The Los Angeles Fire Department’s diversity chief is being eviscerated online after a shocking video shows her blaming fire victims.
A resurfaced clip of Assistant Chief Kristine Larson, who heads the department’s equity and human rights bureau, defending her department’s DEI hiring practices.
The public relations video from 2019, shared by the End Wokeness account, shows Larson saying that she believes people who reach out for an emergency, whether it’s a fire or medical call, want those responders to look like them.
When asked about female firefighters perhaps not being strong enough to carry a man out of a burning building, she responded, “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”
Her comment angered many online, particularly in the wake of the wildfires across the L.A. area where there have been at least 24 deaths, and at least 16 people missing — numbers authorities said were expected to rise.
“This might be a bad enough answer to eliminate DEI in fire departments,” one person commented.
Another added: “This person should’ve been fired immediately after making such a statement.”
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Conservative commentator Collin Rugg added: “Hot take: People just want someone to show up who will stop their house from burning down.”
Critics have already slammed the city’s priority of diversity over proper staffing and equipping its firefighters.
This comes as Los Angeles’ water chief, Janisse Quinones, reportedly took the reservoir offline to “repair a tear” and ignored broken fire hydrants months before the fires, according to the Daily Mail.
Quinones, who was hired by Bass, said during a recent podcast that everything she does needs to be done with an “equity lens.”
She noted: “It’s important to me that everything we do is with an equity lens and social justice and making sure that we right the wrongs that we’ve done in the past.”
After fire hydrants ran dry, and aside from water bombers, L.A.’s Department of Water and Power sent in mobile water tankers to help fight the fires, which can be refilled at hydrants that still have pressure, Quinones said.
It takes about 30 minutes to refill about 4,000 gallons of water.