Aqeel Bashir dead: He was a pioneer in reducing gang violence

Akil Bashir believed that ending gang violence is not the kind of career you are in.

“In this kind of work, you usually choose. You don’t choose,” he said in an interview for the Storytelling Project in 2024, an LA County Public Health Department program that documented the effects of violence on local individuals and communities.

Bashir, it seems, was among the chosen ones.

A former Black Panther known as “The Commander,” Bashir founded the Building Program and Professional Community Intervention Training Institute in South LA, an anti-violence and gang intervention nonprofit. The publication announced on Friday that Bashir had died. The cause of death has not been released, and Bashir’s age is unknown, although he said he was born in the 1950s.

Bashir leaves a legacy of community-focused advocacy and teaching in LA that goes back to the late 1960s, a lifetime achievement that Mayor Karen Bass celebrated in a tribute in X’s honor. “Dr. Bashir was more than a colleague and friend — he was a visionary leader who dedicated his life to protecting the structures and needs of our community. Violence prevention work,” Bass wrote, recalling his work with the mayor’s office. Congestion Reduction and Youth Development.

BUILD stands for Muslim Brotherhood United for Independent Leadership through Discipline. The organization praised Bashir as a “pillar” in local and international anti-violence movements, and praised him as “a devoted family man whose strength, compassion and integrity guided everything he did.”

Bashir started the nonprofit in 1992. L.A.’s warring gangs have just called a truce after a resurgence in the type of street violence that Bashir called a “cancer” and drug and drug war-era law enforcement actions ravaged the black community.

BUILD offers conflict reduction and public safety training as well as professional certifications for frontline crowd intervention specialists, public safety workers, mental health professionals and others focused on violence prevention, according to its website.

At the core of Bashir’s work was an emphasis on the complex and often unspoken web of emotions that creates a collective choice for some young people and makes it difficult to see another way.

Bashir embraced the idea that addressing youth mental health and the stresses of living with poverty, violence, and racism is essential to helping young black people find a way out of the destructive cycle they grow up too quickly.

Bashir, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, knows this from personal experience, having been involved with gangs for a short time. He found a loud voice around joining the Black Panthers at the age of 15, among other black power organizations.

“We were exposed to things that the average person would never consider,” Bashir said in an oral history of the Storytelling Project. “Because of this, we have been forced into a power that very few have had – but at the same time, we have no idea how much internal turmoil and destruction is going on.”

“In 17, 18, 19, our minds were 30 to 35 years old, because everything was about survival, about brutality, about systemic issues of injustice,” he said. “I saw many of my friends killed, put to death [system]”

Bashir also saw how the conflicts between black activist groups at the time obscured the common goals of racial justice and progress. These lessons would serve him well later as he developed and refined his intervention methods.

In multicultural LA, Bashir blazed a trail by acting as a mediator in moments of tension between black and Latino Angelenos. In 2009, for example, he told the Los Angeles Daily News about his efforts to reduce conflict between the two communities after a shooting in Pacoima.

But Bashir’s interventions were more frequent between rival groups. He helped those he mentored in their quest to find peace within themselves.

In 2014, Bashir co-authored “Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members to End Violence.” Turner Publishing describes it as “the first book to provide a detailed account of the intergroup peace process.”

In the book, Bashir describes the gangbanger mentality as a struggle to find a sense of dignity and purpose while living under socioeconomic conditions that often deprive you of healthy ways to experience these things.

“Feeling entitled to tip the scales because society has done you wrong,” Bashir wrote. “Getting down on the edge of time-honored honor is a way of making your life worthwhile because you don’t know what else will do it. Being a gang member is a way of making sure you have some kind of honor in your life, even if it leads to death or prison.”

Bashir wanted to show the youth that honor and life are not mutually exclusive.

In its tribute, BUILD shared a note from Bashir that grounded his work: “Don’t judge possibilities based on circumstances.”

“His foundational wisdom lives on in every life he touched and every student he mentored, and in every community he changed,” the organization said.

A public memorial for Bashir will be announced later, Bass said.