“Sweet Alice brought the police and the community together at each of their events in Watts,” Bratton recalls. “She created an atmosphere, especially for 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 Bratton’s advisor, Rice has helped train former gang members to quell violence in their communities. She wrote in The Times in 2013 about her experience: “Mr. Bratton entered the black community and did not leave. He courted black leaders, attended church and community meetings, and bonded with as many African Americans up and down the social ladder as possible.

“My time in Los Angeles validated that the police could be the instrument of racial harmony,” says Bratton. “They had a 50-year history of open warfare with the black community. The idea was to keep the Blacks in South LA, just to keep them from going out and bothering us. The relationship was horrible. They were oppressive, they were brutal, they were racists.

Bratton has harsh words for the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization, calling them ” Marxists. “

“I have been all my life behind the idea that black lives matter, the individual, the race. But when it comes to Black Lives Matter, the organization, I think we’re starting to understand that some of their goals are very different from what most people think they are. It turns out that basically their foundation was based on an attack on the police, ”he said, adding:“ It will be very interesting to understand too. what are they doing with all the money they collect.

He says that while Biden “went to the left to get elected,” his “relationship with the police over the years and with the unions has been very good.”

Many people are convinced that the 1994 Crime Bill, of which Biden was the architect, did harm to black communities. But Bratton says he thinks the good outweighs the bad, and Biden shouldn’t have apologized for elements of the bill.