The Civil Liberties Champion

Candidate Faisal Gill Turns Outgoing City Attorney into his Foil

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Faisal Gill's campaign photo for his run to become Los Angeles' next City Attorney in 2022.

Faisel Gill is running to replace Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer and doing so on the promise of being the strongest protector of civil liberties. The primary nominating election for city attorney (along with mayor, city controller, the odd-numbered city council seats and the even-numbered school district seats) won’t be held until June 2022.

So far, Gill’s only opponent is fellow former Republican Kevin James. Prominent LGBT civil rights activist Rick Chavez Zbur tossed his hat in the ring before bowing out to run for a seat in the Assembly. This has left Mike Feuer’s record as city attorney as Gill’s opponent.

Gill has been specifically targeting Feuer’s apparent antagonism towards releasing police body cam footage to the public and his role in writing the anti-camping ordinances aimed at reducing the number of homeless encampments.

Gill came to wide attention after successfully convincing a U.S. District Court judge to remove a protective order that had kept police body-cam footage under wraps since 2019 following a domestic violence call. When police arrived, they saw Antone Austin taking the trash out from his apartment. According to Austin’s lawsuit, the police assumed Austin was the person wanted in the domestic violence report.

Austin is Black and the person who was the subject of the police call was white.

Austin questioned the two uniformed officers who ordered him to stop, and the confrontation between him and the officers became physical as Austin demanded an explanation and began to yell for help.

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For nearly two years Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer fought to keep the body camera video of the arrest from the public. Independent journalist Jasmyne Cannick reported that Feuer’s office claimed in court filings that it did not want the Los Angeles Police Department video released publicly because it would “be contrary to LAPD policy and may have a chilling effect on future LAPD investigations.”

Cannick, who has broken a number of stories regarding problems in and outside of the police department, has enthusiastically endorsed Gill and has been actively promoting his candidacy.

The Political Making of Faisal Gill
Referencing the fact that he’s picked up and resettled quite a bit over the past 15 years from one side of the country to the other, he said he’s a firm believer of being involved in the community in which you live.

“I would never take the positions that I’m taking right now but I’m looking for my service to mean something,” Gill said. He lives in Porter Ranch, a northern suburb of Los Angeles. He could have ran for an Assembly seat, noting it would have been easier.

“I firmly believe wherever you live, you got to be involved in politics,” Gills said. “I tell my kids that time you’re involved in your neighborhood council.”

Though he was born in Pakistan, he was raised in Virginia. His father spent long hours driving a taxi and his mother was a homemaker.

Gill described himself as a subpar student who regularly got into fights, defending himself against schoolmates due to racial bigotry. He even became a father while still in high school.

He recounted watching his father go to work at 7 o’clock in the morning and not come back until 9, 10 o’clock at night, just driving a cab to Washington D.C. and back to their home in a Virginia township. Back then, Washington D.C. did not have meters to calculate fares. Fares were calculated by zoning.

“So you go from one zone to another and another and another. That’s how you calculated fares,” Gill said. It was common for passengers to accuse the driver of taking longer routes for a bigger fare amount.

“There would always be that tension with the passenger in the backseat saying ‘go this way’ or ‘go that way.’ My father would just say sure, sure, no problem. Which way do you want me to go? I’ll go. No problem.” Gill said he got to see this first hand when his father took him and his younger brother to work one day.

Gill noted that his father was trying to teach him that the beauty of America is that it doesn’t matter where you were born.

My father’s basic message was, you can be in the back seat giving the orders, or in the front seat taking the orders. In America, it is up to you.

Gill said that his father also explained that he may not ever be accepted by some people.

Aside from all the fees and regulations he had to pay and abide by in order to drive a taxi, Gill said his father was apolitical.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, Muslim organizations across the country determined that they had to increase Muslim participation in government, or things could get really bad for them. It must be remembered that 762 Muslims from around the country were rounded up and detained. Two-thirds of them were from New York.

Recalling the aftermath of 9/11, he recounted receiving death threats, his North Virginian neighbors looking at him and his family differently; he saw fellow Muslims deported to their home countries on no other charges than briefly overstaying their visas.

“Several times with people I knew cursed me out, called me names such as towel head and told me, ‘go home terrorist.’”

Gill recounted going on multiple interviews with the broadcast news media on the day of 9/11.

“I did my last interview at 11:30 p.m. that night from my house before I went to sleep,” Gill recounted. “My mother … my parents lived with me at the time … and my mom asked, ‘are you sure you should be that visible? It’s not a good idea because the people they are going to they’re not going to like us.’”

Gill was already active in Muslim organizations before 9/11. But after 9/11, there was a consensus among mainstream American Muslim organizations that the world had changed.

“Even before [9/11], I was, is involved in Muslim organizations, and I was involved in the late ’90s and this was before I was even in the military, there was a secret evidence going on where the Clinton ministration had put Muslims in jail without providing evidence.”

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the federal government rounded up 1,200 Near Eastern and South Asian immigrants, relying on rules signed into law by the Bill Clinton administration in response to the 1998 terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

In 2003, Gill served as a spokesman for the American Muslim Council, an organization founded by Abdurahman Alamoudi to encourage Muslim political participation. al-Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years in federal prison for bringing over one million dollars in cash provided by the Libyan government into the U.S.

He was appointed to the Office of Personnel Management as general counsel deputy in the George W. Bush administration. OPM manages the civil service of the federal government, coordinates recruiting of new government employees and manages their health insurance and retirement benefits programs. The Department of Homeland Security and its duties were split from the OPM.

After his appointment, Gill was investigated by officials in connection to al-Amoudi but was ultimately cleared by a polygraph test and allowed to resume work. However, pundit Frank Gaffney led a public campaign to discredit Gill, highlighting the brief inquiry into Gill’s AMC connections and soliciting letters from congressional Republicans calling for an investigation.

In a 2004 statement defending Gill, a DHS spokesman said: “DHS is confident that our security clearance process is effective. Mr. Gill was thoroughly vetted at several levels. Mr. Gill did not withhold information on government forms required to initiate government security clearance processing and has been cooperative throughout the process.”

Faisal Gill left the Department of Homeland Security in January, 2005. In 2014, NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA had been spying on Gill and several other prominent Muslim-Americans beginning in 2006.

Asked whether he believes he would have been monitored by the NSA if he were not Muslim, Gill is blunt. “Absolutely not,” he says. “Look, I’ve never made an appearance or been a lawyer for anyone who’s been [associated with terrorism]. But there are plenty of other lawyers who have made those appearances and actually represented those governments, and their name isn’t Faisal Gill and they weren’t born in Pakistan and they aren’t on this list.”

Gill changed his party registration in 2007. He likes to say that he’s been a registered Democrat longer than he has been a registered Republican. It’s clear his experience during the Bush years changed him.

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Gill’s Critique of LA’s Homeless Ordinance
Despite his short time as an Angeleno, Gill is looking to make a difference in Los Angeles and be the protector of civil liberties that City Attorney Mike Feuer hasn’t been.

This is particularly important given that the city council passed a “kinder, gentler anti-homeless sweeps” on July 28, designed to restrict homeless encampments around the city.

The new rules target people who sit, sleep and store their belongings near building entrances, freeway underpasses, parks, homeless shelters, day care centers and other public facilities.

This latest ordinance is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It leaves room for case-by-case decisions that will likely lead to different enforcement in different council districts. It also means that council members with differing opinions and competing interests will wield some power over how to police certain areas of their district.

Councilman Joe Buscaino, who is running for mayor, said he is looking to enforce the new rules to their fullest and would prefer a more stringent ordinance.

Buscaino reportedly said, “If you are offered shelter, you must either move in, move along, or face a consequence.”

Councilmember Mike Bonin voted against the measure. He said that by and large, the problem is that people living on sidewalks have nowhere to go.

In an interview with the editorial staff of Random Lengths, Gill argued that the “city attorney [in Los Angeles] has been used… as a personal attorney for the city council. And that’s not how a City Attorney is supposed to [act].”

The anti-camping ordinance that was passed is the result of the city attorney writing a modified version of the ordinance that is currently the subject of the lawsuit, LA Alliance v. City and County of Los Angeles.

The lawsuit alleges that the city has not responded quickly enough to shelter individuals experiencing homelessness, which has led to unhealthy conditions on city streets, and the obstruction of free passage on sidewalks.

Gill, who has been critical of Mike Feuer’s handling of the city’s anti-homeless ordinances, noted that, “the city council, as an entity, does not have an attorney….to the extent that the city attorney is opining on policy or going out there and making policy. He or she should not be doing that.”

“To the extent that the city attorney is basically giving his opinion on whether the policy the city council is passing is legal, that’s the role,” Gill said. “When the city council is basically passing something that is illegal, the city attorney should be sure to step up and say, look, this policy is not legal according to the Constitution, state law or ordinance or city charter.”

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