Lefer: How did you first get involved with street gangs?

Rice: I went to the Jordan Downs housing project in Watts right after the Rodney King police verdict had sparked riots in 1992. There was still smoke rising from burning buildings. I was going as a representative of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where I’d been for maybe five months. I went straight from court that day, and I waltzed into the Grape Street gym looking like a black Republican, wearing more pearls than Barbara Bush. [Laughter.] And a group of women looked at me as if to say, What are you doing here? I said I wanted to help. They told me to go help their men, and they directed me to a trailer. Two rival gangs were inside brokering a truce, but I didn’t know that, so I just went and stupidly knocked on the door: pearls, pumps, business suit, and all. I said to the man who answered, “I’m Connie Rice from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and I’m here to help you.” Inside I could see black men with red bandannas and blue bandannas seated around a table — red on one side, blue on the other. The Crips and the Bloods. I probably looked like an extraterrestrial to them. They slammed the door in my face.

Three minutes later the door opened, and a guy in a blue bandanna said, “We know who you are. You can get us a copy of that agreement that the Jews and the Arabs have.” I said, “The Camp David Peace Accords?” And he said, “Yeah, if the Jews and the Arabs can work their shit out, we can work ours out too.” So I came back with the Camp David Peace Accords. That’s how I got into it. I was like their research assistant. It’s ridiculous that I get any credit for having brokered the truce.

A year later, when the second verdict — the federal verdict — was set to come down in the Rodney King police trials, I got a call from a gang member. The police were putting on their riot gear, he said. They had their rifles out and were blocking off the streets and removing their name tags. “You need to call the police chief and tell him there are going to be some dead cops,” the gang leader said. I called Captain Bruce Haggerty, the head of the Southeast LA division. This was Good Friday, the start of Easter weekend. There were going to be barbecues in every park and backyard. The cops were mostly new recruits on their first assignment, because the veterans all wanted off for the holiday weekend. These recruits were ready for Armageddon, and, because of the celebrations, they were going to see smoke and black men with no shirts everywhere. I told Bruce to have his officers put their name tags back on and bring along some gang-intervention workers and gang liaisons and go shake people’s hands at the park and join them at the barbecues and the picnics.

Lefer: And he listened to you?

Rice: Yes, he turned it around. Can you imagine? And luckily the right verdict came down in federal court: two of the officers were convicted of having violated King’s civil rights. But until then, both sides were ready to pull triggers. Not just the police. The gangs had been talking about shooting cops. That was the beginning of my role as mediator. I saw that both of these cultures had to change. So I started to explore the world of gangs. How did these guys get into this life? What made them think they had to kill somebody who looked at their Nikes wrong — besides typical male machismo?

Lefer: What about the documented rise in violence among girls?

Rice: That’s true. The group with the fastest rate of increase in gang activity is teenage girls, and we have to pay attention to them. They’ve gone from being sex objects for the male gang members to committing felony assault. Some girls are creating a power base of their own. They’re defending turf, and they’ve got guns. But girls are still a tiny percentage.

The despair these kids feel is so far from my experience. I was an air-force brat, and my family was all about hope and achievement. I asked one gangbanger, “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” and he said, “I don’t.” And the sexual behavior: I met a boy who’d just had his fifth child with his fifth girlfriend, and he couldn’t support any of them. I try not to be judgmental, because it doesn’t help, but I lost it and said, “What the hell is wrong with you? Put a sock on it! Haven’t you ever heard of a condom?” He looked at me and said, “You got to understand: I’m not going to be around very long, and they’re the only proof that I was ever here.” The other kid who lifted the veil for me was about nineteen. He had killed two people and had gotten shot in retaliation and was in the hospital. I said, “Are you trying to die?” He thought for a moment about how to explain it, then said, “This is suicide by homicide. I kill anybody who reminds me of myself.”

That’s when I started looking at some of the conditions in the communities where the violence was. The levels of post-traumatic stress disorder among children in hot spots for gang activity are the same as in Mosul and Baghdad. I always begin with the question “Who has the power to change this?” Sometimes it’s the voters. When it comes to police reform, it’s the police. With gangs, it’s the gang members and their communities. I need to ally myself with the people who can solve the problem. My strategy is to figure out what people need in order to create change themselves.

Lefer: It reminds me of the therapeutic adage that people won’t change unless you first accept them as they are.

Rice: And then you help them realize that it’s good for them to change. If you create incentives and let them do it on their own terms, they will. But litigation and court decrees will never change someone’s mind-set.

After the Rampart misconduct scandal, we asked the lapd to turn away from paramilitary, occupation-style policing and work with the community, and they looked at us as if we were out of our damn minds. We were asking them to do something for which they had no resources or incentives. None of the criteria for getting promoted on the force were related to community policing. So I spent hundreds of hours interviewing cops, from uniformed officers to the chief of police, to figure out what resources they needed in order to feel safe enough to do community policing. Now we’ve got a task force, and we’re rewriting the criteria for giving promotions, the training criteria, and the awards-and-incentives systems — because if no one gets promoted for making sure a kid doesn’t get arrested, why should anyone do it?

Nevertheless the good cops who do community policing have been there all along, demonstrating that you can win the trust and cooperation of the community and get rid of the conditions that create crime. Because when you create trust, people in the community start calling you and reporting crimes, and that makes your job easier. The cops get backup from the community, which increases everyone’s safety. When the police feel outnumbered, which they are, then they overreact and use excessive force.

Lefer: The Rampart Division reportedly got reformed. It’s supposed to be a model of police and community working together. But during the May 1 immigration rally at MacArthur Park, which is covered by Rampart, riot police stormed the park.

Rice: The Rampart turnaround is genuine. They really transformed that department. The cops who went into the park weren’t Rampart cops. They were swat teams, which still operate under the old mind-set. They think, We’re the blue vanguard, and we get to do whatever we want to do. But Police Chief William Bratton demoted two swat-team commanders, which is a big deal in that culture. And he has promoted change-agent cops over the dinosaur cops in the department. The idea is to rewrite the script so that recruits entering the academy will have no contact with the old culture. It’s a start, but it’s going to take ten years. It has taken me twenty-five years to get this far. And there were people working on it before I got here, so you’re looking at a fifty-year battle to get the lapd to come to terms with its legacy of excessive force.

Lefer: How do you change the split-second decisions that police make based on race?

Rice: Research shows that cops actually make decisions with less subliminal racial bias than ordinary citizens do. The overt racists are a tiny part of the force. The real problem is when the police aren’t fluent in a culture. If you put me in the Samoan part of town, I won’t know how to read those people. For many underclass African American males, life is a fight, so the way they say hello may be combative, and that scares white rookie cops who’ve never been in a black community. There are middle-class black cops who don’t know how to read underclass African Americans either. They can’t tell what’s a real threat. The lapd puts these rookies in South LA, where they shoot at anything that moves. It’s all upside down. The least-experienced officers are in the most-dangerous positions, while the seasoned, mature officers on the force don’t go out in the field. They go home at 5 P.M. in their company cars. What Chief Bratton doesn’t understand is there are two lapds: a nighttime and a daytime. When you go out in the nighttime, it’s scary.

LA is a self-policed city. There are about three hundred cops out there at any given time to police a five-hundred-square-mile city. That alone explains the hyperaggressive, paramilitary-style policing. When you have too few officers, they puff themselves up like porcupines to look more fierce than they are.

We’ve set up a system that actually guarantees high levels of violence in poor areas. They have a name for it: “containment suppression.” My middle-class neighborhood is safe only because those neighborhoods soak up all the violence. The cops in Southeast LA will tell you they’re not there to provide public safety; they’re there to make sure the violence doesn’t spread. We’ve got seven thousand unsolved murders in South LA. Our political system has engineered public-safety apartheid. Why is it acceptable that residents of West LA have a one-in-eighty thousand chance of being murdered, whereas people in Southeast LA have a one-in-two-thousand chance? Kids growing up in the southeast part of town have a one-in-fifty-one chance of being physically assaulted at a felony-battery level.

There’s a one-in–10 million chance that any American is going to be hit by a terrorist attack, yet we spend billions every year to fight terrorism. We spend just seventeen cents a child to keep kids in Southeast LA safe. I’m not suggesting that Watts ought to become as safe as Bel-Air, where former first lady Nancy Reagan lives. I’m not that stupid. But we ought to be able to say that a kid can walk to school without a risk of being shot. I don’t think that’s too much to ask in the richest nation the world has ever seen.

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