Los Angeles voters will choose from seven largely unknown attorneys vying for Los Angeles City Attorney in the June 7 primary, a race that could set the course for the city’s approach to corruption, homelessness, housing, public safety and other pressing issues.
The two top winners face each other in November, barring the unlikely event that one candidate wins 50% of the vote, plus one vote, to win outright in June.
The powerful City Hall position involves two roles — acting as the prosecutor of misdemeanor crimes, and also representing city departments and other parts of L.A.’s municipal government in lawsuits and business transactions.
The seven candidates specialize in different areas of the law, have a wide range of backgrounds and experience — and their platforms dramatically differ. One candidate pledges to seek aggressive reform of the criminal justice system by diverting people away from incarceration, and on the other end of the spectrum one candidate promises to fervently enforce minor quality of life crimes.
The seven include three City Hall veterans: Sherri Onica Valle Cole is a former deputy city attorney; Richard Kim is a deputy in the City Attorney’s Office, and Kevin James was president of the Board of Public Works. The other four candidates include civil rights attorney Faisal Gill, bankruptcy specialist Teddy Kapur, former corporate attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, and federal prosecutor Marina Torres.
This complicated race has been under the radar, but some sparks have flown. Richard Kim formally disputed Marina Torres’ claim that she is “federal prosecutor.” But Torres prevailed and kept her ballot description. Kim also raised eyebrows by sending a false mailer appealing to Asian American voters, claiming that he’s the only Asian American candidate in this race. In fact, three Asian Americans are competing, including Teddy Kapur who is Indian American, and Faisal Gill who is Pakistani American — and Kim.
L.A.’s next city attorney will inherit a troubled government office at the center of a corruption scandal that broke into the open in 2019 when the FBI raided the offices of the City Attorney and the Los Angeles Department of Water Power.
The raid stemmed from an FBI probe into collusion and other improprieties surrounding the settlement of a class action lawsuit. The suit represented thousands of LADWP customers who were wildly overcharged on their bills due to the bungled overhaul of the public utility’s billing system in 2013.
Since the FBI raid, headlines about corruption at Los Angeles City Hall have stunned many Angelenos. A senior official in City Attorney’s Office has pleaded guilty to extortion, and the former head of DWP, David Wright, pleaded guilty to bribery and was sentenced to six years in federal prison.
In addition to inheriting that ugly controversy, the city attorney’s job includes drafting the detailed ordinances put on the books by the Los Angeles City Council, such as language that drives the city’s medical and recreational marijuana laws; restrictions on the unhoused that have been challenged as unconstitutional; and environmental laws including prohibiting businesses from using plastic grocery bags.
In addition, the city attorney plays an integral part in L.A.’s criminal justice system, working with LAPD and the L.A. County District Attorney’s office by acting as the agency that handles misdemeanor crimes.
The seven candidates encompass a broad range of attitudes toward crime and government oversight, and no polling has been released for this wide-open race.
Sherri Onica Valle Cole, who served as a Los Angeles deputy city attorney for 15 years, says she comes from an extremely humble background, having faced poverty as a child and experienced homelessness as a child. As a deputy city attorney she focused on consumer fraud and workplace protection cases, and worked as a criminal defense attorney on “white collar” crimes.
Those experiences and others in her life – she is a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence – have molded her. As city attorney she could overcome the challenges the city faces, she said, because she understands the people with whom the city attorney interacts.
Onica Valle Cole said at a forum hosted by the New Democratic Club that when she was a deputy city attorney, her first question when taking up a case was “what really is the solution to this problem?”
“I really want to reimagine community safety and help create a whole community safety program centered around ‘who do we deal with, we deal with when,’” she said.
The city attorney’s office has “diversion” programs used before and after someone is charged, but she would put a special focus on the mentally ill. She wants to hold police accountable, and to attack racism at the systemic level – by removing bias she says is built into the criminal justice system.
Onica Valle Cole also says that she approached her job as a criminal prosecutor informed by the experiences of her husband, a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer. What she learned, she said, is that the justice system is stacked against people due to their race or their poverty.
Faisal Gill, a civil rights attorney, says he aims to hold the Los Angeles Police Department “accountable,” and will reduce the overuse of misdemeanor enforcement, and “end the criminalization of homelessness.”
He wants to stop prosecuting unhoused people for crimes that stem from not having a home such as trespassing on public property, vagrancy and sleeping on sidewalks.
And he would not shy away from holding police accountable, and would call for officers to be investigated and face consequences for using excessive force or acting in a racially discriminatory way, he said.
He laid out a plan to dramatically change the City Attorney’s Office by being more conservative in charging people with crimes that he argues could better be addressed through services and programs that do not involve law enforcement.
Among those, Gill said he would cut back on prosecuting quality of life crimes such as drug possession, arguing that the city attorney’s office has been overly enthusiastic in charging people.
“We charge way too much, and we all know who we’re charging,” Gill said during a People’s Budget L.A. candidate forum. “It’s not the folks in Brentwood and it’s not the folks in Cheviot Hills … It’s the Black and brown people that we are basically charging. We’ve got to stop charging that much, and put people in diversion. And stop giving them a criminal record for the rest of their life.”
While representing a music producer client, Gill found that prosecutors tried to force his client into a diversion program. Gill said LAPD body camera footage later revealed that his client was racially profiled before being wrongfully arrested.
Kevin James is an attorney who has served on numerous city commissions, most prominently as president of the city’s Board of Public Works from 2013 to 2020. He then served briefly as chief of legislative affairs for Mayor Eric Garcetti and is in private practice as he runs for city attorney.
When James led the Board of Public Works he oversaw a department that handled many of the city’s basic services, such as maintaining streets and street lighting, picking up trash and handling the city’s waste management systems.
He said he is uniquely qualified for the city attorney job because he dealt with many legal issues facing the city including contract disputes, labor relations and illegal dumping.
James says the city attorney’s office has the most critical city government role in addressing homelessness, but he believes it has taken the wrong approach by settling cases that challenged laws which are used to regulate and restrict where people can live.
In a candidate forum hosted by the West Valley Neighborhood Alliance on Homelessness, James noted that “every time the city of Los Angeles settles another lawsuit, we’re letting our ‘neighbors’ off the hook.” Nearby cities “have no incentive to participate with us in building the housing and services that we know that we need,” he said, so he wants to get a court order that will ensure every community throughout the county is doing its part.
Teddy Kapur, the son of immigrants from India who built a life in America from humble beginnings, is a partner at Pachulski Stang Ziehl & Jones LLP, which advises businesses going through bankruptcy and other financial difficulties.
He frames the city’s homeless crisis as being fueled by financial struggles faced by families, businesses and workers.
Kapur has focused on the city attorney’s role in ending wage theft, a practice in which employers fail to pay their workers what they are owed, and that often receives little enforcement. And he believes that short-term solutions to tackling homelessness – such as “tiny home” villages – are not enough.
As city attorney, he would pursue more long-term options for housing. He says the city attorney’s office can act to preserve thousands of affordable housing units — by preventing the expiration of existing covenants with property owners, which will expire in the next few years.
Kapur chairs the board of the nonprofit ImagineLA, which provides mentorship and other services to formerly homeless families. He also volunteers at Public Counsel to provide free legal help to people facing personal bankruptcy, and teaches a course in job search strategies at Los Angeles Community College.
At an endorsement meeting of SEIU 2015 union, he said, “I have volunteered my time and energy for over 20 years to help people who don’t have a place to live. … I will lead with compassion and urgency. I’ve made tackling homelessness a priority in my personal time and will make it a priority in City Hall. “
Richard Kim, a deputy city attorney, is running to lead the office that he has worked in for 20 years. His priorities include pushing back against criminal justice reform measures he believes restrict law enforcement agencies’ abilities to fight crime.
A self-described moderate Democrat, Kim supports the recall of Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, and characterizes as “dangerous” Gascon’s policies aimed at reducing incarceration. Kim also points to ballot measures he calls failures such as Proposition 47, which aimed to reduce imprisonment for minor offenses.
“Over the years our hands have been tied,” Kim said at a candidate forum hosted by the Central City Association. “State and local laws have tied our hands and taken away our prosecutorial discretion.”
Kim says he adheres to the “broken windows” theory from the 1980s that says tackling minor offenses will ward off more serious crimes and urban “lawlessness.”
The theory lost support over time, when critics said it failed to improve public safety and led to disproportionate incarceration of the poor, and residents of Black and Latino communities. But Kim says it works, and he’ll enforce “good laws” that restrict behavior such as public urination and defecation, panhandling, loitering, public drinking and shoplifting.
Hydee Feldstein Soto, a real estate and business attorney who until recently sat on the board of her local neighborhood council, says she is running to solve Los Angeles’s biggest problems, including homelessness and corruption.
She says she wants to reduce the high cost of voter-approved Proposition HHH dwelling units the city is building for the homeless, and wants to reduce the costs of other affordable housing efforts, in order to produce more units sooner.
It is costly for affordable housing builders to secure financing from various sources, she says, so the city should update its “outdated” financing approach. She wants to stop awarding no-bid contracts, streamline the building-approval process and obtain the city’s share of funding for public and mental health services.
She also says she would tackle the city’s culture of corruption and bring accountability to City Hall. She plans to partner with the city’s Ethics Commission and the City Controller’s Office to make sure public records requests laws are followed.
On the issue of whether the city attorney should make policy, Feldstein Soto said in a forum hosted by the Beverly Hills Bar Association, “The city attorney’s policy is limited to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion on a case by case basis.” For that reason, she said does not view the city attorney’s role as being a policy maker, and she would not decline enforcement of a category of laws as long as they are constitutional and valid.
Marina Torres, recently an assistant U.S. attorney in the L.A. office of the Department of Justice, says the city has played an important role in her life and that of her family. When the FBI raided City Hall as part of a spreading corruption investigation, she was drawn to the need to clean up L.A. governance by running for City Attorney.
Torres says she specializes in corruption cases at the federal level, such as those involving money laundering and drug cartels, and she plans to have “zero tolerance” for corruption and will use the City Attorney’s Office’s powers to root it out.
Torres was motivated to be a prosecutor after seeing law enforcement officials using a punitive approach with her own family members who had committed crimes – regardless of whether they were juveniles or first-time offenders.
She saw prosecutors who were stripped of their empathy, she said during a candidate forum hosted by the Los Angeles Business Council, noting that “I have loved being able to bring a prosecutorial approach to these cases that’s full of empathy, and one that, with constructive prosecution, with intelligent prosecution, we can keep people safe.”
She identifies with the issues, she says, because her family members have been homeless, and she had to tap a law known to attorneys as “5150” to detain a loved one who was deemed to be a danger to themselves and others.
Torres is against scaling back the role of police in reaction to police brutality. She believes policing can be reformed and racial equity can be addressed even as laws are enforced. She agrees services and shelter are necessary, but believes enforcement of laws is critical. And as a prosecutor working on cartel and human trafficking cases, she sees drug addiction and mental health issues that must be addressed.
