fire departments in the country.
Around this same time, Janisse Quinones was appointed to head the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, with a $750,000 salary that far exceeded her predecessor. The press release made sure to mention that she was the “first female Latina to lead LADWP as CEO.”
Between all the trailblazing lesbian fire chiefs and the first female Latina CEO, the LAFD couldn’t find the manpower to fight the fires on the first day of the firestorm or the water in the hydrants to put them out. Breaking glass ceilings is easy, but putting out fires is hard.
Kristin Crowley was picked to break glass ceilings, not to fight fires.
Even before the worst firestorms in over a decade hit, there were warnings that the DEI LAFD brass had wrecked one of the country’s greatest firefighting services. The I-10 fire in 2023 spun out of control and the LAFD struggled to cope with what should have been an easy problem. In a Keystone Kops moment, Engine 17 got stuck under the overpass and was destroyed.
No one dared to point the finger at Crowley, a Harvard Business School graduate who earns $439,772 and was prone to reciting Kamalaisms like “I am different, but there’s a lot of difference everywhere in the world” and “we all our different, but that’s a strength of ours.”
Being different has become a major asset at the LAFD ever since it went DEI.
Crowley succeeded Chief Ralph Terrazas, hailed as the first Latino chief who replaced Chief Douglas Barry, the first black chief, and in the ordinary way of things, Crowley will be replaced by the first transgender fire chief who will then have to be replaced by someone even more diverse. Assuming that there is still a Los Angeles to pay them/it/them a six-figure salary.
None of this has much to do with fighting fires, but very little in LA government has to do with anything except “breaking barriers” and triumphing over obstacles like basic competence.
After complaints that the first Latino fire chief tolerated sexism, he had to be replaced by a woman. Kirstin Crowley came to work committed to being the best at rooting out sexism.
After her appointment, Fire Chief Crowley vowed to prioritize a “work environment that is free of harassment, discrimination and hazing” and promised to build a new era for the LAFD through “the creation of systemic equity and inclusion across the LAFD.”
Systemic equity and inclusion doesn’t put out fires. Not unless you drop DEI consultants on them. But the LAFD leadership was too busy with DEI to deal with minor matters like fires.
In 2022, the LAFD under Crowley announced its first Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Bureau. It bragged that 70% of the applicants to the department were minorities and 8% were women. Rather than hiring the best, the LAFD was laboriously working to fill diversity quotas.
Mayor Eric Garcetti had promised to bring the number of women up to 5% from 3.5% and now the LAFD is approaching 8%. No one was allowed to ask if this was going to make the LAFD any better at fighting fires now that it was hiring in order to hit a diversity target.
Beyond DEI, every stupid woke idea found a home under Crowley’s regime. After taking over, Crowley debuted the first “electric fire engine” to fight “pollution”, instead it was sidelined by a water leak. The vaccine mandate ousted some firefighters and suspended others. Last year, with a shortage of firefighters, the LAFD began trying to bring some of them back.
Los Angeles and the LAFD fought the Firefighters4Freedom Foundation group, which represented 500 members of the LAFD. Now the LAFD has been reduced to begging for volunteers with firefighting experience. The DEI LAFD seems to be a whole lot more diverse, but also a lot less competent at deploying manpower than the old organization used to be.
While the LAFD might have lost a whole lot white men who knew how to fight fires, it gained a lot of DEI hires who knew how to pursue diversity, inclusion and all the pronoun stuff.
And while LA might have lost a lot of buildings, it gained a lot of lesbian fire chiefs.
