New Los Angeles Police Chief Is a Conventional Choice

After a monthslong search, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles on Friday chose a conventional law enforcement leader to head the Los Angeles Police Department, one of the highest-profile jobs in American law enforcement.

The move signaled that the mayor’s priority was improving the culture within the department rather than overhauling the way policing was conducted in the nation’s second-largest city.

Ms. Bass selected Jim McDonnell, who spent almost three decades within the L.A.P.D. before being elected in 2014 as the sheriff of Los Angeles County. He will now be charged with boosting morale, building up the department’s depleted ranks and preparing for the large events that are coming to Los Angeles, including the World Cup, the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

“This choice says that the mayor is interested in the internal dynamics of the department and getting those right, and then from there hopefully building out more toward the future,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights attorney who spent years suing the department over misconduct and representing victims of police violence before partnering with police chiefs to investigate scandals and push reform.

The appointment of a new police chief, which still needs approval from the Los Angeles City Council, represents Ms. Bass’s chance to put her own stamp on public safety in the sprawling and diverse city. It was her first opportunity, nearly two years after she assumed office, to shape the nation’s third-largest municipal police department, after New York and Chicago.

Ms. Bass grew up in Los Angeles and worked as a social worker and physician assistant in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. She founded Community Coalition, a nonprofit, in 1990 during the crack epidemic to address issues of crime, addiction and police accountability in one of the city’s most impoverished and violent areas.