The race to succeed Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D), who’d taken office when crime was falling and will leave as it surges, has pulled in more than two dozen candidates. Some of them are credible, some of them are gadflies, and all of them describe a city in crisis — harder and more expensive to live in, with a government too sclerotic to fix it.

Billionaire developer Rick Caruso is among them. He says that if elected, he’d hire 1,500 more cops for the “underfunded” Los Angeles Police Department and he’d house at least half of the city’s 60,000 homeless by the end of his first year.