What did you do to diminish tension between the parties?

Julian Klugman

Answer:
About how you handle it? Ultimately you could adjourn the meeting, if you had to, or you could have a recess. And then you talk to the person.

Werner Petterson

Answer:
In the earlier days when CRS was involved in things on the street as mediators. In that environment there was the possibility of things turning violent. In the kind of mediation that I'm talking about, I think when somebody becomes a part of a negotiating team they have more then just their own interest. They are being a representative for their community and so I think there is a lot of pressure to not do something crazy and jeopardize a larger interest that you are working for. If you're out on the street then anybody can do anything and nobody has responsibilities.

Ozell Sutton

Answer:
This is in caucus. Now the only thing I'm talking about here is I will pursue those interests. In other words, your cause.

Wallace Warfield

Answer:
Again, I think it would depend upon the conflict. For example, in a particularly violent conflict, where there’s a riot – first things first. And again, even this is somewhat controversial from a social theory standpoint -- there’s the notion that conflict intervention is designed to simply maintain the status quo and cool people out. So riot prevention cools people out, and removes the justification of anger that can really give grit to the complaints that people have. On the other hand, people are dying. So, the people who are espousing that belief are not the mothers, locked cell-like in their apartments, who can’t go out at night to get milk for their babies because people will be shooting machine guns in the area. You’re not responsible for that, but somebody has to be. You’re not always pulling people together; you’re simply doing a very hands-on conciliation approach to violence prevention. Then, before it gets to the point where people can fairly quickly become reconciled to the fact that we’ve stopped the violence, and then it’s back to business as usual, we say, "Now that we’ve got your attention, and we have some moments of respite here, are you willing to sit down and talk?” And then that’s the time to begin the process of pulling people together.

Dick Salem

Answer:
I was cooling my heels. What can you do when the group caucuses and they don’t want you there? Usually, you wait awhile and give them some time and stick your head in to see if you can be a positive factor. But they wouldn’t let me in. Oh, they were furious. That ended and we got through that.

Dick Salem

Nancy Ferrell

Answer:
It generally involves police departments. The best thing to do is to create as much public awareness as possible about what's going on. The more light you can shine on this community issue and make everybody aware of what's going on, the less likely that violence is going to occur, regardless of where it's coming from. The first thing is just to get everybody out there and talking about what's happening. Then you try to create response systems that include the community. For example, one situation was in a park at night where there was a lot of violence involving black youth. The police were trying to deal with it and one of our recommendations was to get the adult male pastor to come into those parks and help. The police were more likely to cause more violence to occur. So our suggestion wasn't the answer to the problems, but it was a way of working with the current situation and trying to diminish possibility of violence right then. We try to find people who have influence with the people who you fear might cause the violence. Again, those personal leaders. I used to tell school districts, "If you want to stop trouble in the hallways, put some other kids or parents in the hallways." A generation of school administrators cried "We want the parents out of the schools." Same thing in a community. You can't hire enough police officers to police the community. We have got to get the community involved in policing. It's amazing our presence, whether it was me or any of us, could create calm. There was a calming effect. We are good talkers, we can create hope. They don't have to take one particular route, there is an alternative. That takes us back to the Indians as a good example. The potential there was violence. The potential was that the people inside had guns.

Silke Hansen

Answer:
I think a number of different ways. If I can actually get them to the mediation table and get them to where they are actually listening to each other, then it is actually embarrassing how easy it is to reach an agreement among the parties. That's because in most cases, they have never really done that before. They have talked at each other and yelled at each other, and they've said things about each other to the media and so on, but they have never really listened and responded and then listened again. So once they actually hear what some of the needs and what some of the obstacles are that each of them faces, and once they talk to real individuals and not "those people" or "those administrators," it just comes to a whole different level. There are certainly cases where the two parties never get to a point where they trust each other; there are also cases where the parties agree to trust each other only because I'm there. Even in those cases, though, they each agree to do something and that is a step in the right direction. So, you know, I am not going to pretend that the parties suddenly become "good buddies" and live happily ever after just because Silke Hansen was in town. But at least they have grappled with one particular aspect of their conflict, and in that regard they have a better relationship than they had before. That's a step in the right direction.

Silke Hansen

Renaldo Rivera

Answer:
There are several things. One, I mentioned very early that each of the state officials -- the Attorney General offices and all of their first assistants who were going out and doing the community meetings that started on day two -- were mentioning CRS. Even though we were not always in attendance, our small, highly specialized agency was consistently mentioned by high-level state officials in law enforcement. So that word filtered out. Two, in primary target areas where enforcement efforts or backlashes were taking place, like Patterson and Jersey City and then along Atlantic Avenue here in Brooklyn, CRS' presence was known and visibly felt. They saw us directly do our usual conflict resolution of large-scale community tension reduction with other public officials and law enforcement. Three, these organization in the local Arab-Muslim community and South Asian and Sikh communities had been aware of our attendance at meetings sponsored by their umbrella organizations or the Asian Federation or the New York Immigration Coalition, or the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in both their town meetings and youth meetings. So without taking over their agendas they had seen our presence there very strategically. In a series of activities from day two right through the present, what occurred is that they consistently heard about CRS and when there was a big problem they had seen us at work. So now what we're coming back to is the nature of the shifting landscape -- and we're not at the worst of it yet, it continues with the antiterrorism bill. There is more receptivity to CRS's direct outreach as a federal agency to each specific community. The timing of this was key. Because of the previous activities they weren't pushed aside by a heavy federal presence. We also permitted a natural community organization process to take place with people that individuals and community members already trusted, their own leadership. We assisted them building coalitions with their advocacy and umbrella groups and we just coordinated and we continue to coordinate with the umbrella groups. Now it's to the point where they need more responses from officials, which is the particular job that CRS is more able to do and more uniquely skilled to do and in the position to do. They're much more ready to receive us. This has been complimented by the work that was done in Washington headquarters in reaching out to national Arab-Muslim, South-Asian and Sikh organizations. They did the outreach, they provided us with the contact information with their local people, and then we, at Ground Zero, followed up with their national field office staff and field office directors by encouraging those field office people at the national level to come to this area and we assured them of our willingness to meet with the community at its request. So we utilized national field directors to come and utilize their local networks and advertise and introduce that CRS would be interested in listening to their concerns and trying to help to shape an effective agenda to respond to those concerns.

Stephen Thom

Stephen Thom

Stephen Thom

Stephen Thom

Stephen Thom

Answer:
Sometimes they get hot and I have to watch the parties and see what level of tolerance one has of each group. I read the behaviors and decide whether to ask them to calm down. Sometimes I call for timeouts and ask for caucuses. There have been times where I've said, "Wait a minute, we need to review why we're here and what tone and ground rules we've agreed to abide by. If I sense some discomfort by some of the people, I'll say, "By the behavior of the individuals there seems to be a need to take some of that tone out of here," or "Could we take a time out?" At that time I can meet with individuals to draw out that person and speak to that person directly and say, "You know you're creating a level of hostility. Do we want to move forward in working towards a solution? We're not going to cut you out of getting your voice and what you want to accomplish, but the tone is going to possibly harden the other side, so it depends what you want to accomplish here. Think about that as you convey your issues. You could be passionate, but don't get to the point where you're so aggressive that it harms the process." I think those are the kinds of techniques that I have used.

Stephen Thom

Answer:
Well, now you're asking me. I can't tell jokes, I can't remember. Maybe, the things that you play off on are things you hear and the misinterpretations we have and using yourself as the vehicle for humor versus any of the parties. But, everybody will say something and then they'll know it's a miscommunication or it's a faux pas of some type and you catch it and you go "Did you hear that one?" Just a light playoff on words sometimes can relieve a lot of tension. When you see the parties warming up in that vein of a little humor sometimes, it gets a whole lot of invigorated faith in the other person's ability to recognize that the other party is just another human being with needs and interest just like me.

Silke Hansen

Answer:
Ok, very recently, we were in this case where we worked together with the Kansas City Regional Office. We're in Pine Ridge and AIM and Pine Ridge Leadership wanted to march into White Plains to protest. There had been a couple of recent murders which had been unsolved. There were allegations of mistreatment of Indians in the town and that the town was using the sale of alcohol to the detriment of the Native American community. There had been a march the week before which had gone peacefully, but as the marchers got ready to return to the Pine Ridge reservation, others stayed behind. There was some burning and looting and destruction, so when plans were made for another march, there was a real concern that this might become violent. It was at that point that CRS got involved. So there was a potential for violence there. One of the key things that we try to do before an event which might lead to violence is that we get the key players, the leaders, together to talk about what expectations each one has about the coming event. We talk about what parameters each one has set, what are their absolutes, and what is negotiable, so that each side would know what to expect of the other. In this case, we arranged for a meeting between the march leadership and the Nebraska Law Enforcement, particularly the State Patrol. We tried to come up with an understanding of how far marchers would be able to go. The Nebraska Law Enforcement understood that there was no intent to create any violence or to destroy any property. They understood, in fact, that the marchers would be training self-marshals. CRS helped, to some extent, in doing that too. AIM has a very effective security staff themselves, so they served as marshals to some extent in controlling their own group. When we actually got to the border and the point at which Nebraska Law Enforcement said, "This is as far as you can go," there were a number of demonstrators who wanted to contest that restriction. They wanted to cross that boundary and be arrested, and some did just that. Other leaders worked very, very hard to draw attention off those marchers, away from that confrontational setting, to avoid actual physical violence. There were police lined up shoulder to shoulder in riot gear and it was like 95, 97 degrees outside. It's not where I would have wanted to be at that particular day! Yet the marchers said they were not leaving until those arrested were returned. CRS tried, but was unable to negotiate an agreement whereby those arrested were released on their own recognizance because these marchers really wanted a court test of their first amendment rights, of where they could go and what they could say there. On the other hand, nobody really wanted violence. Eventually they were released, but they were not returned to the border, where there was still some tension, but they were transported back to Pine Ridge, away from the confrontation site, and released there. We had a debriefing with the law enforcement and march leaders later that day or the next day, and all of them were convinced that, had it not been for the meeting prior to the march, and the understanding that had been reached there the trust that had been built up. I remind you that they were not "best buddies," but there was a trust level established. Had that not been done, this probably would have ended up violently again . So I guess what I am saying, in probably way too many words, is that our primary response to a potentially violent situation is to try to get the key parties together beforehand to avoid that violence. Because once things have gotten out of control, it's difficult to use mediation skills to get it back on track. When you do this kind of preventive work. you can see where there might be actions that are exacerbating the violence, and try to deal with that. I know that the phrase, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" is sort of a cliche and trite, but that really is true. Usually even the people who might be involved in violence don't go out wanting violence. They might want to make a particular statement, and they might want to get arrested, but there are ways of doing that in a controlled manner which gives everyone what they want.

Silke Hansen

Renaldo Rivera

Answer:
Yes, on some occasions that is very much the case and then you'll have an old guard in some of these agencies that's just not equipped either linguistically or by inclination.

Martin Walsh

Answer:
The important thing was that meeting with the president and students. We had met previously with the president and chancellor to discuss what they were going to say. That was important for them to help allay some of those tensions in the sense of what he was going to say or not say.

Angel Alderete

Angel Alderete

Answer:
I can only speak for myself, but generally the agency responded to the police department -- in this case, the LAPD -- to be available to them simply for whatever information that we could provide about potential problem areas. Not as intelligence, but more like letting them know, "we think you ought to do certain things." For example, do not send the troops out to control things, but letting people like our people go out there and try to either calm down the situation by talking to them, or disperse the situation by dealing with the leadership and hope that the leadership would bring the people away from that situation. It's really hard to pinpoint what it was that we did, because it was mostly a seat of the pants kind of thing. You're there because the problem has presented itself. So then you're only dealing with it through your own experience. You can't really program a riot or the aftermath of a riot, so you just go along with those situations. You anticipate some of the things that might happen, based on your experiences having dealt with other riots or other disturbances, but you still have to be very careful. You can't commit yourself to the police department and you can't commit yourself to the community. You're just there to use the process to keep problems from escalating. I can only use my own sense, I didn't see anyone talking about it. We had very little chance to sit down and talk immediately. Most of our meetings were, "Here's what today's assignments are," and you were gone. Probably the most significant thing that I think I did was to be out on the streets and talking both to some of the leadership of the police unit, and to several of the leaders of a given group on a given corner who were raising hell. With police unit leadership, you would ask them, "Give me a chance to talk to these folks before you decide to intercede." The sergeant that I was working with was really good and he said, "Yeah, go ahead. We don't have any problem with that." So I would go out there and talk to these folks and they would crap all over me, but that was okay. As long as they were crapping all over me, it meant that wouldn't crap on the cops, which meant that the cops wouldn't go after them. So I would take the abuse and I would say, "Okay, but what about that? You're using all these angry statements at me, but don't you think that you could do other things to deal with the issue aside from expressing anger, anger, anger?" We just had gripe sessions with these folks. If they got too close, I would fold my arms and I'd start talking to them and as I would talk, I would take steps -- very, very small steps -- forward, and what I was actually doing by moving forward was moving the group back. So I'm talking to a group of maybe about twelve to fifteen people with maybe a couple of leaders, and they're riling up the the people in the group behind them.

Edward Howden

Answer:
Sometimes. I was usually able to moderate the situation without any heavy handedness. Once in a while a certain decisiveness, maybe even standing up and speaking very loudly, was necessary. That was rare, but I can recall a couple of occasions where that, in my judgment, became necessary. One was a business mediation, which was kind of unusual for us to do, but a minority sub-contractor was one of the parties on a big housing development that had been ninety-seven percent completed. It was a middle income development, and there was an impasse between this sub-contractor who had some minor finishing work to do and the general contractor who was not minority. They had some bad blood on various things, various past hassles, and now they were right at impasse. As I recall, somebody from HUD called us. HUD was involved in some aspects of the financing and everybody wanted to see the project finished since housing was a desperate need. The attorneys for the two parties actually were willing to have us give them a hand. One of the attorneys handled arrangements and they were willing to move fast, like tomorrow. I had no chance to study the issue. They were so anxious to get to it, I think it was the attorney for the minority sub-contractor, that he arranged the meeting room in a major hotel-- normally I would be doing that. Anyhow, we got into that session quickly. The minority sub-contractor, the main person, didn't have a bonding capacity or something, he had some kind of a problem financially, and he had brought in this guy from New York to help him. We went through the regular opening routine and I explained to these folks, "look, you all understand that I'm not expert in the contracting business and I've had no chance to study up on this as there's been no time. You're in a hurry, so you're going to have to educate me as we go along, and I may have a lot of questions." They agreed, and we got going. We got fairly well into it but then an impasse developed and people got angry. A gentleman representing the minority sub-contractor who was six foot three and big strong guy, said angrily, "I'm not going to take any more of this, you know," and accused the general contractor of insulting him. "I'm not going to take any of this, this is a waste of time" and he stood up to walk out. So I'm at the end of the table and I stood up and said, "Dammit, Mr..., you agreed to the approach we were going to take to this, and we are following that approach and I think we can make it, so please sit down." He paused a moment, and then he sat down. And we got on with it. By the end of the day we had a deal. As a matter of fact, Mr... was so happy with the deal, he invited everybody down to a bar at this famous hotel and bought us a round of drinks. There was one other intra-tribal scene where a lot of folks were present and it was just not feasible to limit it to a four or five member team. Actually there were several teams from either side. There was a clan or family grouping, with history behind it, that was very unhappy for maybe a couple of generations. Some of the other members of the band insisted on being present. It wasn't public with press, but there was quite a crowd, and that got messy. People were standing up shouting, and it became pretty difficult to have any orderly process. After a time trying to keep it on track, I asked for a recess and spoke with some of the folks. I explained that we had agreed in advance who the people were who were going to handle this, and I told them that we were not going to be able to pull it off if it continued like it was going. "I don't want to tell anybody to go home, I can't tell anybody to go home," I said, " but how about we convene the original group in such and such a room." So we proceeded on that basis. But that was one case where it was it couldn't have gone anywhere on the basis on which it had started. In situations with high tensions, from time to time there would be individuals who would explode or get close to exploding, but usually we didn't have anything fall apart when that happened. We were able to have our recess and to caucus and get back on track.

Efrain Martinez

Manuel Salinas

Answer:
Initially, of course, when we first brought them together, they were hostile. We took a break after they aired off. I suggested we take a break, and then we'd come back together that afternoon. While we took a break, I talked to the group, and I said "in order to find a solution to some of these problem areas, we're going to have to go back to the table with the department and have more of a dialogue in specific areas of your concern. I realize that you're angry about this, but there has to be more specific information, so that the police department can more accurately respond to some of your concerns." So they did. They agreed they would come back. In the meantime, what they had done already, is identified some people at the university who could come in and help. The university people came in and they had cooler heads and a better understanding of what has to happen, and I think that helped lead them to sit across the table with the department and try to work out some kind of solution. And it wasn't that there were a lot of items that they wanted to discuss. It was just that the police department had to somehow respond to the Hispanic community, or patrol the Hispanic community in a more fair manner, rather than in a picky way. The Hispanics felt that the police began to pick at their side of town. For example they would stop a car because it was suspicious, or stop a car because a light wasn't working, or stop a car for whatever. That was part of what I felt was picking on that area, which then led to more hostility. So that's why I thought it was so important. But anyway, to get back to your question, once they came back, they were more ready to work with the department and the department was more ready to talk to them. I also met with the department earlier and said "this is what I'm going to do while we take a break," and they said "that's fine." The department was really ready. They were ready to say they goofed up, they wanted to know what can they do to remedy the situation. They wanted us to help them find a solution to that.

Ozell Sutton

Answer:
Yes, you tell them that, but you do it strategically. You explain to the chief that the marchers are policing themselves. They've got marshals to police themselves. They don't need you to police them, yet you are close enough, if something occurs, that you can get there in seconds. Your purpose would be better served if you were back out of sight. That's the way that you reduce tension.

Will Reed

Answer:
A lot of times you do. A lot of times you want to have one side overcome their hostility or let it all hang out and then sometimes, it hangs out no matter who is there. You just have to be cool and let them talk; don't go in there and try to shut them up. Usually if you don't say anything, someone from their group will quiet the loud individual and that's more effective than if you do it yourself. When somebody's up there and they have the floor, the best thing you can do is let them speak. Most people, unless they have some real problem, will accept that you are a mediator.

Will Reed

Answer:
Well, it depends on if somebody's threatening violence, and generally you can tell when that is going to happen. I remember one time in Oklahoma, the white establishment business council, came in and put their guns on the table in front of the council and the sheriff. How were we going to deal with that, because the sheriff wouldn't tell them to remove their guns." So, before things got started, I just got vehement. I didn't know if it was going to work; I suppose if they had said, "Shut up and get your black butt out of here," I would have left, but they didn't. I got up and I said, "Hold it! None of this!" I put on my best act like I was mad, my eyes got big as saucers. I was scared of them, but they didn't know I was scared. I was really scaring them! They said, "Oh. Yes sir. Yes sir." Boy, they went back out to their pick up trucks and got rid of those weapons. The minorities in this situation were Hispanics instead of Indian. That was the only time I ever saw anybody put their firearms on the table.

Will Reed

Will Reed

Answer:
Put it this way. That was one of my methods of operation that I went out for. Even though I was attempting to mediate something, I had an agenda myself. And one aspect of that agenda was to try to develop mechanisms, or suggest developing a mechanism within the mediation sessions that will speak to the issue of communication, keeping channels open at all times. And how are you going to do that when you start talking about police brutality? You want to look at doing that. When you start taking about better compliance with city laws or ordinances. When you want to start talking about better garbage collection in a minority community or anyplace else, what better mechanism could you have, or what better organization could you have where police, social workers, school officials and others are coming together with minority leadership once a month instead of letting a crisis develop? To answer your question about the proof that that trust level had been developed was that in some cases, the minority community, and in this case, the Indian community, elected someone they supported to be president of that organization. He served for about five or six years. Then somebody else served. But the idea was that this was ongoing. Here's a communication mechanism that remained open all of these years and it couldn't help but to serve to diffuse tensions as they existed throughout the country. It's the same way in Bingham's Hispanic community. It's the same way. These things came over a pretty long period of time. It took a while to discover how we could come up with something so that CRS didn't have to be back in this town every few weeks. What can you do to help? So instead of allowing somebody to use you as their flunky or something, you come up with a mechanism and in time you facilitated the scene. And if anybody else wanted to be the facilitator, then they'll be a facilitator.

Dick Salem

Answer:
When we entered, tensions were exceedingly high. I could observe no level of trust whatsoever. The game for inmates was to taunt the corrections officers, who didn't want to be there in the first place, but had to be there because that was their job. Many of the inmates didn't resent every counselor, but they wanted to make life for most of them as unhappy as they could, and they were masters in brinkmanship. There was no trust at those levels, and between inmates there was no trust between groups. During the course of mediation, when people were talking and began listening, tensions were eased. Within the reformatory, the parties at the table had to learn to know each other a little better. There was some transformation as they listened and there was credibility to what was being said. Everybody has certain basic needs including being acknowledged and understood. Those instances that I cited, with the salsa and the hairnet, guards and administrators came to see that the inmates were bright, at times eloquent. The inmates got a sense and understanding of why the place was run the way it was. Some of it was unforgivably sloppy and poor. But there were reasons why there had to be twice as many guards on a given hour, during the head count, and there were reasons why there wasn't more visiting space. So they were able to understand each other's problems and that eased tensions.

Dick Salem

Answer:
He would not meet with them because they hadn’t made an appointment. It was one of those things where "If you want to meet, just make an appointment, but don’t just show up.” Or "We have this under control, there is no need for a meeting.” The main job of CRS was to get him to meet with them. Not to carry the message of what was happening, but to get the president to sit down with the parents, hear them out and give them a response. That was the appropriate role for us. When the president told us he was too busy to meet, C.J. said, "I only need five minutes of your time,” and that five minutes was spent convincing him and trying to help him understand the necessity of meeting with the parents.

Dick Salem

Answer:
I would let them talk and do a lot of listening. Sometimes counsel parties if somebody got very angry. Sometimes you would say something like "I can’t tell anybody what to say, or how to behave, but I just want to emphasize that when we use certain language it makes it difficult to communicate and make progress, so I’ll ask you to just keep that in mind.” That wasn’t often. No, I would never tell anybody how to talk to anybody. It might come up. I think people understood what the ramifications of their behaviors were and they had to play it out when they were together. Usually, by the time you get to the table the anger has been expressed sufficiently so that the level of anger expressed at the table is mitigated a bit.

Dick Salem

Answer:
I would let them talk and do a lot of listening. Sometimes counsel parties if somebody got very angry. Sometimes you would say something like "I can’t tell anybody what to say, or how to behave, but I just want to emphasize that when we use certain language it makes it difficult to communicate and make progress, so I’ll ask you to just keep that in mind.” That wasn’t often. No, I would never tell anybody how to talk to anybody. It might come up. I think people understood what the ramifications of their behaviors were and they had to play it out when they were together. Usually, by the time you get to the table the anger has been expressed sufficiently so that the level of anger expressed at the table is mitigated a bit.

Dick Salem

Answer:
You get people talking and hoping that they see some light at the end of the tunnel. Most people don’t want to be in violent situations because someone can get hurt, including them. Most people are looking for ways out and they use the potential of violence to bring it to the brink and they hope they don’t have to jump.

Dick Salem

Answer:
You mean when we did annual assessments of racial tensions in certain communities. I think this was probably a political ploy originally, where a frightened Republican administrator probably turned to the director of CRS and said, "Where’s racial violence going to break out?" We'd then come back with a report that said what’s needed here are more jobs, or more money from the Labor Department to take care of this problem. We would do an assessment, I’d call my staff together and we’d look at the region and the areas we should cover. The staff knew the region and would conduct the assessments. That doesn’t mean that because tensions were high over a public housing issue in Chicago that we were working on that case. Sometimes the staff would build it up to alert Washington how bad things were in the Chicago low income community that relies on public housing. We could never really predict what was going to happen. We could just say tensions are high, people are worried about a potential for violence.

Nancy Ferrell

Answer:
I pay attention to the setting. How people are arranged in the room, whether they're sitting close to each other, if they're really hostile toward each other. I may intentionally put myself between them. Have enough room between them so that they're not going to feel threatened by one another. I remind them in a private meeting, they may not want to embarrass anybody, think of what it's going to cost. If you continue in this direction we're not going to move toward productive resolution. But if you feel that strongly, that may not be an appropriate response. I think that always needs to be restated when emotions are really high. Not to try to push them on, but to give them an out. If you feel that strongly, this may not be the appropriate avenue. You may need to take legal action. You may need to use another option. Most times they'll come back from that and say, "No. I really want to try to do this. Maybe we need to meet another day. Get some more information." A lot of that I've dealt with in private groups where they've been allowed to really vent as much as they want and then I begin to test some of that. This is not a community example, but it's a clear example. Some of the community people believed that this municipality and the business leadership intentionally kept the gas prices in their community high, because those establishment people could all go outside the community to get gasoline. The community was pretty much confined to the community to buy gas and their gasoline prices were higher. I traveled from there and out of there all the time, and the reality was that the prices were cheaper in town, then they were out of town. But to say that to them immediately, is not helpful. But as they gained trust venting, I began to test some of that and say, "Okay, have you checked some of that out?" So next meeting they come back with better information. I had one situation where the community just swore that if you were arrested and a minority, when you were taken to jail you would be beaten, no questions asked. I shared this with the chief and the staff, his administrators. They were just horrified. One of the deputies said, "we haven't beaten anybody for twenty years!" I said, "Well, they remember." He couldn't believe that the community still carried that perception. I didn't even tell him as I remember, he had the courage to go ask. He was really horrified that people would say that. He had the courage to ask the prisoners that he had right then, "what did you think was going to happen when you got here?" They said, "we expected to be beaten." He then had the courage to come back to our group and say that. That's what they thought, that's what they believed. I said, "That's the power of history. People carry any incident with them, until there's intentional effort to change that history." You know you haven't done that for twenty years, but there's been no intentional effort to say to the community, "that's not who we are anymore." Those were examples of where you deal with some of the reality checking ahead of time, so you begin to break down some of the myth. You break down as many of the myths as possible, so that by the time you get to the table, there's some basis for discussions. If all of these myths are true, then you don't have much relationship to deal with. If you can see that some of those myths don't have a reality base, then you begin to think maybe there are some things we can talk about. If that wasn't true, maybe we were misunderstood.

Silke Hansen

Silke Hansen

Angel Alderete

Manuel Salinas

Answer:
I think the beginning to turn that around is when we chaired that first hostile meeting. They saw us working impartially or working with the chief to try to, number one, control the meeting. Also, I tried to identify the people I had met by name. I had met only three or four, but if I knew someone, I'd say "Bill why don't you speak now," or something like that. That began to build that slight trust. Remember, the people didn't know us then at all, except for the small group I'd met with. Then, of course, when they set up a meeting I was present. I was at practically all the meetings that followed thereafter. So I met with them constantly One of the other issues was that there were funerals going on in the meantime. The police were saying, "How are we going to handle this situation?" They were afraid that the community might get all upset during or after the funeral and trouble would start again. So I met with the police chief and assured him that the group was going to be cooperative, but they needed a permit. And I asked if he'd have police officers located at some distant points, and also asked that a police officer come in in advance to talk to the group to say "I'm the one you contact in case there's any problems." I wanted them to know someone in the police department directly. I forget who the chief selected, but he was a redheaded guy, and really nice individual. Had good character for the funeral purposes. So in case something happened during the funeral, they would get a hold of him. The chief also identified the officers that could work with the community to go to the funeral. The community met with the officer-- it was five people still--so they would know what the officers were going to do. The church was almost downtown, in fact it was close to the police department. So that's the kind of thing we did. He helped establish communication, to gradually build trust. After awhile, I almost felt like I was part of El Comite, a member myself. Which I was not, but they almost begin to treat you that way.