TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Article on Chief Bratton
• Chief Bratton's interview in L.A. Weekly
• Los Angeles Police Department

E-mail a friend

Tavis: Bill Bratton, famed police chief here in Los Angeles in the fall of 2002. In the mid-nineties, he served in that same capacity in New York City. The first person ever to lead the police force in the nation's 2 largest cities. All in all, he's been in law enforcement now for over 30 years, and I'm pleased to welcome him to our studios this evening. Chief, nice to see you.

Bill Bratton: Tavis. Great to be back.

Tavis: You OK?

Bratton: Life is good.

Tavis: How's your wife Rikki doin'?

Bratton: As beautiful as ever.

Tavis: Yeah? You guys have a great love story. But that's a book that Rikki wrote that we talked about at another time on the show.

Bratton: There are gonna be sequels.

Tavis: Yeah, exactly, sequels. I'm sure there will be. Anyway, nice to have you on the program. That's the good news. You're happily married. Rikki has written a book about the love affair that the two of you have and how you met, and that's the good news story of your life. The bad news is this videotape. Hate to bring it up again.

Bratton: Two.

Tavis: Two videos, absolutely. So let's start. This tape has been seen around the world. I'm talking now specifically about the tape involving the car-theft suspect, Stanley Miller. What happened here?

Bratton: Couple things that, uh, there was, in fact, they caught that Stanley Miller, who is the individual in this incident who was driving that car. At the conclusion of it, 2 TV stations captured on video from their helicopters an incident that has, in fact, ignited a phenomenal amount of controversy and reflects, unfortunately, the deep mistrust that particularly the African- American community has in this city toward its police force. 100 years of not being treated well by the Los Angeles police department comes to the surface every time we have an incident like this. We're now investigating it. Because the videos were not pretty. I've described them as awful in the sense of some of what's going on. And we have several investigations going forward...a criminal to determine was there criminal actions on the part of the officers and the administrative so that if the District Attorney in this county makes a determination that we can't go forward criminally, then I have an administrative investigation I have to conduct. Good news is that we had a consent decree here in Los Angeles as a result--going back to the Christopher Commission, Rodney King, and then the Rampart scandal of the late 1980s, and that consent decree ensures outside monitoring by the federal government, by the Inspector General, by the Police Commission. So maybe some good will come out of this, that the systems of openness, the systems of accountability that were promised under the consent decree, hopefully, we'll be able to show they work here.

Tavis: You mentioned Rodney King. There were immediate comparisons to that Rodney King videotape. Your thoughts on the comparisons being made between the two.

Bratton: Well, the video image in both instances is awful. The Rodney King one went on for an extended period of time. The more recent one is about a minute and 38 seconds in total length from start to finish, and the actions that it captures are--particularly, the one officer striking the individual in this case 11 times, I think, with a flashlight.

Tavis: Uh-huh.

Bratton: So versus the prolonged beating that King received, you have this quick action going on. But beyond that, it begins to change. One: the investigation. We'll not resist the investigation at all. We were controlled by a consent decree that we have a police commission, an I.G., that it's now 12 years later in Los Angeles. There's been a lot of changes in how we deal with this. I'm different. I'm very different than my predecessors, I think, in the willingness to be very open about what we're doing.

Tavis: To your credit, you have been open about this, and you came out very quickly. The mayor came out very quickly. The atmosphere with Rodney King and Darryl Gates and company was a very different atmosphere in this city. So to your credit, I think that part of the reason why thing has not blown up...the city has not blown up in the way that it did after Rodney King, in part, was because of the way you handled it. Having said that, though, you got to...you got to tell me, though, you got to admit that something like this does in fact set back whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish here.

Bratton: It does, but, uh, I'll take some credit, but a lot of credit has to go to the maturing of the communities here, that there's been a beginning of the building of some trust between this city's administration, this police department, and, uh, particularly the African-American community, that, uh--I'm fortunate that I had 20 months here to build some of those bridges with Bishop Blake and Cecil Murray at First A.M.E., and so I had relationships that if this had happened a month or two into my term of office--

Tavis: Different story.

Bratton: It would have been a very different story.

Tavis: Yeah.

Bratton: So the African-American community is here saying, "Look, we've been abused for a hundred years by this police department. We've been abused in this country for 150 years, uh--" several hundred years. "Uh, we're telling you quite clearly, we want to see outcome here. We want to see a process that works, that we've put our faith in this consent decree. We've put our faith in--" in my case, "You as the police chief, Mayor Jim Hahn as the mayor." And so there's a lot at stake here.

Tavis: Let me move beyond Los Angeles, and maybe you know something on this that I don't. I've talked about this ad nauseam, and I still haven't figured it out yet. I think most African-Americans would accept the premise and, in fact, would agree that most police are, by and large, law-abiding, doing their job, protecting and serving. There are some bad apples. Too many bad apples. But you cannot deny, nor can I, that there has been this--repeated to your earlier point--there's this history of a lack of good relations too often between black folk and the police. That's not just here in L.A. You were the top cop in New York. You had the same problem there. You were the top cop in Boston, one of the most segregated cities in this country--

Bratton: Right.

Tavis: What is it about cops and black folk, black folk and cops? Do you know something I don't know?

Bratton: It's the history. It is--the police were used for--throughout the time of slavery as the enforcers, that, uh--in terms of chasing runaway slaves. So, government--we are always the most visible arm. And even after the Civil War era, moving up into the fifties and sixties and the civil rights era of Martin Luther King, we were used as the instrument of government to enforce segregation. Bull Connor down in Selma. In my hometown, Boston, in the sense of, uh...issues in that city. There wasn't an American city that did not have these tensions as police were used as the instrument to, quite frankly, to subjugate

African-Americans. And over the last 50 years in this city, there's still been that incredible tension between this department and that community.

Tavis: I wanna cover some other issues while I got you here. Let me ask you, uh, lastly, on this line of questioning at least, whether or not we're making progress here in Los Angeles and across the country. We live now in the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever. Sooner or later, we gotta make progress on this front, not just because of the black community's problem with the police department, but the brown communities, the yellow communities, the red community. I mean, we--this is a multicultural country. If we don't ever get this problem under control...

Bratton: It's one of the reasons why I'm here. I could have stayed in the private sector, but I deeply believe in my profession, policing. I believe it has--I'm looking at 35 years when I began as a cop versus--I know how I've grown and matured and how my profession has grown. The issue of race in this country still--we, the police, are the flash point for all those festering, unresolved issues, and if there's a place to get it right, it's here in Los Angeles, because so much of the history, so much of the anger, so much of the frustration is here. And we are the future of the world--

Tavis: Are you suggesting to me that if--I want to make sure I hear you correctly--are you suggesting that if we got the crime problem fixed, we'd solve, to a large degree, the race problem in America?

Bratton: I think it's an element of that beginning of that healing. Because the reality is that crime in this country, the principal victims of crime in this country still remain, in terms of violent crime in particular, people in communities of color, in minority communities, poorer communities. That's the reality of it. So if we can show that government is serious about addressing the problems in those communities, in those neighborhoods, then we begin building that trust...and I do deeply believe that.

Tavis: My crew gathered around here--some of them, at least, along with yours truly--we're doing our TV show live this summer from both the Democratic and Republican conventions, and my radio show done from both of those cities as well. It just occurs to me looking at you that I'm going to 2 cities that you've been the top cop in both: Boston, for the Democratic convention--

Bratton: And I'm still young.

Tavis: Still young and handsome. The Boston convention. Boston is where the democrats are. Republicans, of course, in New York City. Should I be scared?

Bratton: Actually, in terms of--you should not be scared, but at the same time, there is a concern--a significant concern that those are 2 extraordinarily significant events in our country. July, August, we're bracketing the Olympics, for which there is phenomenal concern in Greece during that time. I hope, actually, to go to both conventions from a policing perspective, but because of the concerns of a potential terrorist act during either of those events or during the Olympics, I'll be pretty much staying in the city during all of those events, in the event we're to have an incident. We, this past weekend, raised our alert status at LAX, and we'll keep that alert status through the end of the national elections, 'cause there is widespread concern.

Tavis: How do you sustain something that long and get people to believe that you're serious about it for that long a period of time?

Bratton: Well, in that case, we're talking primarily LAX and some of the other infrastructures in the city. We're able to do that in a way that we can rev it up, as we did over July Fourth, but then we keep it at a little lower level that doesn't really stress our resources, even over an extended period of time.

Tavis: Let me ask you a personal question, if I might. I'm looking at you, and every time I see you, you're always very calm and very cool, very collected, very laid-back. We hear--we read in these studies all the time that police officers tend to be, or can be--many of them can be very violent when they go home. They can be very aggressive because it's the nature of the work they do every day, and they've gotta go home and shake that off when they get home. How do you run a police department like L.A., New York, Boston, and still have a--

Bratton: Well, I have as short a fuse as anybody, but Rikki says I have the look. You never want to get the look. I have an explosive temper. I'm quick to come back if I'm attacked. It's ironic, just in the last 24 hours, I'm dealing with 2 issues of abuse by police officers in their home environments that--exactly that. They're taking it home with them and basically taking it out on their families. So, we are not immune from that at all.

Tavis: Let me ask you whether or not you think we're making enough progress in making our police departments look more like America, because it seems to me that if we can do that--I'm talking about females and persons of color. If our departments, it seems to me, can look more like America, then maybe we'll make some progress on policing in this country.

Bratton: Well, look at this department--the L.A. police department. We are the exact makeup of the city. We're about 12% African-American, about 40% Latino, about 40% Caucasian, and 5 to 6% Asian-American. We're also getting close to 25% female. In the department, we've got very large representations of gays and transsexuals, transgender, and we're moving faster than the rest of American society. I was at the symphony not too long ago, and in that whole 130-person symphony orchestra, there wasn't a single African-American. So if you look around, the police are doing pretty well in terms of the speed at which we're changing to look more like the communities we're policing. I think some of the trust that some of the African-American leaders have in this city for me is that for 20 months, I've been raising the issue, "Where are you?" In my recruit classes, I don't have African-Americans. And we've come up with a slogan: "To make a difference, be the difference." So, literally, don't just complain about it--there's no African-American police officers. You've gotta encourage your young people to literally think about these careers. And that's why these types of incidents are such a setback to that, because it really--once again, "The police have really not changed, and why should I subject myself to going into that type of environment?" And for me, that's personally frustrating, because we've spent so much time over the last 20 months trying to get more African-Americans into this department.

Tavis: You're just getting started, and I'm sure you'll have the time to make LAPD what it can be and make it a better department than it is now. I'm not sure policing is in my future, but maybe I'll start taking, say, french horn lessons so I can play in the symphony when you come back again.

Bratton: No, but you might be in the recruiting effort.

Tavis: Whatever I can do to help, I'm glad to.

Bratton: 'Cause no one is as respected as you are.

Tavis: Nice to see you, chief. Thanks for coming by. Up next on this program, actress Holly Robinson Peete as we continue on our road to health. Stay with us.