Both Sides Of The Street

Connie Rice Lays Down The Law To Cops And Gangs

In 1974, at the age of eighteen, Constance “Connie” Rice offered to do all the family ironing in front of the television just so she could stay home from school and watch the Senate hearings about the Watergate scandal, which was tearing apart the presidency of Richard Nixon. She became so engrossed that she burned her father’s shirt. That July, the House Judiciary Committee considered articles of impeachment, and Rice was again transfixed as Barbara Jordan, a lawyer and the only African American woman on the committee, talked eloquently about the Constitution before she cast her vote to impeach. Rice knew then that she would study law.

She graduated from Harvard College in 1978 and won a scholarship to attend New York University School of Law, where she filed petitions on behalf of death-row prisoners, including a notorious white supremacist. Rice, an African American who considers capital punishment an “obscenity,” was determined to save his life in spite of his racist beliefs. But her efforts were not enough. Before he was electrocuted, the Klansman sent Rice a thank-you note for her attempts to help.

Early in her career, Rice’s male colleagues didn’t know how to interact with this young feminist law clerk. Some tried to relegate her to fetching coffee and affixing index tabs. Rice, who already had a black belt in tae kwon do, didn’t hesitate to assert herself. After she discovered their practice of making important decisions in the men’s room, she and another female law clerk followed them in there and took part in the urinal-side meeting.

In 1991 Rice moved to Los Angeles to work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She represented the grass-roots Bus Riders Union in a class-action suit against the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Her case was that the authority had discriminated against low-income, mostly minority bus riders by channeling funds into light-rail systems that benefited middle-class, mostly white commuters. Critics scoffed and said allocation of transit funds was not a civil-rights issue. Her own boss called to point out that the transit-authority board included two prominent naacp members. (Rice reenacts the phone call: “Now, Connie, I’m sitting here with a Jack Daniels and three aspirin. Please tell me you did not file a lawsuit.”) She proceeded anyway. The 1996 consent decree put more than $2 billion back into the bus system.

Despite this victory and others, Rice concluded that litigation was a limited tool for promoting social change. In 1998 she joined with law partners Stephen R. English and Molly Munger to found the LA branch of the Advancement Project, a nonprofit committed to making public-sector institutions — such as schools, transit, and law enforcement — equitable for low-income residents. She remains codirector today.

The Los Angeles Times has called Rice one of the “most experienced, civic-minded, and thoughtful people on the subject of Los Angeles,” and California Law Business named her among the ten most influential lawyers in the state. She is known as an irreverent commentator on pbs and National Public Radio and says she wants to “unparalyze the debate” on race rather than make everyone hold hands: “I want to change your behavior, not your soul.”

Although Rice has helped clients sue the Los Angeles Police Department [lapd] for brutality many times over the years, her relationship with the lapd has grown less adversarial within the past decade. When a scandal emerged in 1999 over misconduct in the lapd’s Rampart division — including charges of cocaine theft, manipulation of evidence, physical abuse of suspects, and perjury — Rice headed a panel that studied the division and recommended reforms. She now works with the police to move LA law enforcement away from paramilitary-style operations and toward community policing.

She is currently writing a book titled Power Concedes Nothing. “Many of my friends are in office,” she says. “I’ve been suing my friends for twenty years. But even when you know the people in power, you still have to be a burr under their saddle and demand change, because power concedes nothing without a demand.”

In August 2007 Rice took the time to talk with me at her office near downtown LA. Her speech was animated, her outrage tempered by bursts of laughter at society’s absurdities. As the interview wound down, I couldn’t help asking about Rice’s famous relative, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Their fathers are first cousins, but the two women didn’t meet until they were adults. “Our politics are completely different,” Connie Rice said. “I’m trying to close the gap between the underclass and the working class, and she’s trying to close the gap between the millionaires and the billionaires.” That didn’t stop former California governor Pete Wilson’s secretary for judicial appointments from confusing them: She once called Connie on behalf of her Republican boss to ask for recommendations on judges. (“How bipartisan! I thought,” Rice said.) Connie was making suggestions for the Supreme Court when it became evident the secretary thought she was speaking to Condoleezza. The cousins met soon after and had a laugh about the mix-up.

Lefer: As a civil-rights activist, when did you begin to question the value of litigation?

Rice: I always thought of litigation as the battering ram. You use it to break open the front door and make room for people to enter. Law is easy if you’re in it only to win cases. But if I win a case against the police department and then send my clients back to a neighborhood where they dodge bullets and their kids aren’t getting educated and their medical benefits have been cut off because they lost their second job, how much of a victory is it? Litigation can’t do the delicate work of creating the political will to solve problems. 

Lefer: Did you consider yourself in a rut when it came to police-brutality cases?

Rice: A second-year law student can do an abuse-of-force case against the lapd. We won all of them, but we hadn’t made a dent in the problem. I had fun suing them, and I loved dragging them in to depositions; it made me feel like an alpha female. They were so awful to our clients, and so racist and sexist and brutal, that I had a ball tormenting them in court.

Lefer: What changed your attitude?

Rice: A canine-unit case was brought before the court. It was outrageous what these handlers were doing with the police dogs. It was a brutality machine.

Lefer: I’ve heard there were videotapes of dog attacks in which police officers referred to black youths as “dog biscuits.”

Rice: Yes, the officers would film the dogs in action and bring the tapes home.

The problem for us was that the victims of the dog bites were gangbangers or delinquents, and the officer would come into court with the dog and throw a ball up in the air, and the dog would catch it and then sit there looking cute. Once a jury saw that, it would be all over. So we transformed the case into a statistical one: We showed the bite rate — the percentage of times, when the dogs were deployed, that the suspect was bitten. The judge looked at the data and saw an 80 percent bite rate and a 47 percent hospitalization rate, and he said to the police, “You’d better settle.” The cops were bristling. They said, “We want to fix this ourselves. Give us the money for retraining, and we’ll change it.”

I recognized their sincerity, so we told the city to give them the money. And do you know what? Within six months the bite rate was 5 percent. They got rid of the sadists and revamped the whole canine unit. They brought in the first woman dog handler and the first African American handler. Fifteen years later the bite rate is still below 10 percent. So when they want to change, and the change is on their terms and in their interest, cops can turn things around.

After that I asked myself, How can I get rid of the mentality of brutality? Of course one of the first lessons I learned was that they don’t call it “brutality.” They call it “good policing.” My language shut down the debate. I wasn’t communicating; I was still fighting them. My team and I had been having a good time beating them in court and feeling powerful, as if it were a sport. But the truth is we need cops. I’ve been around gang members for ten years and know what they’re capable of. I’m not romanticizing these guys. I’ve seen videotapes of them gang-raping a little girl to force her brother to join. If I had a choice between a police state and a state run by gangbangers, I would take the police state.

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