Aquil Basheer believed that ending gang violence wasn’t the kind of career you just fall into.
“In this type of work, you’re usually chosen. You don’t choose it,” he said in 2024 in an interview for “The Storytelling Project,” an L.A. County Public Health Department program that documented the effects of violence on local individuals and communities.
Basheer, it seems, was among the chosen.
A former Black Panther known as “the Commander,” Basheer founded the BUILD Program and the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute in South L.A., an anti-violence and gang intervention nonprofit. The program announced Friday that Basheer had died. The cause of death was not disclosed, and Basheer’s age was unclear, although he had said he was born in the 1950s.
Basheer leaves behind a legacy of community-centered advocacy and teaching that go back to the late 1960s in L.A., a lifetime of achievement that Mayor Karen Bass celebrated in a tribute on X. “Dr. Basheer was more than a colleague and a friend — he was a visionary leader who dedicated his life to building the infrastructure our communities need to protect and support those doing critical violence prevention work,” Bass wrote, noting his work with the mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development.
BUILD stands for Brotherhood Unified for Independent Leadership through Discipline. The organization lauded Basheer as a “pillar” in both the local and global anti-violence movements, and praised him as “a devoted family man whose strength, compassion, and integrity guided everything he did.”
Basheer started the nonprofit in 1992. L.A.’s warring gangs had just struck a truce following a resurgence in the type of street violence that Basheer called a “cancer,” and as both drugs and drug-war-era law enforcement practices ravaged the Black community.
BUILD offers conflict de-escalation and public safety training as well as professional certifications for front-line gang intervention specialists, public safety workers, mental health practitioners and others who focus on violence prevention, according to its website.
At the core of Basheer’s work was an emphasis on the complex and often unspoken web of emotions that make gangs an option for some young people and also make it hard to see that another path exists.
Basheer embraced the idea that tackling youth mental health and the stresses of living with poverty, violence and racism are essential to helping young Black people see a way out of destructive cycles that force them to grow up far too soon.
Basheer, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, knew this from personal experience, having briefly gotten involved with gangs. He went on to find a higher calling around the time he joined the Black Panthers at the age of 15, among other Black empowerment organizations.
“We were facing things that the average person would never even consider,” Basheer said in the “Storytelling Project” oral history. “Because of that, we were forced into a strength that very few had — but simultaneously, we didn’t realize how much inner turmoil and destruction was going on.”
“At 17, 18, 19, our mindset was of 30 to 35 years old because everything was about survival, dealing with oppressive struggle, systemic issues of injustice,” he said. “I saw a lot of my comrades murdered, put in the penal [system].”
Basheer also saw how conflicts among Black activist groups at the time risked obscuring the shared objectives of racial justice and uplift. Those lessons would serve him later as he developed and refined his intervention methodologies.
In multicultural L.A., Basheer blazed another trail by acting as mediator during moments of tension between Black and Latino Angelenos. In 2009, for instance, he told the Los Angeles Daily News about his efforts to quell conflict between those two communities after a shooting in Pacoima.
But Basheer’s interventions were more than between rival factions. He sought to help those he mentored find peace within themselves.
In 2014, Basheer co-authored “Peace in the Hood: Working With Gang Members to End the Violence.” Turner Publishing described it as “the first book to offer a detailed description of the process of making peace within gangs.”
In the book, Basheer describes the gangbanger mentality as a battle to find dignity and a sense of purpose while living under socioeconomic circumstances that often deprive you of healthier ways to experience those things.
“The feeling of having the right to balance the scales because society has done you wrong is a given,” Basheer wrote. “Going down in a time-honored blaze of glory is a way of making your life matter because you don’t perceive that anything else will do that. Gang membership is a way of ensuring you put some sort of honor in your life, even if it leads to death or prison.”
Basheer had wanted to show young people that honor and life were not mutually exclusive.
In its tribute, BUILD shared a nugget from Basheer that grounded his work: “Don’t judge the possibilities of what can be based on circumstances.”
“His radical wisdom lives on in every life he touched and every student he mentored, and in every community he transformed,” the organization said.
Bass said a public memorial for Basheer would be announced at a later date.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
