john mckinney

For more than a year, Marissa Roy has vowed to turn the Los Angeles city attorney’s office into a massive “public interest law firm.”

Now, she has a sweeping mandate to put that plan into action.

As of Wednesday morning, Roy had nearly double the vote tally of her opponent, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, all but assuring the 34-year-old progressive will walk into City Hall in one of her jewel-toned blazers next year as Los Angeles’ chief lawyer. While the contest has not officially been called, McKinney effectively conceded the race in an interview with The Times on Wednesday.

For decades, the L.A. city attorney’s office has focused almost exclusively on prosecuting minor crimes and defending the city from increasingly expensive litigation. In an interview in May, outgoing City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto scowled when a reporter mentioned Roy’s campaign line about running the office as a “public interest law firm.”

“That’s insane,” Feldstein Soto said, days before her historic primary defeat.

But in Roy, an enthusiastic and tenacious California deputy attorney general, the city will have a proactive top litigator who’s ready to play offense. Roy has promised to take her experience from a years-long legal battle with Meta to aggressively pursue litigation against corporations and landlords for alleged misconduct that harms the average Angeleno.

Long before she announced her candidacy, Roy had begun courting public servants inside the sprawling city attorney’s office to ensure her plan passed muster.

What began as a series of informal coffees at Pitchoun! Bakery downtown quickly evolved into a network of trusted advisors, who helped shape her campaign promises and fine-tune policy proposals so they could be executed on Day One.

“There’s not a single word on my website that they haven’t reviewed first to make sure that we can implement it,” Roy said in an October interview. “It’s why sometimes I won’t take a hard line on something, because I talk to the deputies involved and they say they need discretion.”

Despite attack ads saying otherwise, Roy hasn’t vowed to block prosecution of certain misdemeanor crimes — even though she prefers diversion programs as a way to aid homeless defendants.

She’s been more direct about her plans to protect the city’s immigrant communities from potential future raids and aggressively fight the Trump administration in court when it targets Los Angeles. Given her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America, Roy’s stances on litigation involving the Los Angeles Police Department could also depart from her predecessors’.

The union representing rank-and-file LAPD officers spent millions against Roy. Feldstein Soto also steadfastly defended the LAPD’s widely criticized uses of force on protesters and journalists during immigration raids last year.

Roy also benefits from a deep bench of elected allies across the state, including her current boss, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, and fellow progressive city attorneys in San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland. Many local supporters showed up to toast her presumptive win Tuesday night, already riding high on the blue wave that crashed across the U.S. when the first Los Angeles returns dropped around 8:20 p.m.

The event at Audio Graph Brewery in downtown L.A. had all the energy of a wedding reception, with DSA acolytes munching cookies emblazoned with Roy’s face in icing and union organizers bopping up and down to the viral Slayyyter track “Dance…” as results rolled in.

Roy is an evangelist for affirmative litigation, proactive suits of the type that forced President Trump to cede control of the California National Guard late last year after he deployed thousands of soldiers to quell protests and aid immigration enforcement across the state.

“We need someone who knows how to sue the Trump administration, who also has the relationships and can pick up the phone and call the San Francisco and San Diego city attorney,” Roy said. “We’re all part of this very tiny niche of municipalities suing the federal government. We all became experts [in those methods] together.”

Despite at times amplifying inaccurate claims that McKinney was a conservative, Roy and her opponent shared some policy planks. Both were highly critical of ballooning legal costs under Feldstein Soto, as well as her penchant for hiring outside law firms to fight the city’s battles. Both also said they wanted to revive internal programs the outgoing city attorney had scuttled, such as neighborhood prosecutors and specialized units for handing child abuse and domestic violence.

“This election is gonna go her way, and I’m just really truly grateful for the opportunity to be part of this over the last nine months,” McKinney said Wednesday morning. “I met a remarkable group of people. I learned a lot about the city, the City Attorney’s office, about city politics and I’m a better person for it. I congratulate Marissa on her victory, I wish her well.”

McKinney said he hopes Roy can “uplift that office to be the finest municipal law office in the country,” but also suggested she spend her energy on more than legal combat with business leaders or the White House.

“She’s gonna have to broaden her focus to issues related to public safety, homelessness. Obviously, we both agree that city liabilities need aggressive proactive risk management,” he said.

Meanwhile, Roy could scarcely contain her excitement as she laid out her plan to supporters chanting her name.

“I’m much more comfortable when people chant things like ‘Let’s sue it’, because that’s the work that we’re going to do,” she said.

“Let’s sue it!” the crowd cheered.

Nov. 3, 2026 10:52 AM PT

The 2026 elections in the city of Los Angeles include mayor, City Council, city attorney and eight ballot measures.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her challenger, Nithya Raman, have spent $13 million on their mayoral campaigns. In the latest poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, the mayor and City Council member were locked in a dead heat, with 40% of likely L.A. voters supporting each of them. And 19% still undecided.

The race for city attorney has gained outsize attention as California Deputy Atty. Gen. Marissa Roy, with strong support from the left, has campaigned against L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney. In late-October polls about 45% of likely voters were undecided.

Voters in the city of Los Angeles also weighed in on ballot measures and City Charter amendments covering everything from taxes and fire resources to governance of airports and the port and the quality of parks.

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Ballot measures

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California Deputy Atty. Gen. Marissa Roy has nearly doubled her lead in the race to replace Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, even as the mayor’s race has narrowed dramatically since September, new polling showed.

Both Roy and her rival, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, made significant inroads among likely Los Angeles voters in October, winnowing the number of undecideds down to 45% from 70% last month, according to a poll released this week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times.

But while the race for mayor is now a dead heat, the contest for the city’s second-most-powerful elected position has widened, with Roy leading McKinney by 17 points in the final days of voting ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

Some 36% of likely voters say they’ve marked their ballot for Roy or will soon, versus 19% who say they’ve bubbled in for McKinney or plan to. About 45% remain undecided — far more than are still mulling the mayor’s race, but far fewer than were on the fence a month ago.

Experts said it’s not uncommon for voters to have uncertainty about city attorney races, since few people realize the question of who should fill the office will be on their ballot and many elect not to answer. About 15% fewer Angelenos voted in the last city attorney’s contest than voted for mayor, data show. Other cities saw a similar slump in returns.

The Los Angeles city attorney controls a budget of nearly $200 million and a staff of 1,000, serving as lawyer for L.A.’s City Council and general counsel for its myriad municipal agencies.

Increasingly, city attorneys around the state also pursue so-called “affirmative litigation” against exploitative corporations or punitive federal policy — a role Los Angeles pioneered, but which Feldstein Soto largely eschewed during her tenure at City Hall.

Roy has built her career on affirmative litigation, making it a centerpiece of her campaign. McKinney has characterized it as grandstanding and “out of alignment” with voters.

The two have also knocked heads over how the city attorney should charge and prosecute misdemeanors, work that accounts for about a third of the job.

Polls show voters split on who is best to address what 43% named as their top issue: street homelessness. Both McKinney and Roy have vowed to use the office to stem encampments — Roy by keeping more Angelenos housed through attacks on wage theft and renter harassment, McKinney by inducing more chronically homeless residents into treatment through individual prosecutions.

On runner-up concerns — building more affordable housing and ensuring public safety — similar percentages of likely voters trust Roy and McKinney, respectively.

McKinney, who has taken pains to highlight himself as a Democrat, retains a commanding lead among registered Republicans and self-identified MAGA voters, as well as the much-sought-after supporters of former mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt, who will likely decide the contest between Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Roy was way ahead among renters, who make up nearly two-thirds of the electorate, as well as progressives and self-described Democratic Socialists.

Independent expenditure groups behind both continue to pump money into the race, with Roy’s supporters seeking to paint McKinney as closely aligned with President Trump, and McKinney’s boosters looking to tar Roy as the second coming of former Los Angeles Dist. Atty. George Gascón.

Growing up without “two nickels to rub together,” John McKinney never thought he’d be a lawyer.

At the beginning of 2026, sitting in his office as one of the highest-ranking prosecutors in Los Angeles County, McKinney had no designs on trying to become L.A.’s city attorney.

But if he can beat progressive darling Marissa Roy next month and finish off an upstart campaign that barely had a pulse six months ago, McKinney would complete a lifelong underdog story that saw him go from working as a house painter and substitute teacher to pay for college to serving as the top lawyer for the second-largest city in America.

A highly regarded trial lawyer, McKinney, 58, claims an undefeated record in homicide trials and has won convictions in some of the region’s most infamous crimes, including the murder of beloved L.A. hip-hop star Nipsey Hussle. He reached his longtime perch in the district attorney’s office’s major crimes unit after a lifetime of struggle. Both of McKinney’s parents died before he was 5, and he was raised by his oldest sister in a cramped household with half a dozen other children in Passaic, N.J.

John McKinney speaks at a news conference at the Los Angeles Police Protective League in May.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

McKinney beams with pride while discussing his hardscrabble East Coast upbringing — whether praising his sister’s hustle for working “six days a week,” or refusing to turn in his Yankees hat in a Dodger blue city. In interviews, he’ll sneak in a verbal jab at Roy, then finish the insult with a wry smirk. McKinney notes he’s been a prosecutor almost as long as his 34-year-old opponent has been alive.

“She’s never tried a case,” McKinney said. “When you’re running for city attorney overseeing trial lawyers and having to make high-impact decisions on whether to settle a case for $20 million or not, you should at least know what it’s like to go through a jury trial.”

Roy was part of the team that secured a $17-billion settlement from Meta in a landmark case this year, and has tried many cases decided by judges, rather than jury panels. She’s pushed back on McKinney’s barbs, noting he has no experience handling civil cases, a core component of the job.

McKinney has focused his campaign on lessening the city’s homelessness crisis by leveraging people into treatment, tackling quality-of-life crimes, and reducing the city’s out-of-control legal costs.

But he faces an uphill battle. Roy, a deputy state attorney general, has been campaigning for more than a year and raised more than twice as much money as McKinney. With the backing of both the county’s Democratic Party and the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, Roy won June’s primary easily, outpacing McKinney by 15 percentage points. Both finished far ahead of City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto.

Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice, is running against John McKinney to become L.A.’s next city attorney.

(Gary Coronado/For The Times)

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman leads a strong coalition of law enforcement support for McKinney, who has also been endorsed by four former city attorneys, two prior district attorneys and several City Council members, including Traci Park.

McKinney has emphasized the word “Democrat” in his ads, a nod to Roy’s attempts to cast him as the preferred choice of Republicans who won’t stand up to the Trump administration if elected. Although McKinney rubbed elbows with Republicans during efforts to recall then-Dist. Atty. George Gascón and employed fundraisers who worked with Trump, he says he “despises” the president and was disgusted by immigration raids in the city last year.

McKinney thinks Roy’s emphasis on fighting Trump speaks to a misunderstanding of the job. Across the country, it has been state attorneys general, not city attorneys, who have spearhead litigation against the White House, said McKinney, who dismissed the partisan attacks as a “misleading smear campaign.”

“Her lack of management experience and jury trial experience has not gone unnoticed by voters and her platform of wanting to turn the city attorney’s office into the country’s largest public interest law firm is out of alignment with the issues important to voters: public safety, homelessness and protecting taxpayer dollars,” he said.

Long before he was concerned about winning an elected office, McKinney was simply worried about survival.

The youngest of seven children, McKinney lost his mother to cancer when he was only 2. His father passed away unexpectedly three years later. His oldest sister, Ora, was recently divorced with three kids of her own but took in McKinney and his sister. He remained especially close to Ora — whom he described as his “mother, father and best friend” — until she passed away last year.

With his caretaker working nearly round the clock, McKinney said, he easily could have run in the streets with friends caught up in the crack cocaine boom of the 1980s. But McKinney said his sister’s determination inspired him to choose a better path.

“My sister made me believe there was really no limit to what I could do in life if I worked hard enough for it,” he said.

McKinney isn’t seeking sympathy, but believes sharing his backstory shows he’s “lived a life that mirrors a lot of the adversity Angelenos face every day.”

For much of his career in L.A., McKinney was seen as one of the district attorney’s office’s premier trial lawyers. He said he had no interest in management or politics until Gascón was elected in 2020. McKinney was one of several prosecutors to publicly criticize and sue Gascón. His involvement in the failed bid to recall Gascón put him in a political spotlight for the first time. He frequently spoke at recall events — which sometimes overlapped with rallies against Gov. Gavin Newsom and promoted conservative causes — and later joined the crowded field vying to replace Gascón in 2024.

Colleagues said McKinney has a history of being able to reach across ideological and cultural aisles. Bobby Grace, a veteran prosecutor who has worked with McKinney for decades, said he had a knack for getting people to take risks to take the stand in important cases.

“I think that’s where he made his reputation as a good trial lawyer,” Grace said. “To be successful, particularly in gangs, you’ve got to be able to convince witnesses who don’t want to come forward, and I think that was really his strength.”

Although he failed to gain traction in the race to unseat Gascón, finishing far behind Hochman, he caught the future district attorney’s eye and the two became allies. When Hochman took office, he put McKinney in charge of specialized prosecutions, giving him oversight of a wide range of cases, including cop killings, juvenile crimes, gang homicides and child abuse.

McKinney said he wasn’t even thinking about getting into the city attorney race until the middle of January, when a number of people approached him about entering.

City attorney candidate John McKinney, left, walks through Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles on July 1.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

By March, McKinney was scrambling to get a campaign together, and Hochman was quick to lend the fundraisers and managers who helped him oust Gascón.

He soon ascended from nonfactor to legitimate contender. Frustrated with ballooning legal costs and her handling of a department data breach, the city’s powerful police union abandoned Feldstein Soto and backed McKinney. Independent expenditures — political interest groups that can spend unlimited amounts in campaigns if they don’t coordinate with candidates — doled out $3 million to support McKinney.

In total, records show those groups have spent nearly $5 million on McKinney. More than half of that money has come from a venture capitalist who has publicly praised Elon Musk and a political action committee run by Airbnb, the rental giant currently facing a lawsuit from the city for price gouging during the wildfires.

McKinney insists campaign support won’t influence his decision-making in office. He has vowed to sue Airbnb if it engages in price gouging, and he knows the Los Angeles Police Department is a major factor in the city’s rising litigation costs. Given his law enforcement background, he argues he’s better positioned to influence police than Roy.

“I think because they know I’m not coming at them from a vindictive point of view, trying to underfund them or undermine them, that my criticism will be taken for what it’s worth, which is to make them stronger, to make them more trusted and more effective,” he said.

Whereas Hochman often compared L.A. to crime-plagued “Gotham City,” McKinney acknowledges the city’s more recent struggles are not with violence, but with quality-of-life crimes: unchecked homeless encampments, street racing, animal abuse on Skid Row.

Walking around Skid Row this summer, McKinney spoke with several people who approached from tents and other jerry-rigged structures. He listened closely as they explained their struggles and pleaded for help in a part of the city few residents ever set foot in. He describes his approach to the city’s homeless crisis as one of “compassionate accountability.”

“Every person who is living on the street has had some tragic circumstance in their life,” he said that day.

McKinney acknowledged he can’t do anything about a lack of housing as city attorney, but he can better manage the way L.A. throws resources at the problem. That includes more sophisticated audits of community-based organizations that have contracts with the city to aid unhoused people, he said.

Ultimately, he does not want to punish people who are suffering, but thinks the city attorney’s office can use its power of prosecution to pressure homeless defendants suffering from addiction or mental health issues into treatment. The mission is a personal one for McKinney, who grew up with a schizophrenic nephew whose slow decline he watched for years.

“When I talk about compassionate accountability, it’s not just a campaign slogan for me,” he said. “It’s real. These are real people.”