Kristin Crowley was appointed Los Angeles fire chief in 2022 at a time of turmoil in a department consumed by complaints of rampant hazing, harassment and discrimination among its 3,400-member ranks.
She was portrayed by then mayor Eric Garcetti as a stabilizing force, a trailblazer and the most qualified person. “I look for who’s best, not just who makes history, because the protection of our city first and foremost has to go to the human being who is best prepared to lead. But let me be clear, that is Kristin Crowley,” he said.
Crowley, a 22-year veteran at the time, had proven herself in the field. During the Woolsey fire of late 2018, she and wife Hollyn Bullock, also a firefighter, had dropped their three kids off at school, pulled some old personal protective equipment from their car, and set about saving Bullock’s mother’s home and eight other houses in Malibu over the course of 16 hours.
“We only lost one home,” Crowley later told the Malibu Times, “because it had no water supply. Neither of us had fought a brush fire for at least five years, but we went back to our training on how to protect a structure from a brush fire, and were using only garden hoses and buckets.”
But now, six years since that incident and three since Crowley was appointed to lead the LA fire department, the mood between Crowley and Garcetti’s successor is different. Two Los Angeles neighborhoods have been leveled by wind-driven fires, and others are under threat.
The most destructive event in the city’s history has put civic and political leaders on the defensive. Recriminations are flying, and Crowley is in a public spat with Mayor Karen Bass over a lack of resources, including personnel and equipment, that the fire department desperately needed when the infernos ignited last Tuesday.
Crowley publicly criticized the city on Friday for budget cuts that she said have made it harder for firefighters to do their jobs at a time when they are seeing more calls. She also cast blame on the city for water running out on Tuesday when about 20% of the hydrants tapped to fight the Palisades fire went dry.
“I’m not a politician, I’m a public servant. It’s my job as the fire chief for Los Angeles city fire department to make sure our firefighters have exactly what they need to do their jobs,” she told CNN.
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But in public city budget hearings last year, Crowley asked the city for an increase of 159 personnel. Instead, Bass and the city council cut 61 fire department positions despite calls for service increasing 55% since 2010.
Crowley warned that budget cuts could hamper the department’s ability to respond to emergencies, including wildfires. Cuts in overtime limited the department’s ability to prepare and train for “large scale emergencies”, she said, and the department had also lost mechanics, leading to delays in repairing the vehicle fleet.
“This service delivery model is no longer sustainable,” she said, adding that more complex emergencies and the growth of the community “demand an expansion of our life-safety service capabilities”.
Crowley’s comments and perceived falling-out with Bass – who maintains the fire department has the resources needed to do its job and will address specifics once the crisis subsides – has prompted so much speculation about her job security that the union issued a statement on Friday assuring rank-and-file members that she had not been fired.
On Saturday, the mayor invited Crowley to stand beside her during a news conference in a public – and perhaps forced – show of unity.
“Let me be clear about something: the fire chief and I are focused on fighting these fires and saving lives, and any differences that we might have will be worked out in private,” Bass said, adding: “Our first and most important obligation to Angelenos is to get through this crisis.”
But Crowley and Bass are now swept into the national political fray over diversity, equity and inclusion policies that conservatives believe have gone too far in US institutions. Crowley, the city’s first female fire chief, made diversifying the overwhelmingly male department a priority.
There’s no evidence that Crowley’s efforts to diversify the department have hampered the fight against the fires, but that’s not how right-leaning pundits see it. “What we are seeing [was] largely preventable,” conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly charged. “LA’s fire chief has made not filling the fire hydrants top priority, but diversity.”
The Los Angeles department of water and power, and not the fire department, is in charge of providing water for the hydrants, and its leaders have said they were overwhelmed by the intense demand on a municipal system not designed to fight wildfires, particularly when firefighting aircraft were grounded by the Santa Ana winds.
Gavin Newsom has ordered an investigation into what happened, and Crowley herself added to the criticism. “When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we expect there’s going to be water,” she said during a local news interview.
Adam Thiel, who previously served as Philadelphia’s fire commissioner, suggested that people reserve judgment until the fires can be investigated. He noted that firefighters cannot control the weather, a key factor in battling wildfires.
“Firefighting, to a regular person, probably appears to be a relatively simple process of putting water on a fire,” Thiel said. “In reality every firefighting operation, in any environment, is inherently volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.”
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Crowley was appointed to the job amid complaints about a frat-house culture in the department that was sometimes hostile to women and minorities. Several lawsuits alleged hazing and harassment, and federal investigators found evidence of discrimination.
At the time Crowley was sworn in, women accounted for just 3.5% of the uniformed membership, a figure that’s not unusual for a department. A survey found that half the uniformed women in the department – along with 40% of Black people, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders – felt harassment was a problem.
Crowley, who has served as a fire marshal, engineer and battalion chief, told the Los Angeles Times in 2022 that she planned to ensure all employees “come to work and feel safe and feel heard”.
Crowley, who grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, came to firefighting after what she called “a really unique journey”.
A high school and college athlete, she studied biology at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, with plans to become an orthopedic surgeon. Two weeks after graduation, she moved to California.
A stint as a paramedic changed her career path. She did an internship with the fire department and was hooked.
“Within a few seconds of me entering into the fire station, it was just such a wonderful connection to what I had being a student-athlete for the majority of my life, and I tell you, it was a perfect fit,” she told WBAY-TV in Green Bay in 2022.
Associated Press contributed reporting