Did you take continuing responsibility for its implementation?

Wallace Warfield

Answer:
Yeah, right. Do it right the second time.

Renaldo Rivera

Answer:
For example, people need to have ways to assess, communicate with, get input from communities and collaborate with communities. This can mean they might need police advisory committees or structures, some relationships to local Church groups, youth groups, etc., that can provide assistance and a ready source if a crisis comes up. It creates a ready source of individuals that they can go to penetrate a community, to help reduce the tension right away. For example, a structure is a police advisory committee. Sometimes they might have a human relations commission or council in the town or the county, so that might be something that's useful for screening complaints so that there's some redress capability through local ordinances in the future. This then gives people some positive channels through which to put their anger prior to things getting completely out of hand. You might suggest community relations councils if they don't exist already. Sometimes you may provide additional training for human relations councils or offer to sit in on several police advisory committee meetings if they already exist so that you can take a look at how things are currently operating and make suggestions to both sides on how they might want to improve it around the current set of controversies they're having. Sometimes mayors or municipal officials may not have broader arrays of outreach relationships to affect their communities. Particularly with demographics of change. So, you may talk with them about how they would go about creating such a vehicle or a structure because sometimes they don't know how, they haven't thought it through. And what the appropriate groups are, because youth are most frequently left out, for hate crimes, for violence reduction, for prejudice reduction, and meanwhile it's the most effective group. Both between long term activity and loosely organized, spontaneous activity, it tends to be in young people, high school and early 20's, and they're doing those actions on people in high school and their early 20's. That's the grouping that often times is disconnected from any of the commissions in town, or the advisory councils or advisory committees or human relations committees. So, those are two types. Another one is promoting community forums and dialogues. That's another kind of vehicle and structure that we talk about. Sometimes they pick the form of town meetings, but sometimes there are just forums and dialogues and we try to assist people, if it's useful for them, to create this kind of forum or vehicle where they can get some public airing of these things and come out with some recommendations for future actions. If asked, we'll sit and facilitate those with them, because sometimes that's helpful to them.

Angel Alderete

Leo Cardenas

Answer:
Lack of resources and, of course, staff.

Bob Ensley

Efrain Martinez

Answer:
The negotiators set up a monitoring committee of law enforcement and community representatives. The people and the police negotiate it as a deal and agree to meet three or four times a year, or at the end of four months. They will sit down and review all that was planned and see if it has been done. Most likely it will have been done because we only talked about what's doable. What happened in all this is the people are now talking directly to the chief. They see that officers are not sprouting horns like everyone painted them to be. They're not devils. We're all people here. The other day in this big town, there was a mediation meeting with police command staff, and I asked them to tell about themselves. Why did they get into law enforcement? How long have they been with the department? One sergeant, who's an assistant to the command person, said, "Look, I've got relatives, and they're all like you. I'm the one that's a police officer, but they're not. They face the same problems you face when you're out there." So the people there got to see this person as a human being that has relatives just like they do. Comfort and lack of intimidation are very important. For the next meeting, all the police were not going to have uniforms. But everybody knows each other now, and we've reached that level. Now we're very much into negotiating what's going to be done. Who's going to do it and by when? So the monitoring committee, at the end, assures that it's continual. Another town I worked with went through this process. At the end, the mayor wanted to have a press conference in City Hall, and the mayor signed it, the chief signed it, the city manager signed it, as well as the community representative. They all agreed to a monitoring committee that was going to meet three or four times a year for two years. However, they then agreed to make that monitoring committee permanent. Then it became the conduit for issues, human beings are human beings, we've been dealing with conflict since Cain and Abel hit each other or something. That's a long time ago.

Dick Salem

Answer:
Typically not, but we would stick with school desegregation cases for a long time. What would happen is when a federal judge was considering issuing a school desegregation order, we would visit the judge, explain what our agency was doing, and what role we might serve. Some said, "Thank you, we'll call you if we need you," and other judges would write us into the order as a resource to the parties. Some orders were general; others gave us very specific tasks. These orders gave us license to work with the parties, monitor developments and keep the judge appraised of what was happening.

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

Question:
Did you plan for that follow up? Was that standard?

Manuel Salinas

Answer:
Yeah, I continued to go to the meetings. I didn't drop it off immediately, whenever I could I attended, so most of the time I was there. They didn't hold them that often. As they began to get results, the meetings began to wind down a bit.

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.