Before terminating a case, did you help the parties develop a contingency plan to help prevent a recurrence of the conflict?

Dick Salem

Answer:
I don’t know for sure. I am sure it does in some places. That’s why I suggest we try to get a grant to look at some of that. I mean I could think of some good things that have happened, where you have a police-community conflict, where you get a significant level of response from the establishment, from the mayor’s office basically, and police commissioner, depending on the structure, and the aggrieved community. Then you come together and you set up some mechanisms to address the issues. People exchange phone numbers so that anybody can contact anybody in an emergency, so when there’s a problem you can get to the leadership on the streets. Whether it’s the police leadership or the community leadership. You have monthly meetings of the leadership to discuss issues. You have improved training, you review the police firearms policy and you make changes in it. You do human rights training, human relations for whatever that’s worth sometimes it’s worth a lot, sometimes less. You build this into the orientation for new police officers. You address personnel complaints about assignments, hiring, and promotions. So these things would be written in. You come up with an agreement with half a dozen components to it, whether it was formal or informal mediation. You’ve involved the business leadership, perhaps, or other socially concerned business leaders, civic leaders, the black community, the white community, whoever the parties are. I don’t know how enduring those have been in places over the years. It takes some enlightenment.

Nancy Ferrell

Answer:
I was the facilitator. They each had an opportunity to express their opinions about what we needed to be dealing with, as far as bringing the issues out to the table, and then validating that with everybody, because we couldn't deal with everything. Prioritizing those issues and building a consensus around the table about what issues we were going to deal with, so from the very beginning I was teaching them what I do. The next time an issue came up, they had been through the process and I had basically facilitated, but coached and modeled that behavior as we went along. The main thing is keeping the environment safe for everybody, so that nobody was diminished and that was always one of my ground rules. They were obviously able to create other ground rules that they felt like were important once we validated the issues and began hammering out responses to it. In terms of faculty, one of the responses was that the research division was going to do a statistical analysis of grading practices and that was going to become a matter of record. There was an ongoing task force that established its membership. They identified how the members would be selected each time, and how complaints would be channeled into that. For example one of the biggest concerns the students had was, "I'm the only minority student in that classroom, how can I possibly file a complaint that my teacher has control of my grades?" So they built in some safeguards for them. The same thing went for any kind of complaint in housing. Building in safeguards, we developed a brochure about race relations and anti-discrimination policy and procedure on campus. The fraternal system was looked at and the whole process for evaluating their documents that they have to have on campus, organizing documents or whatever they have. A process was put into place to review and look at that for complaints and charters. There were some specific steps for the student government to bring in minorities into representation under the student government. More multi-ethnic activities were generated out of that.

Nancy Ferrell

Answer:
We did that a lot. Hate crime task force. We did it in Oklahoma as a state initiative. They didn't have a hate crime law. There was a task force made up of community and city and legislative leaders, and we put together a policy statement and handbook that went out across the state. It stated that Oklahoma will not tolerate hate crime. That was one of our pro-active things. It's as if the more light you shine on something, the hate can't grow. Hate grows in darkness and the more you put the floodlights out and say, "This is not acceptable," the more they go underground somewhere else. They grow in an environment where it's dark. That was probably one of the greatest impacts, working with that group and helping them put that together.

Silke Hansen

Answer:
Not really. However, if there are local resources or leaders, we try to help give them some skills and abilities on how to follow up on their agreement. I don't do community organizing training, per se, but we do explore options and alternatives with the parties and identify other resources they can use. But if there isn't already something there, even getting a Vista volunteer would take time and resources that you just don't usually have. I think once there's been some basic agreement, and the communication is there, then you get a change in the relationship between the two parties. There are certainly communities where that was built-onto, and better relationships developed throughout the community, but it doesn't happen in as many communities as we would like especially those of us who have a community organizing background prior to being mediators. I know there have been times that I've gone into a community and sort of wished, "Gee, could I take off my mediator hat for a year and just do some community organizing here, and then come back as a mediator again?" That's because it's much easier to arrange for mediation if there's an organized community and institution, than if there is just a frustrated community with no organizational structure. They can't deal with the institution, and it becomes very easy for the institution to either divide and conquer or just ignore the situation, because the community isn't cohesive enough to really be able to make a difference. Of course, I'm sure that part of the community's frustration in many cases is that they think, "You're from the Justice Department. Why can't you make it better? Why can't you go and tell them what they must do? Why can't you make a difference?" And then when I say, "Well, my job is to try to help you to make that difference," I think they sometimes see that as a cop-out. They think, "If we could do it by ourselves, we wouldn't need you. But we can't, so what are you going to do?" I know that there have been communities which have been frustrated because I have come and nothing's changed. But the reason nothing changed is because there isn't even a core organizational structure to work with. It doesn't need to be hundreds of people, it doesn't even need to be a dozen, but there does need to be a community core that picks this up as an issue and stays with it and works with it. I know it's a lot of work, and it's slow and tedious, but the only way I can really make a difference is if they have that. I explain that, and then I work with that group to help them deal with the institution. That's one of the things we are trying to do now. We're trying to help communities form human relations commissions. Right now that's still at a very grassroots level. John Dulles who is the regional director for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for this region and I have worked cooperatively on a number of cases, particularly in Indian country. But unless there's some support from the tribal structure or the tribal government, it's very difficult to get that off the ground. Even though I personally think that in some ways it would be more effective if it were an even more grassroots initiative, there isn't enough of a grassroots core there willing to do the work, so here we are talking community organizing. "What are the entities that you would want to be a part of that?" I ask. We've conducted workshops on how to establish a core team how to decide who should be included . We have some brochures on how to form human relations commissions and I've developed that into a workbook too. But, we can't do that for the community. They have to do that for themselves. For example, there was one community that formed a small group that just started documenting every case of police abuse. It was a "who, what, when, where, why" kind of thing. They developed a chronicle of what was there. So when they then went to the city council or county commissioner, they had some documentation of what was going on, and not just anecdotal evidence. So we try to encourage at least starting with that piece. But it's difficult to make that happen if they don't see some immediate results. So that's an ongoing struggle.

Stephen Thom

Answer:
All adults, multi-racial. Filipino, Pacific Islander, Latino, African American, and some European American. It was just a variety of people coming together who had participated in these dialogues. What he did was he used the process and said, "I have a big challenge for all of us." Everybody wanted to know what it was. He said, "I'm going to ask you, and I know you're all problem solvers and you've all done the different things in your own school communities, but I'm wondering if you would support a bond issue to improve our school buildings?" That Study Circles group helped to pass the bond issue by 88%. I think it's the seventh highest rated school bond issue passed in the state. That was because CRS and others got people talking and understanding and looking at school issues, but caring for students, not about the bickering between them. They collectively worked on the broader issues of the community, and the best for their children. So that's an example of doing something to really give the institution a mechanism. And they continued to do those Study Circles each year. CRS helped to develop a collaborative that gave that school district a peer mediation capability, developed a curriculum and gave the District a community organization to work with to sustain ongoing training. To try to institutionalize all of this, the collaborative was awarded a grant to have the school assign two liaisons to what it calls peace project. We were able to do this because every school district in California was given money after Columbine. The governor released something like $100 million dollars to all the schools in California and it was based on the number of students you had from 8th to 12th grade. You had a formula. It was something like $44 dollars per student at that grade level. Englewood came into something like $240,000 dollars. The superintendent knew this was going to happen. He said, "Steve, I want you to develop a comprehensive conflict resolution program for me; I think money is coming down." This is right after Columbine. And I said, "Why do you think that?" He said, "Steve, white folks are getting hurt now." I didn't ever think about that, but sure enough the state came down with this money, we had $240,000 dollars and so I gave him a proposal of a program where we did peer mediation, peace builders, anger management, we instituted problem solving in every classroom, and we did Spirit at the high schools and we did community dialogues and we made that as a package program for this whole school district ).

Stephen Thom

Answer:
Sometimes. I usually try to put in a mechanism somewhere. In our cases, when we get an agreement there is a commitment to do training and follow-up. Most of the training that I do is associated with the outcome of a mediation or a remedy to a conflict. That's the reason why I'm doing so much mediation training, Student Problem Identifying and Resolving Issues Together (SPIRIT) training, and consumer relations training -- I did a lot with the Korean swap meets -- good business practices training, anything that is a follow-up to the mediation that gives it more sustaining strength. In most of my mediations I try to aim at what will we end up with that really gives them a long term vehicle, skill or capability to avoid this problem again. Very rarely, in some cases I'll say, "If this arises again call me. I'm certainly available to assist you more." I don't know if I write it into the agreements.

Martin Walsh

Answer:
Yes, we didn't want to have it that we would meet with them every 6 months or every 3 months to have a review, but it would be built into the process. It was something that we like to do, in our terminology, a se1f-enforcement mechanism, a process that we try to develop in the agreements so that there is some accountability system.

Stephen Thom

Answer:
It still is. I've been in that particular school district for several years. The school disturbance took place in 1998 and the Human Relations Commission and I got together and decided that we wanted to see what the senior of 2002 thought about the riot of 1998 when they were freshmen. One of the strategies we use after civil disturbances on campuses is to do an assessment of the juniors and the seniors, and we do that for particular reasons. For one, we want to know what they think was the cause. What did they do while the disturbance was taking place? What should they have done? How could they help? So we do a combination of an assessment and plant seeds to make them partners in restoring calm to the school. That's why we do it with juniors and seniors because we want the older students to be partners with us, to try and put some pressure on some of the younger students to see whether we can defuse tensions. We do that in classrooms. We bring in a team of people so we hit all the juniors and all the seniors to try to see if we can line them up and be partners in trying to quell a school crisis. That's what we did in '98, meaning we didn't really talk to the freshman and sophomores. So we said, we'd better go back and talk to them as seniors and see what their points of view were, because we were so busy trying to squash any element of violence, we really didn't take time to meet with the freshmen. Usually the seniors will blame the freshman anyway, and what we learned from the review was that the seniors were actually challenging the freshman to take to first step, to cause it. And all those kinds of things we learned subsequently. So that's another approach we've used. In Inglewood, we promised the superintendent that we would go back there for the next 5 years to make sure there weren't any more civil disturbances. So we've been on that campus for the last 4 years, and it's gone smoothly.

Angel Alderete

Bob Ensley

Bob Hughes

Answer:
No. No. The Northwest Coalition was involved in urging National Data Collection for some time before it became mandated by Congress. In fact, I'd done that kind of work in Alabama in the 1950's, state-wide.

Bob Hughes

Answer:
There's one conciliation case among the Nez Perce Indians in Northern Idaho and the State Department officials of Idaho. There was one summer where there was a confrontation between the younger travel fisherman who traveled a hundred miles off the reservation to a site near a state hatchery. Anyway, a confrontation had developed and I knew that it was pending. The confrontation had developed as the Indian camp, which was along the side of the river, was invaded by the state department fishers and a forestry specialized team. I won't call it a swat team, but it was a specialized and very mobile team, trained and well-armed of enforcement offices. There were about thirty Native Americans, or tribal members, in the encampment in all. Men, women, and children. About a dozen members of this swat team would make sweeps through the village, looking for illegally caught salmon that was not in season. These sweeps would occur at any hour of the day or night, without warning. The agents would go into teepees and so on. This created a lot of tension. I was there, sort of on the sidelines, because these operations had been set up and planned in Boise, well in advanced of the season, when the fishing opened and the run began. One time, when they made the sweep, the Indians chased them out of the village with clubs, not firearms. But, they were chased up the hill to the road where the truck of the troopers was there to pick them up. This was all on foot. Well, as they approached the truck, the Nez Perce Indians caught up with them and cut them off from accessing the trunk. They had their cars parked in this area, the tribal members did, and they were unlocking the trunks, but not opening them. Several obvious guns were in there and it was clear that they were on the verge of a firefight. The state enforcement officers had shotguns and they began to chamber their weapons. They were almost surrounded and backed up against their truck. The Indians were moving in on them, shouting, with clubs. With the weapons that were obviously there, I felt that when it came down to it, the last resort was that I had to walk over between them and tell them to stop. "Somebody's going to get killed here, and none of us want bloodshed if it can be avoided. Tom, I want you to select one or two persons. And Bill, I want you to select one or two persons with you, and in two hours from now, I want you to meet me over at my motel. We're going to work out an alternative to settling this thing. In the meantime, you have your people turn around and go back that way, and you have your men get in that truck and go back to your camp." And it worked. A couple of hours later that evening, we worked out an agreement that would establish a process that they were willing to follow in establishing communication and in inspecting the camp. They were calling it a sweep, but it was "inspecting the camp" for these purposes. "It will be done at these reasonable hours. And when you approach, you will wait until one of these designated persons comes to meet you and escort you through." And that seemed to defuse the situation. There was a television camera team on-site from Boise, that filmed the confrontation. The governor saw it that night on the evening news, and he sent his legal representative up. There were some state patrolmen involved there, too. Highway patrol. The governor has authority over highway patrol, but not the Commission of Fish and Game. He had no authority over them, but he sent legal council of the state department of law enforcement up by helicopter that night, and it landed in the field out there. There was a big stir and he had the captain in charge of that state patrol unit order them back to the barracks. He did not want the state troopers providing support for the fishery enforcement personnel. The legal council of the tribe, and the legal council for the state department of law enforcement, and the tribal chairman, and I got a group together representing both sides. Together, we realized that we did not know what the law provided and what the law did not provide. We decided to meet at the University of Idaho, at the Law School, and have a conference and invite representatives of other tribes. It would be co-sponsored by the Department of Justice Community Relation Services, Nez Perce tribe, State Department of Idaho, law enforcement of Idaho, and the Law School. We had about a two day conference, Indian Law and Jurisdiction was the title that we gave it. Other tribes sent some people in, because they had similar problems. Not necessarily fishing, but traffic control on the reservation. That was very successful in establishing a collaborative approach. This developed relationships, trust building, and so on. The following year, instead of meeting at the university, we went to Spokane. There's a large convention hotel, and we had 300 or more people attending from all over the Northwest. Some were there from other parts of the country, experts on Indian Law and Jurisdiction, conducting a seminar on fishing and other law enforcement jurisdictions. It was very successful. That all grew out of that. Guys involved in that confrontation jointly sponsored Native American and official agencies. That model was unique in the country. You've had one party or the other holding these conferences at universities while we're here, but not a jointly sponsored, collaborative effort. That was also the model that we used in the Northwest Coalition. Officials and Civil Rights Groups together, making a collaborative program, and forming approaches to those hate issues. The same thing in these Native American fishing issues. Both of them were unique and there had not been that kind of joint collaborative effort in either area previously. Well hey, I didn't realize it was going to get into all of that, but some of these, which may seem to be a little, fairly limited, area of mediation will channel conflict to the table. At the table, we don't have it all here either. "We better involve some other resources and do something." It kept growing and growing until it developed to that scale, and a lot of that seemed to put a cap on a lot of those confrontation issues. The sponsorship in the second of those Indian Law Jurisdiction conferences was very broad, with the Northwest Tribal Law Enforcing Association, the State Department of Law Enforcement, for 2 or 3 states, the Northwest Indian Treaties, the Northwest Indian Tribal Council and so on. They were authorities from all over the country.

Efrain Martinez

Answer:
That's a good question and it would be better. In Houston the triggering crisis was a shooting of an African American youth, a student by a Vietnamese. He claimed he shot in the air as a warning because rowdy kids had come to the store. For safety or security reasons they had a limit of no more than three kids in the store at the same time. A bunch of kids came in and somebody broke the window and he thought he was being shot at so he fired and hit a kid in the leg. The kid was far away, and the community couldn't understand how shooting in the air could hit the kid. There's was picketing and all kinds of things. It would be better to do this on an ongoing basis, and communities setting up a process to do this, and a lot of them have done that. We have a booklet that we come out with, and it offers a lot of ways of doing things. Best practices, what communities are doing that others can be doing. So it's not necessary to have an incident. Hopefully communities can do this before they have an incident, so they won't have any. Anyway I'm very proud of what Jasper has done, they work well together, and they came together in a moment of crisis and I think they may have overcome their problems. They are a very religious community and not facetiously, but kind of the way I put things sometimes with where do you want to be a year from now, and as good Christians, there has to be work done on that. In Jasper, we want to be there, but wishing is not going to get us there, so here's what we need to do together. And that is the plan. From the beginning they were working together, so we kind of just fostered that a continuation of that, and there were some critics as usual, the group still wants to be inclusive, they want to have everybody participating. They've done well. We're going to use them in Washington. They've agreed to go to Washington with us. In fact both the Asian-African-American task force in Houston and the Jasper task force. Plus groups throughout the country. What we kind of do is show America that people can work together and are working together to make it a better America for everybody, and here are examples. You'll be able to talk to them and see them, and they're just people. Police officers, if I can brag about the task force in Houston, were selected by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which is the largest law enforcement agency in the world that deals with bettering policing throughout the world. They got the civil rights award for this year. September first we're going to get an appreciation award from the Houston Police Department. The international meeting is being held in Charlotte and I'll be out there with them. They're great people, police officers going above and beyond the call of duty to work with the communities. These two officers have second jobs, but they still go on and work with the community on their own time. Or on duty or off duty.

Ozell Sutton

Dick Salem

Answer:
I don't know if anybody ever took a complaint. I think the real answer to that came 15 years later where the same procedures were still in place and I asked McCray, "Why did you leave them there?" He said, "Well they worked." Everything that came out of that was their design. I might have suggested some things or pushed some things in certain directions, but I believe that all came right from them.

Dick Salem

Answer:
Depending on the nature of the case, we’d try to set up some structure. For example, one or committees might be set up in the community that would continue in force long after CRS was gone. In the case of a police-community conflict, it might a leadership committee that would meet monthly to keep communications open and to address any alleged violations of agreements that had been reached. CRS was unable to enforce these agreements so we would set up local "enforcement mechanisms” to do that. If someone came back to us, we might re-enter, but usually, if you had success in the case, there was some mechanism locally. I don't mean a formal mediated agreement, it just could be a negotiated agreement that the parties were going to do certain things.

Nancy Ferrell

Answer:
Generally, I would say yes. I can’t remember specifically on that document. We always had the "what if’s," and our agency was a recourse as far as calling us to come in and help interpret and redefine or help the parties begin to implement. The things we did, like the task force, became recognized groups under the president, and reported directly to the president. So they had their own legitimacy and recourse. Any violation fell in under existing policies and procedures. So it wasn’t outside the system. It was just creating this place where people were focused on ethnic relations and discrimination and helping these people who were pretty much isolated get redress. The remedy was available there; it just wasn’t being exercised, because people were afraid to seek remedy.

Silke Hansen

Leo Cardenas

Answer:
Scholarships at universities, in this case, in the state of Colorado. Not only in the state of Colorado, but in the other four cities where McGraw Hill also had television stations. There were also hiring goals over a five-year period. One of the points of agreement was that each of the stations would hire a minority manager that would work as a liaison with the minority community to manage minority programs and air time. At the time, there was a popular show called "Talking Heads" which was a talk show. This show gave minorities experience in the media. Not only before the camera, or before the microphone, but also behind, working the cameras and doing the writing.

Bob Ensley

Answer:
Oh yes, oh yes. We're engaged in that right now, in a study circles project. They are going to re-institute their Human Relations Commission with subpoena power in Washington, North Carolina.

Werner Petterson

Answer:
No, I never did that in CRS.

Werner Petterson

Answer:
CRS has had a lot of different roles and situations. At times we were mediators, at other times we were what the agency termed as providing technical assistance. For a lot of my last few years I was in that role of trying to help communities come up with ways of handling conflicts within communities where there were complaints by the community against the police departments. I became quite involved and pretty successful in setting up Citizen Review Boards. One of the problems that you always faced in CRS was I would describe myself as like the Lone Ranger, you would ride into town, spend a day or six months. A lot of people might say who is that man. You are not really a part of the community. CRS was an agency that was always burdened with problems. You might not be able to be helpful because you didn't have the money to go there, or you had other things to finance. I think one thing that CRS was always concerned about was creating things within the community that would help the community solve its problems. I really got involved in trying to work in communities with citizens, police departments, and political leaders about setting up these police review boards so that the community would have a way of participating. I don't know what the last figure was, but I think almost close to 50% or more then 50% of cases that CRS handled over the years were cases involving minorities and the police department. That was always the number one issue. It far exceeded any other complaints. To help communities to come up with ways of responding to citizen complaints about police beatings was important.