Lefer: Many community activists are agitating against Chief Bratton. As you grow closer to him, how does that affect your relationships with your allies in the community?

Rice: I’m walking a tightrope. I operate by gut instinct and let people know ahead of time what I’m going to do. Before I started working closely with the police, I went to Bo Taylor, a gang-intervention worker, and I said, “Bo, here’s my new strategy.” I told him and others beforehand so they wouldn’t be shocked by it. People in the community know I’ve sued the police for brutality. They know these are the same cops who threw me out of their headquarters bodily. One cop even said, “I can’t breathe the air she’s breathing.” And I tell gang members, “Remember how I spent time with you and listened to you and didn’t judge you? I’m going to do the same thing with the cops.”

It may blow up in my face, but I’m trying to clear a place where new ideas can be vetted and tested. We have to create some safe zones for innovative people in both camps.

Lefer: You’ve advocated hiring former gang members to work with youth, but gang-intervention expert Hector Marroquin was recently found to be continuing his gang activity while he had city contracts. How do you avoid public-relations disasters like that?

Rice: You don’t. There are corrupt cops, there are corrupt lawyers, and there are corrupt gang-intervention workers. If you see corruption in middle-class groups, what makes you think you aren’t going to see it in an underclass group? These guys are coming out of a gang or coming out of prison and trying to go straight. Some are going to fail. But they are the ones who are experts in the culture. We need them. They’re the ones who can figure out how to get rid of the code that says, “Don’t snitch.” They’re the ones who can reach these men and teach them not to beat up women and how to stabilize their lives when they return home from prison. Prison is a huge cause of the disease of community violence. To learn about the problems in prisons, we need to hear from ex-offenders. I don’t go into the prisons, but I want to help the people who do.

Is there a manual on how to do hard-core gang intervention? Not yet. That’s why we’ve proposed an academy for both cops and former gang members who are interested in this work. But it’s a high-risk venture for everyone. The cops who support it are out on a limb, and the rest of the department is trying to saw the limb off. The gang-intervention specialists could actually get killed for working with police officers. I’m taking the least risk. Who cares if I fall on my face?

My role is to be a catalyst, to make the space and make the introductions and help with translation. After four or five years we’re at the point where a deputy chief picks up the phone and calls Bo Taylor to come down to the precinct. That wouldn’t have been possible when I started this work thirteen years ago. I was at war with the cops in court; the gang-intervention workers were at war with the cops in the streets; the officers were out to annihilate Bo Taylor and others like him. There are some cops who are still out to annihilate them.

I just had some of the police gang patrol in a roundtable discussion. I hired retired, old-guard cops — ex-marines with crew cuts and barrel chests. I don’t even want to know what they did when they were on the force. But you’ve got to have cops like them on your team to get others to the table. At that roundtable the cops told me they’re not happy with the status quo either. They’re putting their lives on the line, and it’s not effective. I was betting they would come around and see that my gang-intervention specialists were part of the solution. Just last week we had a meeting of fifteen of the top gang-intervention workers and about seven of the top cops to talk about how we can work together.

Lefer: But you know, as soon as a neighborhood becomes safe, it gets gentrified, and the original residents get pushed out.

Rice: Affordable housing is a piece of the puzzle that’s too big for me. I can deal only with the violence; that’s big enough.

Most of our politicians here in LA are not stupid. They know what they need to do. But they just don’t want to spend the political capital to change things. It all requires political will, and political will requires a movement, which we don’t have.

Lefer: So you’re looking for something comparable to the Bus Riders Union. You represented them in a class-action lawsuit against LA’s Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1991, and they’re still active as a grass-roots organization, promoting better public transportation for all LA citizens.

Rice: Yes, that’s why, before you arrived, I was meeting with a veteran organizer. I need a base here, and I’m not a grass-roots expert. I know my limitations. We need to organize the poor. We need to organize the prisons. I can’t make change happen, but the community can. In the Bus Riders case I was working with the best grass-roots advocates in the country. It got to the point where I could let the clients present the arguments in court. Ted Robertson, a kid who’d barely finished tenth grade and had never owned a closed-toe pair of shoes, did all the work and all the analysis. We bought him a suit and went to federal court — not just state court, but federal court, with the marble columns to make you think of imperial Rome. At first Ted was a little nervous, but five minutes in, the other lawyer and I were like potted plants, and Ted was leaning on the podium saying, “Now, Your Honor, if you’ll follow me to page . . .”

My goal is to make it so the citizens don’t need us. My goal is to help them build their own movement. Right now we need a movement against violence, against hopelessness and despair, against the mind-set that says, I’m going to be dead at nineteen, so why bother?

We need the mothers on our side. Just as Mothers Against Drunk Driving brought attention to the drunk-driving epidemic in this country, I think the mothers of murdered children could bring attention to the epidemic of violence. We’ve seen the mothers hold vigils with community leaders by their sides. Many of them speak out as bereaved individuals. But to create a movement, you have to have alliances. That means bringing together the mothers and the gang-intervention workers. First, though, I have to build the leadership capacity of the mothers. They have the moral authority, but they don’t have an office or  a telephone. They need salaries and a place to meet. And once the wealthy people on the Westside see the mothers stand up, I think they’ll get on board too.

What if the mothers were to sue the gangs? If it were done — because it’s not clear to me it’s a good strategy — the judgment could be waived if the gang leaders got treatment and left the streets. Maybe it won’t even take litigation. Maybe the gangs will be willing to sit down with the mothers and talk. Litigation is just one engine that can power a movement. My goal is to give my clients a voice, put them at the table, and empower them so I don’t have to speak for them.

Lefer: The Bus Riders Union is a successful multiracial coalition, and the mothers could be one, too.

Rice: They’ve got to be. The Bus Riders Union is multiracial by design, and so are the gang-intervention groups. But multiracial coalitions require constant mediation to make sure old arguments don’t flare up. You have to be aware of the tensions, and not just between black and white or black and Latino. There’s history between Mexicans and Central Americans, and rivalries based on things that happened years ago between different communities in Mexico. It’s like a family reunion; fights can get triggered at any time. You have to check your ego at the door and not let things bother you. You just listen and figure out how you’re going to keep pushing toward the goal.

Lefer: The title of the book you’re writing is Power Concedes Nothing. What’s it about?

Rice: It’s a call for us to become more organized and radical in our efforts to solve problems. The people need to stand up and make demands. We’ve been seduced by American Idol and hip-hop music and “bling” and the notion that this is the best we can do. Real power is not in our political systems. It’s in the structures that control capital; it’s in the international structures; it’s in the hands of a very few, and it’s becoming more concentrated every day. That’s why low-income people can’t climb the ladder of upward mobility. Our upward-mobility ladder starts in the middle class, which is struggling too. The rungs below that have been removed. The poor aren’t even on the bottom. The poor are nowhere. The poor are in prison. They don’t show up in the employment statistics and projections. My clients have been erased. I’m just too stupid to accept it. So I don’t. I keep trying to put them back in the picture.

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