SULLIVAN: I am heartened by the very many policy changes that we're seeing around the country in police departments. But institutions are made up of people and often the behavior of people lags behind policy changes. So we have to insist that the behavior catches up. Behavior is habituated, and what happens is that the current top cadre of officers behave habitually, they do what they've been doing, and it takes some time for them to really address the new policies and change the way of operating, particularly with respect to communities of color. But I'm confident that in time they will adjust. But the first step is to recognize that there's a problem. And the difficulty thus far has been the intransigence of police officers, of law enforcement, to even admit that they treat white citizens preferentially and citizens of color unequally. Once that admission is made, then and only then can meaningful change produce the sort of fruits that some of these policy changes should produce.


I hope we don't have to wait for a new generation of officers to come in for these changes. Many police departments around the country are doing implicit-bias training, and even with the existing cadre of law enforcement, this sort of training tends to work because it makes people realize that they hold implicit biases, subconscious biases. And we all do - everybody of every color, every hue, every ethnicity holds biases. We all have priors, and we bring them to the table. To the degree that we can foreground those biases, recognize that we have particular biases, then we can behave in a way that accounts for those biases, and that's what this sort of implicit bias training will do. There are some wonderful models of policing around the country. The HUPD right here at Harvard does remarkable work with respect to cultural sensitivity and implicit bias training and other efforts that sit at the forefront of policing. The Brooklyn district attorney's office is another that is making radical changes to the way they prosecute, and hence the way police officers behave in street encounters with citizens. We have many examples of good policing across the country. What we do not have is the political will to implement those changes in a mass sort of way. Some of these things are expensive; we need the political will to pay for them. Community policing, for example, has been around for a long time. It does cost a little more money, but it works. If we want to break this juggernaut, we really have to invest in policing.


GAZETTE: African-American people have long felt under siege, and many police officers say they too feel under attack by criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement and others. In a news conference last week, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said police “don't feel supported most days.” How can we get beyond this stalemate when there's such deeply felt mutual distrust?


SULLIVAN: First and foremost, I reject the notion that there's any moral equivalency whatsoever between the claims of police being mistreated and communities of color being mistreated. Police are not being shot in the street year in and year out. There's no history of police officers being dehumanized, being beaten, being inappropriately stopped and targeted. That absolutely doesn't exist. Having said that, the event in Dallas was a tragedy, and it was wrong. But to say that police are under siege in the way communities of color are under siege is downright false. Why do police feel under siege? I think that they feel genuinely under siege because they've never been held accountable to communities of color before. There's a long and unbroken history of law enforcement being able to treat citizens of color in any way they choose with no repercussions whatsoever. Communities of color around the country are now insisting that they be treated equally under the law, and that's the only fair and right and just thing to do. There's resistance from an institution that has historically mistreated this community. They've never been questioned; their judgment's never been challenged.


Notwithstanding that they feel under siege, I'm not willing to give voice to that. They're professionals, they're trained in a certain way, and they should behave professionally. As a lawyer, I sometimes feel under siege by judges, but I don't mistreat my clients, I'm a professional. We should hold our police and military and any other serious profession to the very same high standard. The subjective feelings of a group of professionals cannot define policy. That would be a mistake. It is up to the civilian leadership to insist that its police force always and unconditionally behaves professionally and treats each citizen equally under the law. That should be the starting point. And if an individual officer's subjective feelings prevent her or him from doing that, there are many other professions in the world that they should engage in, but they should not be a police officer.


GAZETTE: How is your work in critical race theory reflected in the events of the last few days?


SULLIVAN: The basic underlying premise of critical race theory is that race insinuates itself into very many if not all aspects of our lives. And these are very real-time, real-life examples of the ways in which race seeps into our understanding and behavior. Someone sent me something over Twitter of two police officers fighting with a very large, Caucasian male in a diner, and the caption was “He's still alive.” He was swinging at the officers, [but] they never pulled out a weapon. They ultimately subdued and arrested him. The predominant feeling among citizens of color is that if that person had been a very large African-American man, he would've been dead. That's just an example of the way that race motivates behavior. We all live in this country with its history of race, and we're all impacted by it - black, white, and other equally. Putting on the uniform does not change that. But it's incumbent on the police department to train its officers in such a way that these biases can be weeded out as much as possible and, whatever remains, exposed and dealt with in appropriate ways.


GAZETTE: As a nation, what questions aren't we asking? Which issues aren't we confronting?


SULLIVAN: We still have not adequately dealt as a nation with the race question: the legacy of slavery and the remnants of Jim Crow that still haunt our workaday lives. And until such time as the country is willing and able to have real, substantive conversations and engage in meaningful, remedial efforts, we're going to continue to see these sorts of episodes. So we have a challenge ahead of us. I think we are able to meet that challenge as a country. James Baldwin once said that the history of America, and the history of African-Americans in particular, is the history of making the impossible possible. So I have full faith that the country can do it. We just need to generate the political will to do it.


This interview was originally published in the Harvard Gazette on July 11, 2016. It has been lightly edited for clarity and length.