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Did you do any organizational assessment or evaluations?
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Bob
Hughes
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Did you always have a plan before you went on-site, or did you develop a plan or a goal
after you arrived on-site?
Answer:
Usually you have a basic plan of assessments that you start with, the people who have the
problem, and confirm what they are concerned about. And that's the beginning of that
assessment, answering those basic questions that I had mentioned. This of course relates to both
conciliation and mediation. Again, you're seeking to identify the issues and who the party's are,
and what would it take to resolve the issues in their eyes. And getting that, you formulate your
own conclusions and your own strategy, and then ultimately your
recommendations.
Manuel Salinas
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
I think the chief himself
felt that they hadn't had a
self audit among themselves and most departments don't, and here's somebody that can do this
for us that will help us in the long run, we think.
Question:
Were you personally involved at all in the assessment process?
Answer:
No, we weren't. This was all done outside.
Question:
How did you determine who would be best to do that?
Answer:
Through word-of-mouth communications with other departments. We knew that the San
Jose
chief of police was an extremely good individual. He brought along another party, and then we
had a CRS consultant we had worked with before that had done some assessments for police
departments, so we brought him in. Then the other two were from Denver, not the Denver police
department, but from the suburbs of Denver.
Question:
And were the locals, either el Comite or the local police involved at all in deciding who
these
people would be?
Answer:
No. They accepted our decisions, since we were paying for it. I think that's why they
accepted it. And, you know, chiefs of police talk with one another all over the country, so they
know what's going on. So when we named that fellow from San Jose, I'm sure the chief of
police here knew of him, and was more than willing to accept him as one of the team, and
knowing him, even without knowing the others, it closed the deal.
Question:
The assessment took how long?
Answer:
I think it took pretty close to three weeks. The time they came in, the orientation, and then
they began and then they finished it off and then the report came back in.
Question:
What kinds of things were they looking at?
Answer:
I think they were looking at police structure, chain of command,
also the chain of command pointed out who was in charge that evening, and the person in charge
that evening should not have been in charge because he didn't hold rank. Also what type of
training they had received, how long their training has been, what is the relationship between the
department and the city managers? Are they in conflict or not, what's going on? Especially
what type of human relations training the officers were receiving after their police academy
training. Because all the recruits for the department go through the Colorado State Police
Academy. So they wanted to know what has followed up since the academy training. Also the
size of the department, should it be larger or smaller? They also looked at turnover. Were too
many officers leaving, and coming in and so on? If that's the case, why, so they look at all these
little problem areas that the department has, and see if it's happening too often or if it's pretty
stable. That gives them an idea of maybe why these things do occur.
Question:
Then they share this information with the community?
Answer:
Yes.
Question:
With the chief first?
Answer:
El Comite, the chief and city manager at the same time. And the community.
Question:
The community in a public meeting, or was it a meeting of El Comite?
Answer:
With El Comite. They came into city council chambers, and they went over it. El Comite
accepted it because the report said that they needed more Chicano officers. They were lacking
the Chicano officers. They felt that perhaps more Chicano officers would be helpful. Also
because there are some people that don't speak English, they're trying to find some bilingual
officers. In this area, you won't find bilingual officers. You'll find people almost like myself,
you speak so long you forget your own tongue. You kind of have to search and look for
bilingual people.
So that was one of their main concerns, as was human relations training. What are you training
the officers, how do they know how to treat us, and why don't they treat us better? What is
going on? So those are the things they really focused on. As far as command was concerned,
they weren't too much interested in that. But they were interested in the human relations, and
recruitment of officers.
Question:
Does El Comite and/ or CRS have a say in what the structure of the assessment was going to
be, what questions were going to be asked, or was that pretty much determined by the people
who were doing the assessment?
Answer:
The people who were doing the assessment. What probably was helpful though, that person
we had used before, the one person who did police assessments, I'm sure that he knew what to
look for or how to lead the committee into those areas that might be helpful to the community vs.
some other areas that might not be helpful.
Ozell
Sutton
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Coming out of Memphis, we had Lee Brown, who was a
consultant for us, and a gentleman from the University of New York in Buffalo, come to
Memphis to do a finding on the relationship between the black community and the police.
Their job was to document exactly what occurs and what happens to complaints -- when they
were made, everything that followed. Then I took that report, and conducted a two-day
symposium on the findings of the report and what needed to be done. The
mayor attended, the chief of police attended, the high-ranking police officers attended. We had
a hundred people. And the Memphis leadership, the president of the NAACP, and we went
through that report. Even those whites who expressed no concern, who saw all of this protest
as unfounded, when they started to go through that report, they were astounded at the level of
disrespect blacks had experienced. Just the whole body of action that occurred against blacks,
or the lack of consideration they got, even when they filed a complaint. We had cases where
people testified that they filed a complaint of police brutality, and that's when things really
started. "Every time I pulled out of my driveway," they'd say, "I was stopped for something,
and then I was verbally abused even if I was not physically abused." We just ran into all kinds
of things.
Question:
And so the recommendations of the report were implemented?
Answer:
It moved things further along. But as long as there are races and attitudes, you have
problems. You can come up with so many ways to curtail those attitudes, but the attitudes
don't change. Christ has been trying to get us to love one another for two thousand years, but
we still don't. When the police officer, every time there is a striking, knows there will be a full
report and full investigation of that. I'm just talking about black citizens, anytime police find
it necessary to strike a person, a citizen, then there ought to be a unit that does not want to be
doing that. Quite often you cannot expect police to police themselves.
| Efrain Martinez
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
I was able to
get the four police
agencies together, and I brought the demands paper the community had put
forth, and they looked at that. We helped them analyze number
one, number two, number three. The head of one of the agencies
said, "I'll take the rap for closing the festival. I didn't do it, but for the sake of
resolving this I'll say I did it." We found also that the police
association had insurance that covered all liabilities and
damages so they wouldn't pay anything. Now, as for the
apology wanted from the state police, they said, "No, they're
not going to apologize for something they didn't do, it was a riot
and it met the state criteria for a riot. So, they took actions
based on the criteria for a riot and stopped it."
I then met with the community group,
and they came back with their response, but I brought
them together again, and I went to the police agencies and got
their response. Finally, I brought both sides together, and I shared the paper
with the attorneys and the lawyer for the community and the
community leaders. They had a female lawyer who was a
veteran of civil rights wars back in the 70's. It was very quiet
as she was reading, and she finally says, "Bullshit!" and throws the paper. She just threw it at
them. I again said that this wasn't written in concrete, there was still room for discussion and
nobody saw it as written in concrete. That is the purpose of coming together,
why don't we talk about number one, and we discussed number one
and we came to an agreement, and so on. The part of the apology
worked out real nice because at the end of the sentence where it
said no apology was necessary because they did not violate
anybody's rights. We added the word "however", and added that if some people thought
their rights were violated, then an apology is extended. So it
could be read both ways.
Efrain Martinez
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Question:
Where did these sixteen points come from, were they just bullets
that
you put down?
Answer:
Yeah. What they said they were
going to do. They came out of the agreement. We got there a
different kind of way, but everybody was satisfied.
Question:
And you had no idea you were writing an agreement when you were
taking notes?
Answer:
No, just notes. I always take notes.
Efrain Martinez
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Every time
we enter a situation we change the equation let's say. What we
try to do is have it change positively. But if it seems like it's a
negative change, they need to let me know because I don't want to
be doing that. I have too much work already, I don't need to be
there if I don't have to. If you think I can do some good and
you think we can work together and I can help you work to get
there, well then I'll continue. But if you don't think so, let
me know because there are other communities out that have been
begging me forever to come over there and help them out.
Manuel Salinas
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Ultimately, they finally agreed that the department needed to better
understand how to handle a riotous conditions. They felt that there was excessive force, and
the police tried to justify why they did it. Those were the problems that were surfacing, and
the friction was going on.
So, ultimately we decided that we did do a partial assessment. We did it, it was just a matter of
talking to the chief, some of the command officers, the community, and within that we made
an assessment of what the problem was, in a little more accurate, rather than emotional way.
The outcome was, finally, that they felt that the university could
carry on a training program for the police department. So the community contacted a Hispanic
professor at the university, and he put a program together on human relations and they then
presented that to the police department. And the police department, after review, accepted
that.
In the meantime we brought in also some consultants to assist in the training. So the
university, and I think there were two people from our department that assisted too. We
provided ongoing training for the police department over a period of six month's time. That's
all we were able to do. The community was happy with that because they were involved in the
development of the training. They thought that was something very worthwhile.
Will Reed
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Whatever the conflict might
have been, you
looked at it and then you assessed it. You made an assessment of the situation. An assessment is
simply a rule of thumb, more or less, where you go in and try to identify what the conflict is
about, what the
issues are, and who's been hurt. Have there been any injuries, any violence, anything like that,
the
important stuff to the overall community? You kind of evaluate it or analyze it. What level of
tension is
this? Is there a high degree of tension? Are people pulling guns on each other, or are they
speaking low
and whispering?
Question:
And how were you able to get that information?
Answer:
Observation, experience, training.....you had training in this agency. We spent a lot of time
going
through tactics and strategies and so forth. You learned how to do that, and your experience
helped you
too, so that you could just look at the situation and determine, "Hey, this is something that's
really heavy.
This is something that we really have got to become involved in." So you shared that
information with your
colleagues and others to determine whether or not you should be involved.
Question:
Was there a minimum or maximum number of cases you could be involved in? Did you
gauge them
or was it a little bit more free for all, where you were able to use your own judgment?
Answer:
We basically used our own judgment all the time. When we were on-site, in the midst of
things, it had
to be your judgment and then you would report back to certain coordinators or supervisors or
directors,
as to what your observations might have been. And then once you did that, you came back and
tried to
discuss a strategy or plan for how you were going to approach this situation to try to, number
one: diffuse
the tension, and number two: see if you could get everybody to talk, come together. If you could
not do
that, you went back and discussed, and identified a number of resources that you were going to
need to
get certain things done. And so after you did that, you charged off into the woods.
| Leo Cardenas
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Clearly, we
had to work the ethnicity out
of it first, then the stature of the organization, how long they'd been in existence, because they
were non-profit and volunteer groups. We were also interested in the type of leadership that they
brought to the table.
Question:
You just said something very interesting, "You had to work the
ethnicity out of it." How do you do that?
Answer:
Very carefully. First of all, by trying to bring equity to the table in
terms of numbers -- numbers of the organizations. And one of the things that happened here and
it happened in other cities, is bringing back to the table individuals who did not currently have a
title with the organization, but had held a title before and were highly respected. We asked them
to
come to the table and be sort of senior, elder spokespeople and bring unity, and that
worked very well.
Question:
Did you try to get equal numbers of each race, or did you try to do something
proportionately?
Answer:
I think proportionate to the organizations who actually signed to be members of the
coalition.
Question:
And this was open to anybody who wanted to be included?
Answer:
Correct.
Leo Cardenas
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
It's part of the process that we sometimes initiate. We want them
to
begin to feel that we're an extension of their dispute and that there is going to be an end to this
dispute that would be satisfactory. When we begin, very early on, we'll begin to talk about the
win-win situation. It won't mean much to them initially, but we'll talk about it anyway. And
we'll plant a seed about that. That's our own scope also. "Remember that when we were here,
we were talking about a win-win situation?" We wouldn't define it, but we were talking about
the fact that the only way we could be of any help was if it was a win-win situation.
Question:
What happens if you look at the
assessment and you can't come up with the win-win; it really looks like a win-lose? What do you
do?
Answer:
Generally, we'll try to exit ourselves as politely as we can. If a mediator has been on the
scene, a mediator's reputation is at stake, so he'll come to me as the regional director, and then I
will make the call. I'll say to the school superintendent and to the leadership, "Based on our
assessment, and our workload," I'll even use that, "It'll be awhile before we can get back into
your community."
Question:
What were some of those red flags that you looked at to determine whether or not it would
be a win-win or a win-lose situation? What were some of the flags that came up?
Answer:
Different, so-called hidden agendas. Even though they put some disputes on paper and back
it up with words, they often have something else at stake. Typical of that is a leader wanting a
job.
Question:
Wanting a job?
Answer:
Wanting a job. Eventually we find out that there have been interviews and that individual is
up for it. Sometimes they will tell us that, but the focus of that leader is that particular job. The
other one that's very common is the fact that they want to fire somebody. Flat out, I'll say,
"We're not the school board, we're not the school superintendent. If
the principal goes or stays we have nothing to say. You do, because you're in the community,
you're a parent, or a community leader, a community organization. But we have nothing to do
with that. And that's not an issue we're going to accept."
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