Opinion | Bill Bratton Discusses Police Reform With Maureen Dowd
“Sweet Alice brought police and community together at every one of her events in Watts,” recalls Bratton. “She provided an atmosphere, particularly for the children, where the police could be seen in a very different way, after 50 years of only seeing the police locking up brothers and fathers.”
As an adviser to Bratton, Rice helped train former gang members to quell the violence in their communities. She wrote in The Times in 2013 about her experience: “Mr. Bratton went into the Black community and didn’t leave. He courted Black leaders, attended church and community meetings and bonded with as many African-Americans up and down the social ladder as he could.”
“My time in L.A. validated that police could be the instrument to bring about racial harmony,” says Bratton. “They had a 50-year history of open warfare with the Black community. The idea was to keep the Blacks down in South L.A., just keep them from coming out and bothering the rest of us. The relationship was awful. They were oppressive, they were brutal, they were racist.”
Bratton has harsh words for the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization, calling them “a bunch of Marxists.”
“I’ve been all my life behind the idea that Black lives matter, the individual, the race. But as far as Black Lives Matter, the organization, I think we are beginning to understand that some of their goals are very different than what most people think the goals are. It turns out that basically their founding was based on attacking the police,” he says, adding, “It will be very interesting also to understand what are they doing with all the money that they raise.”
He says that, even though Biden “went to the left to basically get elected,” his “relationships with the police over the years and with unions have been very good.”
Many people feel strongly that the 1994 crime bill, of which Biden was an architect, harmed Black communities. But Bratton says he believes the good outweighed the bad, and Biden shouldn’t have apologized for elements of the bill.
