On a Friday afternoon, Brian Connelly, an officer at the Palo Alto Police Department, makes an unusual stop in his daily patrol. Connelly, who has been with the department since 2017, visits Palo Alto High School to speak in front of a crowd of seniors about how they can make better decisions by avoiding social pressures.
As students prepare for another boring lecture, he picks up the microphone and begins rapping.
Connelly said he began doing these talks at Paly last year in an attempt to warn students about underage drinking parties and help them make better decisions.
“One bad decision really leads to more bad decisions,” Connelly said, adding that he realized he couldn’t reach students after parties, and he needed a new environment to talk to them.
“I would go [to] these parties, and everyone [students] would just scatter,” Connelly said. “They’d freak out like ‘The cops are here,’ so that got me thinking ‘How can I talk to these students in an environment where they’re not fight-or-flight?”
Connelly reached out to Assistant Principal Jerry Berkson, whom he had previously met with, and scheduled his first talk with the senior class during the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year. The talks have become a recurring event due to their success among students.
During this talk with the senior class, Connelly introduces ideas from Damon West’s book “The Coffee Bean.”
The book spreads the message that individual people have the power to change the environment around them through the metaphor of a coffee bean changing the color of hot water in a pot. After his talk, many students took his message to heart, recognizing him and calling him “be the bean” at their graduation ceremony and other school events.
“That filled me up,” Connelly said, when talking about the unexpected connection he made with the students.
“A couple weeks after the first time I talked to them last year, I went to a [Paly] football game just because I was on patrol, and I walked up the bleachers and they [last year’s seniors] started chanting ‘Be the bean’ and I got goosebumps, like I almost started crying,” Connelly said.
“[Paly] graduation was on a day off, so I stood there as all the seniors walked past me and I fist pounded every single one of them, and then a lot of them recognized me and were like ‘oh, be the bean,’” Connelly said.

Many students connected with his message, encouraging him to inspire and motivate others. Connelly wants to inspire students to focus on themselves and make more positive choices, encouraging them to look ahead rather than dwelling on past mistakes.
“I’m just giving you information,” he said. “When it happens out here, it’s too late … your bad decision has already been made.”
He said he hopes that, by reaching them now, he can inspire better thought processes in the future.
“There’s a reason why your windshield is so much bigger than your rear view mirror,” Connelly said. “Because what’s in your rear view mirror is already behind you. You can’t fix that. You can’t change that … but your future is in front of you, where your feet are right now, where you’re facing, that’s in front of you.”