The only Californian on President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing said we know exactly what to do to confront and correct the dire situation brought on by shootings in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis and Dallas. Acclaimed Los Angeles civil rights attorney Connie Rice said, “You have to completely reform police culture so that they are ready to bond with core communities, so that you can build trust.”
Lack of trust clearly divides many in police departments and communities of color. Given that Dallas police chief David Brown said after the shooting of his officers that police get little community support, I asked Rice if the community has a responsibility in changing the hostile environment.
“That’s the other side of the story,” Rice said. “I had to go the grandmothers because without the community also changing, this won’t work. It cannot be just the cops.”
Her reference to the grandmothers, Rice explained, was to go to the mothers and grandmothers in the African-American community of Los Angeles who had lost children and grandchildren to police shootings “to ask them to do something I’m not sure I could do,” reach across and help cops change. “If community doesn’t buy into it, it will not happen.”
Rice was one of eleven members the president appointed to a task force to examine police shootings and police involvement in communities they protect in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and other instances. The task force issued its report one year ago.
The first recommendation of the task force deals with building trust and legitimacy. The task force report stated: “People are more likely to obey the law when they believe that those who are enforcing it have the legitimate authority to tell them what to do. But the public confers legitimacy only on those they believe are acting in procedurally just ways.”
For Rice, “We’ve gone beyond lack of trust. We’re in open warfare. You saw that in Dallas. Dallas is an outlier. You’ve got a deranged mass shooter going after cops. That deranged individual does not reflect what the black community wants. I know that for a fact.”
What the community wants she said is for the historic warrior police culture to end and be supplanted by police in the role of guardians.
The role as guardian was on display in Dallas as the police responded to gunfire while protecting the protestors marching against police shootings they witnessed on videos during the week.
I asked how the videos have changed perceptions.
“That’s the major difference,” Rice said, “because the black community has always known that we are disproportionately stopped, disproportionately killed, we’ve always known it but the white community doesn’t care what black people say. The video makes it less plausible for the white community to accuse the black community of making this stuff up. The videos have changed the political game.
“When the African-America community sees itself on videos of shootings that are questionable and it looks like murder and there is never any kind of response, because if you’re talking about prosecuting cops you’ve already lost the battle. You have to fix it on the front end,” she said.
Rice contends that the task force recommendations can change police culture from warrior cop to guardian cop. “We’ve done it in L.A.,” she said.
“This is not your grandfather’s LAPD,” Rice said. The policing difference by the LAPD has changed dramatically over the past thirty years. You will never see gratuitous racism or open brutality like the beating of Rodney King that goes unaddressed.
She credited some of the change to the Community Safety Partnership Unit (CSPU) she helped organize working with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck. The plan is to reverse the long held traditions of policing—don’t give credit for an arrest, see an arrest as failure. Earn the trust of the community through service to the community.
Rice explained the police involved in the CSPU were told: You are in the trust business. We want you to bond with these poor public housing residents and we want these poor public housing residents to feel you are part of their community and you are part of their safety net.
On Thursday, President Obama referred to the task force’s work and recommendations “that could ensure that the trust between communities and police departments were rebuilt and incidents like this would be less likely to occur.”
Yet, with passions stoked by the videos and the Dallas police killings, the trust re-building effort will take time.