Rep. Karen Bass met with Angelenos after asking for suggestions to improve police-community relations in L.A. County (Arielle Samuelson/Neon Tommy).

Congresswoman Karen Bass, from California's 37th District, flew from Capitol Hill to Ferguson, Mo. to a South Los Angeles church to gather a flock of concerned citizens in a town hall meeting to discuss new policing reforms for better relations between community members and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Two lines stretched down both sides of the church and Bass was kept an hour over schedule in order to hear every person who wanted to offer suggestions to improve police department behavior in the community.

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Leading the community forum at Wade A.M.E. Church were also Assemblyman Reginald Jones-Sawyer, Sr., the newly elected head of the Legislative Black Caucus, and civil rights attorney Connie Rice. 

Rice was recently appointed to the newly developed 21st century policing task force assembled by President Barack Obama, in response to the national outcry following the fatal police shootings of African-American men Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and local man Ezell Ford. Rice has spent decades working with the LAPD and on behalf of the community.

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Suggestions for reforming the Los Angeles Police Department in particular and policing in general ranged from the practical (change the incentives for police officers) to the dramatic (form militarized groups for self-policing). 

Rice’s solution, born out of her years of experience with civil rights law and the LAPD, was to work with the police, not against them. Rice, personable and colloquial, tried to win over the crowd by telling the history of how she went from suing the LAPD to working closely with them.

But she hit an undercurrent of anger when she said that, realistically, the police would continue to wrongfully shoot civilians, because police work is a dirty business.

Emotions ran high as people one-by-one stepped up to mic to air their thoughts on LAPD-community relations.

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