Karen Bass: “I’m not ready for primetime.”

“I sure as heck wouldn’t have gone.”

Bass stresses the city has cleared dozens of encampments and brought thousands of people into shelter, but data show nearly half of them dropped out of the system and presumably returned to the streets.

Bass wants to hire more police officers, and she has branded Raman’s views on policing and homelessness as “extreme.”

“Every now and then we’re popular, but we go out of popularity very quickly,” Bass said on a recent Friday in Watts at Nickerson Gardens, a large housing development.