Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore declined on Monday to press for an investigation into findings that city leaders sought to paint their response to the deadly Pacific Palisades fires in a more favorable light.
“My efforts need to be pointed toward fixing things, not looking back and trying to point blame at anybody,” Moore said during an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I need to fix where we’re going so it never happens again.”
Multiple city officials colluded to make edits to LAFD’s “after-action” report, which assessed the department’s response to the 2025 fires, Moore and others recently confirmed in response to a Los Angeles Times investigation. Those who worked to downplay criticism about the city’s response included Mayor Karen Bass and Ronnie Villanueva, who was the fire chief when the crisis sparked over one year ago, the investigation found.
Moore has pledged not to allow similar edits to take place under his watch at the LAFD. The fire chief previously decried officials for making the edits, saying they were intended to “soften language and reduce explicit criticism of department leadership.”
But he has since pulled back from calling for further scrutiny into concerns that Bass and fire department leaders responsible for steering the city through the disaster averted accountability.
“I don’t think there’s really any benefit to me” looking into who made the edits, Moore said this week. “I can see where the original report and the public report aim to fix the same thing. They aim to correct where we could have been better. And it identifies … the steps that are going to be necessary to make those corrective actions.”
The most significant changes across seven drafts of the report involved the LAFD’s deployment decisions before the fire, as the wind warnings became increasingly dire, according to records obtained by the outlet. Top LAFD officials decided not to fully staff up and pre-deploy all available engines and firefighters to the Palisades or other high-risk areas ahead of a dire wind forecast.
On Monday, Moore also referenced the LAFD’s controversial actions on the Lachman Fire. Lingering underground hot spots from the blaze are credited for sparking the Palisades fires, which were part of the Los Angeles fires that caused billions in damage, torched thousands of structures, and killed 31 people in January 2025.
Moore said that the battalion chief on duty during the Lachman fires, Mario Garcia, “swears to me that nobody ever told him verbally or through a text message that there was any hot spots.”
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“If that is true, then — you asked me about discipline — potential discipline would possibly occur,” Moore said.
Rebuilding efforts in the city have been slow, with the number of such projects underway in the low hundreds, compared to over 6,000 structures that were burned in the Palisades.
