Bodycams increase transparency, provide objective evidence for investigations and prosecutions, document officer actions, and help de-escalate confrontations.
🚨 Viewer Discretion is Advised 🚨
It may sound good at first, but let’s dive deeper:
Governor Newsom’s claim that California is issuing rebuilding permits “at a rapid pace — 3x faster” and “doing everything possible” to help survivors of the January 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires is, at best, a selective presentation of the facts and, at worst, a misleading one.
Ten months after fires destroyed more than 16,000 homes and displaced 150,000 residents, the reality on the ground contradicts the Governor’s narrative:
• Only ~620 of the 1,564 rebuilding applications in Pacific Palisades have been approved — fewer than 40 %. In unincorporated Los Angeles County, the approval rate remains below 10 %. At the current pace, it will take decades — not months — to rebuild the hardest-hit neighborhoods.
• Thousands of survivors remain in temporary housing, paying mortgages and property taxes on ash while their insurance policies expire and rebuilding costs have soared beyond what most policies cover.
• Despite multiple executive orders suspending CEQA and Coastal Act requirements, local jurisdictions, the California Coastal Commission, and conflicting state guidance have created new bottlenecks that the Governor’s office has failed to resolve.
• The City of Los Angeles has still not voted on the fee waivers it promised in January, and the much-touted “pre-approved” home designs are rarely used because of inconsistent implementation.
• Los Angeles County has opened an active investigation into the state’s largest insurer, State Farm, for systemic delays and underpayments on more than 13,500 claims — a crisis the state has refused to confront with meaningful enforcement.
• The independent McChrystal Group after-action review, commissioned by the state itself, documented “systemic and human failures” in both response and recovery, including inconsistent practices and communications breakdowns that continue to slow permitting and inspections.
The Governor is quick to criticize federal delays, yet he has not acknowledged — much less fixed — the state-level failures that turned a catastrophic fire into a decade-long rebuilding nightmare: chronic underinvestment in fire prevention, regulatory complexity that inflates construction costs four to five times higher than in other states, and a recovery apparatus that has left survivors to navigate a labyrinth of red tape with little guidance or financial relief.
Californians who lost everything deserve more than press-release optimism. They deserve transparency about how slowly their neighborhoods are actually coming back, accountability for the bureaucratic obstacles that remain, and immediate action — not another executive order — to cut fees, enforce fair insurance practices, and deliver the resources required to rebuild lives, not just statistics.
Until those steps are taken, claims of “everything possible” ring hollow.
@WallStreetApes It starts in the home and with what parents are allowing their children to get away with, and how they’re allowed to act. Require meetings with the parents every time a child refuses to listen- disrupt the parent’s lives and maybe they’ll actually start parenting.