Leading in Local Government
An Interview with Mike Feuer
Mike Feuer is Los Angeles’ City Attorney and one of California’s leading lawyers and lawmakers. As Los Angeles' chief lawyer and prosecutor since July, 2013, he has brought an innovative, problem-solving focus that combines fair and effective prosecution with initiatives to improve public safety and the quality of life throughout the city. In 2017, the American Bar Association presented its top award in the nation for a public sector law office to Feuer’s office -- the first City Attorney’s office ever to receive the distinguished Hodson Award, recognizing "sustained, outstanding performance or a specific and extraordinary service by a government or public sector law office." From 2006 to 2012, Feuer served as the Majority Policy Leader of the California Assembly and Chair of the Assembly's Judiciary Committee. And prior to that, he spent seven years on the Los Angeles City Council, where he chaired the Budget and Finance Committee. Earlier, Feuer was the Executive Director of the non-profit public interest law firm, Bet Tzedek Legal Services. Under Feuer’s leadership Bet Tzedek provided free legal assistance to more than 50,000 of indigent, elderly and disabled clients confronting unlawful eviction, the loss of their health care or basic government benefits, scam artists trying to steal their homes, and other critical problems. One newspaper wrote that Feuer transformed Bet Tzedek into a “national success story.” Feuer is the recipient of dozens of awards for his work protecting seniors and children, preventing gun violence, making the legal system more just, safeguarding the environment, standing up for consumers, improving public education, advancing equality and civil rights, and more.
Anthony Mohr: Thank you for your time and willingness to be interviewed by the Social Impact Review. Please tell our readers a little bit about your background and what brought you to where you are today.
Mike Feuer: I'm from San Bernardino, California. My mother and father and my grandparents were key influences for me. I've always been an athlete and I was pitching to my dad from a young age, which I loved to do. He had this old 1920s Cleveland Indians catcher's mitt, and if I could make his hand hurt as I pitched to him, it was a good day. One day as I was throwing to him, I asked why he chose his job. My dad described to me in more detail than he had before what it was like to be a prisoner of war in Stalag 17 during World War Two, about which they made the famous movie.
It was a brutal experience. Near the end of the war, the Russian army was coming after the Nazis, so the Nazis picked up the camp to run from the Russians. My father couldn't walk well; he’d been injured when he parachuted and his plane was shot down, and then the Nazis wouldn't give him boots that fit. My dad said, “Picture a long line of POWs trudging across Austria in the snow.” Because he couldn't walk, my father was about a half mile behind them, holding onto a little cart for stability. There was a Nazi with a German shepherd and a gun trained on him. My dad said that guy could have shot him at any time, and no one would have heard the sound, since they were so far behind. He was sure he wasn't going to live through that experience. When he did, he told he decided “to do the most important work in the world.” He became an educator. Because he'd seen what war had done, he realized that children were our future. For 60 years, he was a public school teacher, school principal, and a volunteer. When my father told me about this march, I realized that he wasn’t just telling me why he chose his job; he was suggesting the criterion I should use to choose mine.
My mom grew up in Boyle Heights in the Los Angeles area. It was the quintessential melting pot back then, with populations of Latinos, Jews, Japanese Americans -- a wide array of people from many backgrounds. Many languages were spoken there. She taught us about social justice early on, because she wanted to make sure that we knew when we were little kids what it was like to suddenly one day have all her Japanese American friends gone. During World War Two, the United States rounded up Japanese Americans and placed them in internment camps. And she wanted us to understand how fragile our rights are and how we have to stand up for people.
I worked my way through college and law school. I transferred to Harvard College and I graduated from Harvard Law School. Being in Cambridge utterly altered the trajectory of my life. It exposed me to so much that I had never even begun to experience before -- intellectually, culturally, the vitality of Harvard Square, the ability to perform social justice work in Boston. Harvard had a huge impact on me that I'll never forget.
Mohr: You served on the Los Angeles City Council, then on to the California state legislature, and then you ran for L.A. City Attorney.
Feuer: I don’t want to omit another key facet. Early on in my career, I led Bet Tzedek Legal Services. Bet Tzedek means house of justice. The organization represents the very most vulnerable people in L.A. When I was there, we helped about 50,000 people who were losing their houses or their health care and had no place to turn. I did that work before I ran for elective office, and that work epitomized why I chose to go to law school. And it also prepared me for my elective service, later on. I was already both intense and empathetic, but my service at Bet Tzedek gave me a ground level feeling for what it's like to live in poverty, to have to grind one’s way through daily life in a major urban center. Because of the neighborhoods we served, it gave me a feeling for what it's like to be in very dangerous places, in locations fraught with inequity and environmental injustice -- as well as a whole slew of other issues that were not specifically on Bet Tzedek’s agenda. But they became very much my issues to grapple with.
Mohr: Would you give me an example?
Feuer: I can give you many. Here’s one that did not make the headlines, but it’s significant for people who are skeptical about the value of serving in public life. At Bet Tzedek, we worked very closely with other organizations that serve senior citizens. Based on my work, I knew there were many seniors who eat cat food at night because they can't afford to eat decent meals. I’ve personally delivered meals through Jewish Family Service to seniors in desperate straits on Thanksgiving for 25 years.
When I got to the City Council, I learned there was a 100,000-person waiting list for home delivered meals in the City of Los Angeles. And I made it my business to change that, so I held hearings, including at a Jewish Family Service location, bringing my colleagues with me to have a first-hand sense of what it was like as a senior citizen living without any food stability. And I can tell you there was a zero-person waiting list by the time we finished.
Mohr: That's wonderful news, and it informs the next topic I want to talk to you about -- the relative merits of getting involved in public life at the federal, state or local level. Which do you feel is a better place for somebody coming out of college or grad school?
Feuer: When I was in law school, I was thinking seriously about politics. I was interested in finding ways to change the world. One possibility was going back to my hometown of San Bernardino and running for Congress, because I had the view, which I think is fairly pervasive in a place like Harvard, that the Federal Government is where the action is. Now I feel that’s a superficial and sort of elitist approach to public service. I quickly got the sense from working on the ground in a city like Los Angeles about the impact you can have here. When I ran for city council, which is the first office I ran for, some of my friends from school thought the job was all about sewers and potholes. But I soon came to realize that at the local level, one can have a tremendous impact on the things people care about the most -- on a daily basis. Let’s be clear about some of those things. I became one of the leaders in the country on gun violence prevention because of my work in Los Angeles and my very direct contact with people. I remember sitting in a small waiting room of a hospital with two parents waiting to see if their five-year-old son would survive a rampage by a racist who had targeted kids at the Jewish Community Center in the north San Fernando Valley. After the guy had gunned down a Filipino American postal worker, he trained his sights on these little kids. I didn't run for City Council to be the gun violence champion -- but I became that person because of what I saw and the searing impact of being in that little waiting room with those parents.
We can talk about a whole array of other issues where local governments are laboratories for all kinds of experiments and how we evolve as a society. They have a huge impact on the way people live day to day -- on their safety, their health, the environment in which they live. And I’ll tell you during the Trump administration and the pandemic, we saw the fundamental impact of local leadership on public service.
Mohr: You are on the same page with David Gergen, an American political commentator, former presidential adviser and professor at Harvard University. In his class on The Art and Adventures of Public Leadership, he talked about how the action and change is occurring more and more at the local level.
Feuer: You remember when Lyndon Johnson was presiding over the country during the Vietnam War, he famously said, “At least I’m not a big city mayor.” If you serve in a state legislature or if you're in Congress, it's easy to be a little distanced on a daily basis from what really touches people's lives, and that distance in some ways can make issues a little more academic. But if you’re local, it's impossible to avoid the stuff that is the most raw. Right now, serving in local government is a challenging and raw experience, I think. I don't want to say it's easy, but I do want to say it is impactful.
Mohr: For somebody right out of college or graduate school who wants to get involved in city politics -- what would you recommend they do?
Feuer: It's important not to come in and immediately say, “well, because I have a strong educational background, I’m ready to run for public office.” It's important to try to meet a payroll. To serve in a community where you've actually touched people's lives. Most importantly, Tony, I would say, and this is a discussion I have with everyone I interview for a job in my office and every person I teach in school, they must develop listening skills, which are hugely significant and deeply undervalued. Sometimes there is a tendency to overvalue the importance of being articulate and undervalue the importance of being someone who really hears what the person across the table or in the crowd is saying to them. And for me as a public servant, I would say if you're aspiring to public service, find ways to express that you actually get what people care about by being on the ground with them. So, what does that mean in real life? It might be tutoring kids at school. It might mean volunteering through a service organization like a Rotary Club or a Kiwanis Club or something like that. It might mean joining a neighborhood council, elected bodies that advise the city council. Many cities like Los Angeles have neighborhood councils. It might be getting involved in a philanthropy or multiple philanthropies. There are ways to connect to the texture of what's happening on the ground in your community so that you understand what the issues are. It's important for establishing credibility with people you're going to be interacting with if you aspire to service later on. It'll make you much better at anything you want to do.
Mohr: What about people in the Advanced Leadership Initiative -- we who are going into chapter three of our lives and focusing on social impact. If one of us wants to get into public life as an elected official, would you recommend they do anything different?
Feuer: To become an elected official, it's very difficult to come to a new place and establish the credibility you need. If you're trying to do that in the next phase in your career in a city where you've been for a while, you probably have networks on which you've relied for years and people you have helped over the years. Let's talk about age for a second. Sometimes people say, gee I’m older, I don't know if 65-70 years old is the time to start. I would say it is never too late to start. Look at some of the key leaders in our nation over the past few years -- Jerry Brown (71 to 80 years old during his second term) governing California and Joe Biden (78 years old) governing the country. We're seeing more and more an understanding that experience in many dimensions counts for a lot. One thing I would say is if someone is aspiring to public service at the next stage in a multi-year career, one should emphasize that experience -- not experience in some ethereal sense, but in solving problems. Problem solving skill is at the heart of what differentiates excellent elected officials from the mediocre ones. People who listen and solve concrete problems. I think that we as a society have bought into the idea that we need responses right away. A press conference is something that provides immediate gratification, and that’s all wrong. The most important issues take time to grapple with. They don't consist of 20 second sound bites. People with the life experiences you're describing should use the problems they have solved to promote candidacies in the future.
Mohr: This topic feeds into politics, and you're an attorney representing a number of clients -- the Mayor, the Harbor Commission, the Airport Commission, and many other bodies. How do you balance politics with the role of a lawyer?
Feuer: It's a very good question and boy, is it a tough question to answer on a daily basis, because I do find myself in situations sometimes where the duty I have as the City Attorney is to promote an objective that I would not have voted for as a city council member. But my role here is to meet the professional obligation to be the best lawyer I can be for my client. That means effectuating their legal goals. This happens all the time with me and it's a source of some frustration, sometimes because I find myself thinking there's a better way to do this thing. There are many other times, of course, when my position personally and politically aligns very closely with my client, but not always. And the point is for no one to ever know the difference, because the obligation I feel as the lawyer for the city is to perform at the same high level, irrespective of whether I agree with a policy objective that’s being promoted, as long as it’s lawful. It will be a different story if I’m in a situation where I feel as though what’s being promoted is either against the law or fundamentally wrong on some very deep moral level. Then I would have to turn away from doing that. I haven't confronted that challenge yet. The other challenge I confront all the time.
Mohr: I haven't counted the beans in the jar, but it appears that at the state legislative level, we have fewer lawyers than we used to and fewer lawyers holding public office. Are you noticing this?
Feuer: Yes. In the state legislature, it has had a major impact. I was the chair of the Judiciary Committee of the State Assembly during the Great Recession. I had deep interactions at every level of the justice system when there were huge cutbacks being made to everything in public life, because the budget was so devastated. It was a harder job because of the relative paucity of lawyers in the state legislature and because of the views people held about the justice system. They were not as educated about it. For example, to be very concrete, among some across the aisle, there was resistance to funding changes that would improve physical conditions in courthouses because they were angry at a Supreme Court of California decision about marriage equality. One had to discuss basic civics with them, to explain that this was a separation of powers question, that it was for the judiciary to deal with and we were talking about whether jurors who are your constituents will be physically safe in an earthquake. Let’s separate the issues.
Had they been lawyers, it would have been an easier argument to make. It's not as though I think one has to be a lawyer to serve in public life, but it helps to be a lawyer. Being a lawyer has helped me in my elected service capacity. I remember a very controversial law that I wrote and the other side had highly paid lobbyists who were there. I was in a committee, and they were asserting that a court decision held X. I said, “But did you read footnote Y in that decision, which stands for a position contrary to what you're saying this case stands for?” If I hadn't gone to law school, I would not have been able to do that.
Mohr: A number of years ago, I was on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court. We had an annual lunch with the legislators from the L.A. County. I was sitting next to one and we got friendly. Three days later, I get a phone call from this person's administrative assistant saying, “Our office needs a favor. One of our constituents got a traffic ticket. Can you take care of that?”
I explained that doing so would be a serious ethical violation. He got very angry at me. He said, “I thought we were on the same team.” I explained that my job was different from his. You serve your constituents and help them, but I can't do that. Then he said, “If you can't do it, I’ll find a judge who will.” That prompted me to ask the presiding judge to issue a warning to our colleagues that this person might call them.
Feuer: I hate to hear stories like that because one thing about public life that goes beyond what you've been asking is the importance of inspiring people to believe that there is quality and integrity in government. As you know, most people think public service lacks both. That doesn't just fuel public disengagement from voting; it also means that the best people often choose not to run because they don't want to be perceived that way either. So sometimes we get very mediocre candidates. We need excellence in public service. I want to promote the idea that if there's any time in our history when excellence is needed, it's right now.
Mohr: So true.
Feuer: Tony, one thing I will say that has never been talked about in any class I've seen is when you are on a legislative body -- city council, state legislature, whatever it is -- if you demonstrate proficiency on a topic and expertise and you've been doing the work, people defer to you from both sides of the aisle. People defer to people who display a depth of expertise on an issue and then let that person occupy the field in many ways. Parenthetically, a lesson for people running for Congress who are in the minority party means you get almost nothing done unless you can identify places where people haven't gone. I remember, for example, Karen Bass had been the speaker in the California Assembly. She ran for Congress. She'd always been interested in the foster care system. In Congress, she recognized that there weren't many people who focused on foster care. Because of her talent and the depth of her work and the tenacity she displayed, she could get people from both sides of the aisle engaged, and she was able to get stuff done. She was a Democrat in a Republican-controlled legislative body, but she got stuff accomplished because she’d found that niche. There are legislative bodies all across the country where, if you show you know your stuff, people will let you run with it.
Mohr: Here’s another question. Your office prosecutes misdemeanors. What's your philosophy about handling them? How do you ask your deputies to approach these?
Feuer: I have been very focused on criminal justice reform. But there's a watchword, and that is reducing recidivism, a metric I take seriously. There are varying perspectives on justice reform. Some prosecutors say they’re not going to prosecute a whole slew of crimes at all. To me that's the wrong approach, because you’re just trying to conserve resources and devote them to someplace else. If you do that, there's no opportunity to change the trajectory of the offender's life and we're essentially making lawful what has been unlawful before. That degrades community confidence in the justice system just when we need that confidence to be at its highest. Let me give you an example of a program that epitomizes my approach to justice reform. It's called Our Neighborhood Justice Program. We take low level nonviolent misdemeanors and say, “If you take responsibility for your actions and finish Neighborhood Justice, we will not prosecute you.” We recruit hundreds of volunteers from throughout Los Angeles and train them in principles of restorative justice. They serve on panels of three in the neighborhood where they live, where the crime was committed, and they serve under the auspices of a trained mediator. The offender -- whom we call the participant -- comes in. They discuss the facts. The participants take responsibility for what they did. They describe their life to this panel, and the panel's job is to prescribe a community obligation that they must perform on the theory that the neighborhood, not just the immediate victim, was diminished by the offense. We then impose interventions like job training. We've had thousands of people go through this program. Misdemeanors reoffend 30, 40, 50% depending upon the nature of the offense. But in this program, we have a 5% recidivism rate.
Almost no one recidivates, because we have been able to successfully change the trajectory of their lives in a way that will have a lasting impact. Two of our volunteers wrote opinion pieces, not letters to the editor, but op-eds in the L.A. Times. Both said the same thing -- that people are searching for ways to add value to their communities and to change lives. These volunteers said, “I found a way because I'm helping my neighborhood and the person who committed the offense is a different person now because of the work I've done.”
Mohr: I'm going to end with a two-pronged question. First, are there issues you're passionate about? Second, are there issues where the newcomer, if they became an expert in that area, would have a leg up?
Feuer: I believe very much in prioritizing. If you do a little bit of everything, you're not going to be an effective legislator, you have to zero in. Right now, the issue of homelessness is the top priority. But on its heels are related issues like affordable housing, income inequality, and public safety. We and every major urban center across the country have urgent cries for racial justice and demands for police reform while crime is spiking, all at the same time.
These issues could be viewed as competing with each other. How we grapple with them and try to find common ground is the key. I’m a big common ground guy. As I mentioned earlier, if you think you’re right and everybody else is wrong and you're not prepared to listen and extract the best of their positions and make them part of your own, you're not going to be effective in public service. We see that all the time with people who are at loggerheads with each other. Barbara Bush famously said at one point, “When did compromise become a cuss word?” And underneath the notion of compromise is listening to somebody else.
As an example, I'm passionate about homelessness because of my work for years on affordable housing and on behalf of people experiencing homelessness. The issue crashes against deep demands for finding ways, not only to be humane but to find order on our streets, where there are encampments seemingly everywhere. So that's a great example of a potentially intractable problem, very hard for someone to just walk in as a new public servant and have the chops to handle that off the bat. The overarching issue for our planet, of course, is combating climate change and finding ways to contribute on that score. Climate change and homelessness share a common key issue for public servants. They are such huge topics that they lead to institutional paralysis. It seems like we just can't do anything personally about it, so we throw up our hands. We cannot afford to do that. So, I certainly would say to anybody running for office, if you are not focused like a laser on what we can do to preserve our climate and our planet, then why are you running? There are so many steps in that space that one could take to find common ground. To try to find ways on climate change, for example, to view this as an economic opportunity for all of us. Don’t look at this as environment versus jobs. Quite the contrary; the best policies would promote both. Listen and synthesize.
Mohr: That’s wonderful. Thank you very much for your time.
About the Author:
Anthony J. Mohr is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and has over twenty-six years of service within the criminal and civil justice system at the state level. He most recently sat on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Anthony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s ethics review and response committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the Regional Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.