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[ ELECTION 2026 ](https://www.citywatchla.com/election-2024)
# Outside the Circle: What Angelenos Are Really Looking For in the Next City Attorney
October 01 2026
Written by Eva Amar.
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CITY HALL—Every election season, Angelenos hear the same familiar promises. Candidates pledge to tackle homelessness, reduce crime, restore public trust and make government work better.
Those conversations matter. But before asking what someone plans to do, I find myself asking a more fundamental question: Who are they?
Campaigns can polish an image and craft a slogan, but they cannot manufacture a life story. Character is forged over a lifetime, long before anyone asks for our vote.
**Character Is Forged in Life, Not in Campaigns**
While learning more about candidate for Los Angeles City Attorney John McKinney, I found myself reading a story that had very little to do with traditional political talking points.
McKinney lost his mother when he was two years old and his father before he reached first grade. Before most children have learned to ride a bicycle, he had already buried both parents.
His oldest sister, Ora Jones—a single mother working long hours in a pharmaceutical plant—opened her home and raised her younger brother alongside her own children. She became his parent, protector and teacher and, in McKinney’s own words, his “superhero.”
McKinney’s road to the law was hardly direct. He left college, worked jobs including carpentry and painting, returned through community college, transferred to Rutgers University while working full time and eventually graduated from UCLA School of Law.
He then began what would become a nearly three-decade career as a Los Angeles County prosecutor.
**Two Candidates, Two Very Different Legal Résumés**
McKinney’s professional record differs sharply from that of his opponent, Deputy Attorney General Marissa Roy—not necessarily in the value of their work, but in the kind and length of legal experience each brings.
McKinney has been a prosecutor since 1997 and has handled approximately 100 jury trials, including roughly 40 murder cases. His assignments have included the Hardcore Gang Division, Victim Impact Program and Major Crimes. He prosecuted Eric Holder Jr. for the murder of Nipsey Hussle and today heads the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Bureau of Specialized Prosecutions.
Roy graduated from Yale Law School in 2017, by which point McKinney had already spent roughly two decades as a prosecutor. Her experience has principally been in civil and public-interest litigation. She began with the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office through a Justice Catalyst fellowship, worked as outside counsel for Los Angeles County in litigation involving the first Trump administration and now serves as a California Deputy Attorney General, where her work has included consumer-protection and housing matters.
The distinction is relevant because the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office has substantial civil as well as criminal responsibilities. Its lawyers handle civil litigation and advise the City, while the office also prosecutes misdemeanor offenses and enforces municipal laws.
I heard McKinney speak in Westwood and make a striking assertion: that Roy had never tried a case.
Litigation experience is not necessarily trial experience, so Roy’s own account of her trial record would provide useful context for that statement.
**Who Is the Client?**
Over the past year, I’ve spent hundreds of hours working with neighborhoods across Los Angeles on land-use decisions, environmental oversight, ethics, neighborhood disputes and government transparency.
Again and again, I have come back to the same questions: Who matters? Who gets heard? And who is the true client of government?
For the City Attorney’s Office, those questions carry particular weight.
Government doesn’t lose public trust all at once. It loses it one unanswered phone call, one ignored neighborhood, one unexplained decision, one broken promise and one forgotten resident at a time.
Some of government’s least glamorous functions can therefore be among its most important.
**The Program Almost Nobody Talks About**
One example I have seen firsthand is the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Dispute Resolution Program.
It rarely makes headlines, but my own community has used the program to resolve difficult disputes involving neighbors and renters that otherwise might have escalated into expensive litigation—or outright hostility.
Its importance could grow as Los Angeles neighborhoods become denser.
ADUs have proliferated throughout established communities, while state housing laws are allowing substantially more housing and, in some circumstances, reduced parking requirements. More people, more vehicles and more competing uses of limited neighborhood space can also mean more conflict.
Most residents cannot hire an attorney every time a dispute erupts. A functioning mediation program offers another option: sit down, be heard and try to find common ground before a disagreement becomes something worse.
I asked McKinney directly what he would do with the program and whether he would preserve or expand it.
His answer was unequivocal:
“I support preserving and strengthening the City Attorney’s Dispute Resolution Program. Residents should have access to a practical, affordable way to resolve conflicts before they escalate. We will work to identify problems early, bring people together, and resolve conflicts before small disputes become big problems. Not every neighborhood dispute needs to become a lawsuit. It dovetails with my plan to reinstate the Neighborhood Prosecutor Program, and create a more proactive City Attorney’s Office.”
Sometimes the most useful thing a legal system can do isn’t win an argument. It is keeping one from becoming a lawsuit in the first place.
**Two Very Different Roads**
The contrast between McKinney and Roy extends beyond their legal résumés to the paths that brought them there.
Roy grew up in Los Angeles and attended the private Flintridge Preparatory School in La Cañada Flintridge before attending USC, where she earned undergraduate and master’s degrees, followed by Yale Law School. Her record reflects an early interest in public service, including substantial volunteer work while at USC and public-interest legal work at Yale.
McKinney’s route was far less linear: orphaned as a small child, raised by an older sister who was herself a working single mother, leaving college and working before finding his way back through community college, Rutgers and ultimately UCLA Law.
Those histories do not tell us everything about either person, and attending private school tells us nothing by itself about what hardships someone may have experienced.
They do, however, show two lawyers who traveled remarkably different roads to arrive on the same ballot.
**The Distance Traveled**
Résumés tell us where people have been professionally. They do not always tell us what it took to get there.
Los Angeles voters have two candidates with distinctly different legal careers, educational paths and life experiences to consider. Those differences deserve scrutiny because the next City Attorney will oversee an office that touches everything from criminal prosecutions and civil litigation to the everyday neighborhood conflicts most Angelenos will never see reported in a newspaper.
And then there is the human story.
**Some biographies are résumés. Others tell you something about the distance a person had to travel just to reach the starting line. John McKinney’s is the latter.**
*(**Eva Amar** is a West Valley community advocate and national campus sexual violence advocate.)*
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