Inciting Love in Perilous Times
With civil rights legend Connie Rice
Wonderful people!
In these last white-hot days before midterms, as we seek routes to racial justice and community well-being, I want to share one of our boldest and most iconoclastic voices on public safety. Connie Rice is a civil rights attorney and an apostle of human dignity. She spent years hammering the LAPD with lawsuits. And then she did something bewildering— she started working with cops. In The End of Bias: A Beginning, I tell the story of how, in a pocket of L.A., she and others transformed police behavior while decreasing arrests and violent crime. Her insight? To radically shift police behavior you have to change their incentives. Her goal? Love. Here we discuss how it all began— and why, to fix policing, litigation is never enough.
You spent the first part of your career fighting for the community’s civil rights by suing the LAPD. Then you started representing cops. How did that happen?
I started on the community side. This was before Rodney King got beaten in '91. LAPD had done a 70 year campaign of humiliation, emasculation, and shotgun policing that was meant to suppress and contain Black people in LA. They didn't want them going west of La Cienega, they didn't want them going north of the 10. They wanted them contained. I would see LAPD rounding up Black men and lining them up against the wall with klieg lights and taking illegal pictures of all their tattoos. No warrants, not even reasonable suspicion, just everybody Black, they'd pull them out of their house. I would document this stuff and get fodder for the class-actions we were doing on behalf of the community. We had a million causes of action to attack LAPD and that's what we did for seven years—nothing but around-the-clock warfare. We won all those class actions.
After the Rodney King beating, Assistant Chief Jesse Brewer, the highest-ranking Black cop, came to my office. He said, "I’m here to tell you how to take LAPD down. You have to represent cops. If you want to drive a wedge right up the center of LAPD and splinter it, this is how you do it."
On the outside, all you can do is advocate. You can hold conferences. You can write a book. You can do litigation if you want to up the ante. Those are all outsider strategies— advocacy and war.
Now, you can only survive as a Black cop by one of two strategies: either you're bluer than blue and meaner than the White cops, and therefore you earn their trust, and you're put in position of power because they know you won't report, or you're like Jesse Brewer-- you're in the culture, you're successful, you go straight to the top but you never forget that you’re part of a very racist organization and part of your job is to change it from the inside.
So Brewer thought that if you worked on cops’ behalf, you could break up the “blue wall” that blocks any change. Was that the idea?
Yeah. And when you get inside the LAPD, your clients are teaching you how cops think. That's how I learned about cops-- by representing them.
I represented Black cops, Asian cops, female cops. This force was so openly racist and sexist that their minority cops, female cops, and gay cops were completely alienated. We did five class-actions representing all these groups who had grievances. They weren't being promoted fairly. They weren't treated fairly in the Academy. They weren't given fair assignments. They were given the dirt jobs.
The point of being brought inside is, this is an inside-outside game. On the outside, all you can do is advocate. You can hold conferences. You can write a book. You can do a TV show. You can do litigation if you want to up the ante. Those are all outsider strategies— advocacy and war.
Why do you see “outsider strategies” like litigation as inadequate?
A court can't order a cop to love a poor Black kid. A court can't order police to lose their fear of Black people. Courts can order constitutional compliance. A court can only put a floor under the screaming neon of abuses. It can't even put a floor under all abuses because not all abuses are unconstitutional. Stupidity isn't unconstitutional.
Outsider strategies can only reach so far and they're often temporal. Once a decree1 ends, the culture snaps right back because you haven't changed the DNA. You didn't get down to the bone to change culture, to change mindsets. That can't be done through litigation. That has to be done from the inside.
A court can't order a cop to love a poor Black kid. A court can't order police to lose their fear of Black people. A court can only put a floor under the screaming neon of abuses.
At what point did you actually start working for LAPD?
I never worked for them. I've never taken a dime from them because then you get corrupted. I raised my own money through foundations.
One day you got a phone call. The LAPD chief asked you for help.
He wanted to know if we had learned lessons from Rampart [a scandal in which dozens of LAPD officers were implicated in blazing, criminal corruption]. I interviewed close to 800 cops. In roundtables so everybody can hear what everybody else is saying. It's like a group therapy session. Jessica, they wouldn't shut up. I was supposed to talk to them for eight months. I talked to them for 18 months.
One of the light bulbs was when I realized how badly they treat one another. They treat each other so cruelly. You've got a lot of crushed spirits carrying badges and guns.
And they take it out on the public. If you're in a culture that's abusive to you, you're going to abuse the people you interact with on the outside. In fact, the harder you are on the public, the more credit you have inside your culture, the police department.
It's not the outsider's perspective. On the inside I could get the insight that you've got to improve the conditions of the cops. You have to model humane, compassionate treatment of them before they will be able to carry it out in public.
I love litigation. I love the exhilaration of it. But litigation wasn't solving the problem.
When you proposed your newer program, the Community Safety Partnership, you pitched it directly to LAPD Chief Charlie Beck.
He said something extraordinary that made me realize he had changed. He said, "Connie, when I was a young cop, I was too stupid to understand that when you do search-and-destroy policing, you don't just destroy the community. You destroy yourself.”
Why did you want his buy-in?
You have to have a prince of the realm to do culture change. You can't do it with change agents. You have to have people who have converted, who are fluent in the culture and celebrated within the culture. Otherwise they don't carry enough clout. Culture change is hard. You have to have insiders willing to lead the way. They're not going to take it from outsiders. It's too condescending.
I'm not fighting the police like I used to. Because you can't persuade people you hate. You cannot change hearts and minds from the outside.
It feels good to protest. I love fighting. I love showing them. I love litigation. I love the exhilaration of it. But litigation wasn't solving the problem. If you're in solution mode, you're trying to solve the problem.
With the Community Safety Partnership, your goal was to change police behavior, but you were also trying to tackle community violence. Say more.
The first civil right is safety. There is no to right to speech, for example, without safety. Dead people don't talk. The first freedom is freedom from violence.
We had a family that had moved into the Jordan Downs housing project [in Watts]. Very poor population. The family had been waiting for this unit, they move in. Gang members didn't even wait for them to unload their truck. They just took their belongings and then they marched them upstairs to be raped.
Oh my God.
Luckily, the residents realized what was going on, and they started banging on the door to stop the rapes. When I heard about this, I just lost it, Jessica.
I got in my car, I don't even remember driving. I was in tears. I marched up to the new LAPD headquarters. Rode up the elevator straight to the tenth floor to see Chief Beck.
He said, “When you do search-and-destroy policing, you don't just destroy the community. You destroy yourself.”
I said, “I want 50 cops and 10 supervisors. I want them there to stay there five years, become fluent in each housing project.” I don't even know how the stuff was at the top of my head. “I want to select them. I don’t want your drunks, your domestic violators. I want your best, and I want it to be competitive.”
Your idea was that safety required a different kind of relationship between police and community members. And that meant you had to change cops’ incentives.
What's the biggest obstacle to trust? It's fear and unfamiliarity.
I said, “You know why people won't help you solve crime? Because they don't trust you. They think you're there to hurt them, and you are. You're not there to make them safe. You're there to make sure that the violence stays in the housing projects. You're there to contain and suppress them. Just be honest about this. Let’s re-design this.”
You have to have a prince of the realm to do culture change. You can't do it with change agents. You have to have people who are celebrated within the culture. They're not going to take it from outsiders.
I said, "And here's the key, Charlie, I want these cops not to make arrests. I want to change the incentive.” You cannot change hearts and minds without changing the incentive. When you change the incentive, you get different results.
We wanted 180 degrees away from mass arrests, mass incarceration policing.
I said, "They're not gonna be promoted for arrests. I want them promoted for demonstrating how they grow trust between them and the residents. They're not in the arrest business, they're in the trust business.” And he said, “Yes.”
I said, “They have to be rewarded for creating the relationship.” He said, “Yes.” I wanted them to learn to love [the community]. And they did. 🪴
Learn what happened next— and how new incentives changed fear to love— in The End of Bias: A Beginning. Consider buying a copy for anyone who cares about justice, dignity, and remaking public safety.
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❤️🔥A Quote I Can’t Stop Thinking About❤️🔥
“There is something in us that wants us to be authentic more than it wants us to survive.” —Gabor Maté, author of The Myth of Normal, in conversation with Anita Moorjani
“Decree” refers to “consent decree,” a legally binding agreement to specific reforms that puts a police department under state or federal oversight.
This was soooo interesting: “One of the light bulbs was when I realized how badly they treat one another. They treat each other so cruelly. You've got a lot of crushed spirits carrying badges and guns.”
“And they take it out on the public. If you're in a culture that's abusive to you, you're going to abuse the people you interact with on the outside.”
Fascinating interview. Intelligence in action.