 |
|
Have there been changes in CRS over the years?
|
|
Angel Alderete
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
that you see
things
now as being different than they were in the early days.
Answer:
Different, yeah, but not improving. I'm talking to you about CRS, I'm not talking about "the
process."
I think the process is more sophisticated, certainly. I think that more
people -- that is, community types -- are more aware of rights, where to seek help,
hey, they can even do it themselves. I think corporations are now smart enough to have in their
human resources departments people who can handle these kinds of problems, so that they don't
get beyond the walls. I don't mean because you're going to get criticism. It's so that you don't
have problems with the postal people who come back shooting. They're able to see things that
are happening and maybe they can talk to the chairs of corporations so that they don't get
defensive about that. If you have a problem, get it solved. And if it costs money, how much?
We don't want to pay all these lawsuits because of what we didn't do.
I think that was one of the selling things we would take to
citydom or school superintendents, that what you can do now, keeps you from being criticized,
which is really important to them. Keeps you from having to pay out all these suits after your
lack of attention to the situation. All the days off that your staff may have to take because of
injuries that they might receive, all of the pupil payment that you get for kids who come to
school. They would lose that money because the kids had to stay out of school, the parents
didn't want to send them. Law enforcement being deployed, that's expensive. Insurance
companies taking a second look at you and saying, "Hey, we don't think that you're a good risk."
They're going to raise whatever premium they charge and it just goes on. And it's nothing new
and it's not something that they haven't thought about, but it's something that they see that if
you're aware of it, you're going to make those community folks aware about it
too. So the idea of people getting together to talk about mutual
problems, that's still good. Even though the pressure isn't as pronounced as it was back in the
60s and 70s, it's still there. You've got to get people to understand that you mean business, and
that if you don't do it then something else has to happen. The thing is that you have to have to
define that "something else". You just can't go in there and blow smoke.
Question:
Earlier, when we talked about the changes in CRS, you thought
that from 1986 on,
they sort of got concerned with numbers and media and things like that. Can you tell us how media affected your job while you were at CRS?
Answer:
The media had very little effect on me, personally. I don't think the media had much affect
on CRS as a whole, even though they sought out that kind of thing. I
think in some rare instances, they got in the way because they wanted you to play the case out
through them and you had to say, "No, I don't want to talk to you." You didn't say it that way,
but you told them that you wanted to deal with the people by yourself. Then when it was over,
sometimes,
if they were interested, we would talk to them. But if we talked to them, we'd
have representatives from the parties there to talk about it and introduce themselves.
But the things that we got into weren't that big. They were just local community kinds of things,
so they weren't really that earth-shaking.
Leo Cardenas
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
How have things changed over the
years?
Do you think that the changes in the civil rights movement or the conditions in the cities have
made CRS's job different over the years that you were there?
Answer:
There's certainly recognition today that minorities are full partners in communities. Some by
sheer number, others by the fact that the educational level has been raised, but certainly more
important, by the almighty dollar. There's recognition today, that in terms of numbers,
computers, they can pinpoint how many dollars the minority community generates in terms of
jobs and spending. That is translated now into the public budgets that those services have to be
as equitable as possible. Certainly, we see it in the selection of school superintendents and
police chiefs today that their abilities to communicate to the total community (and the total
community means the minority community today) is what their job depends on. Job descriptions
of any manager, middle or upper, contains performance factors affecting their ability to relate to
the minority community. Those things certainly didn't exist in the seventies. They thought that
they were in full control and that they were hired to be in full control. That's not the case at all
today -- we see it in the tenures today. Probably, two to three years, anybody that lasts, any
superintendent or police chief that lasts anything beyond that becomes suspect as to why they're
not moving anywhere, why they're staying, or if they have a tremendous amount of ability. We
see it within our own communities as our own organizations, non-profit organizations who have
executive director positions through grants, where the executive directors themselves don't last
but two or three years. The communities themselves are now demanding more than they were
before and there's recognition on the part of the leadership that they indeed have to serve this
community.
Werner Petterson
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
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.
Question:
Did you claim that the two time periods that you worked on
CRS were, I can imagine there
was a big jump, a big change from '75 to '97 involving the changing roles of society and civil
rights in the
agency?
Answer:
Oh yeah I started out during the days of demonstrations in the streets and so that's what we
did. We would respond and go to some sort of conflict that was happening in the streets. That's
what we did. We would go into situations and be a presence and reduce the tensions and get
people talking. Then of course, in the process we would also help the local communities build
their own resources. What happened is we would see communities forming human relation
commissions because we had been a part of helping them set that up, and of course they were
better able to handle situations so they didn't escalate up to conflicts on the street. I think the
community shifted away from demonstrating on the street to taking issues into court. I started
spending a lot of time being a mediator in the Federal courts, not so much in the streets anymore,
but in the courts. I started '60/'69, the Federal Government was the way to get things answered
on
civil rights and solutions around those issues really needed to happen at the local level. Then I
started getting involved with trying to set up these review boards so that the local communities
could form solutions. Taking issues to the federal courts might not have yielded much of a
solution. So in this way people themselves saw that they could get things done.
Wallace Warfield
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Question:
Did the changing nature of the Civil
Rights movement play into this at all?
Answer:
Say more about that.
Question:
We’ve heard from some people that back in the ‘60s, everybody was into demonstrating,
and there had to be
more "putting out fires” because there were more fires burning. Now, minority groups have
gotten more sophisticated;
they tend to do it more in court, so that the nature of the work that CRS does is changing......
Answer:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what else to say about that. I think that’s true.
Question:
Okay. Does that mean that there’s not so much of a role for the agency anymore?
Answer:
Well again, it goes to....what kind of identity does CRS want to have? I mean, CRS was, I
thought, incredibly wedded, or was certainly split between competing identities. One identity I
would call the "Wounded Knee” identity, flying into a situation, bullets whizzing over your head.
What did you really do? Well, that was secondary. The main thing was the excitement. You were
in the thick of things, and it was tangible, the fear was tangible, it was exhilarating. Not the kind
of ambiguity from doing some of the more long-term kinds of processes where you can’t see the
outcome. Our field [of Conflict Resolution] is a field where you have to live with ambiguity. If
you can’t live with ambiguity, you have no business being in the CR field. But in that way,
CRS, at the end of the day, could say, "Well, I stopped these two guys from burning down a store
in this community. These other two guys were about to pull out a rifle and shoot across a ridge
and I stopped that....” You could count that; you could measure that. It doesn’t matter whether
or not you could actually see what you did.
The other part of the agency -- and I would think that I was one of the people that made the
transition -- I was never really wedded to the fire-fighting notion to begin with, you know -- and
so many of us, who saw the handwriting on the wall, said, "Those of you who think about CRS in
the Wounded Knee fashion are perpetuating a myth of communities that no longer exist. The
minorities in the communities are becoming more sophisticated than we are. Why do they need
us? They don’t really need us -- you’ve got other groups and other organizations.” By that
time, the field of dispute resolution was becoming more professionalized, as there were
community-based DR centers, the justice centers were coming online, and people were just sort
of nibbling away at the flanks of CRS, I’d say from the mid-’70s on. And, you know, much of
the agency had sort of surrounded itself in this reactive approach, and many of us were saying,
"Listen, things are changing and we’d better change.” But there were people who came out of
that Civil Rights era, who knew protests, in fact were comfortable with that because that’s who
they were. The old militant leadership, who knew nothing but protests in communities, began to
lose out to more sophisticated people who had more skills like the Atlanta-based NAACP, and to
negotiating. Not that the protests still weren’t useful from time to time, but the landscape of
disputing was changing, and the agency had a very difficult time making the transition. From
what I understand, from the few people I stay in touch with, there still is some of that difficulty
there.
Wallace Warfield
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Question:
Do you feel that when you were a
regional director, there was any tension between you and Washington in terms of what was
successful or not?
Answer:
I think, at the time that I was in the regions, there wasn’t that problem because we didn’t
have that pressure on us. We could do whatever we wanted to do at that point. The definitional
pressures and problems emerged with the cutbacks. We had to survive, and the question was,
how do you survive? That’s where the schism really began, Heidi. I think at that point my
argument was that I didn’t see a reason why we had to throw the baby out with the bath water. I
wasn’t convinced that Congress needed the numbers; when I testified before Congress, it was of
our own volition that we shared the number of disputes -- they didn’t ask us about that. And
even when they did, they weren’t terribly interested. What they were more interested in was
whether you could tell them what you did in their individual districts; now that’s what was more
interesting to them politically. The sheer numbers....well, they would just get glassy-eyed. First of
all, you’re talking about numbers -- when I was there, of doing 1060 cases a year, against an
agency like Health and Human Services doing, you know, 40 times that number, whatever it is
they were doing. So, the point being that I was never convinced that Congress was terribly
impressed by the numbers, but we sort of convinced ourselves that we thought they were -- some
people did. When I got to Washington, some of us tried to get the agency to rethink itself, which
was very, very difficult to do.....to look at different kinds of measurements of success, and then
do more to work harder in convincing Congress and the Attorney General’s office that these
were more important things to do. It was an uphill battle......slightly more successful in the Carter
administration, less compelling in the Nixon administration and in the Reagan administration --
they really didn’t care, frankly.
Question:
How does the media play into this? We’ve heard from some
people that, "Oh, we took a very low profile but then that caused us problems when it came time
for refunding.....”
Answer:
I think that, again, it’s a situation of the styles of intervention that were, in fact, necessary
from 1964 up through the classic Civil Rights era. The nature of intervention changed afterwards,
and CRS didn’t, in many cases, keep up with the change. So it made sense, when you were in
Selma, Alabama and white businesspeople would come to you privately and say, "We know this
change has got to be made, we can’t talk about it, but we trust you to do this and that you will
not talk about it,” that CRS would always be very low-key. The problem was that there was less
of a need for that than in the South, and though the conflicts changed, the habit is still there. Now
I hear, through the grapevine, that CRS was significantly involved in the Elian Gonzales situation
in Miami. I could read the newspapers, I could read between the lines and I could see CRS’s
fingerprints with nary a word about CRS.
Question:
No.
Answer:
So Janet Reno, who knows CRS very well – and who is a supporter of CRS, bless her soul –
gets the limelight, but CRS was in there doing stuff. CRS played roles in convincing her how to
intervene in the critical hours of taking Elian back from his relatives. Never got into the papers...
it would have been a wonderful story. But CRS does not know how to tell stories
about itself, for one thing, and the other problem is that CRS people don’t write, by and large.
So even when there are opportunities to write for journals in the way that I wrote the negotiation
article I did a few years ago -- I didn’t mention any particular cities, I simply wrote it from a
composite perspective. It was really about two cities but I didn’t have to use their names. Well,
CRS people could do the same thing, but they’ve gotten themselves into this notion that they
can’t write, and there’s no indication that that’s true. They could write, those of them who
have a bit of a theory perspective, could write that way. I mean, John Chase could write, and can
write.
Dick Salem
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Question:
How did the changing nature of the Civil
Rights Movement affect your work?
Answer:
When I joined the agency in 1968 there weren't many people talking. They were protesting,
they were breaking windows. We were going back and forth between parties in volatile
situations, such as a protest where the law was being violated because somebody didn't have a
permit and yet they were going to march down the street and what not. We were helping mitigate
tensions and do things that would help minimize the likelihood of violence. Explaining to people
what was happening to one party, why the other was this way. It was important to meet together,
and getting them to meet was a big thing - just opening communications.
After a while, the dynamic changed and people started talking. There was greater verbal
communication across tables rather than through protests, marches, and violence. That was the
time when we learned the skills of mediation. CRS learned to mediate and started blazing trails
in this field and developing a body of knowledge through our experiences. We did more of this
type of mediation than any other entity, and we were the first major body of mediation after
labor.
Next, the protest broadened, so instead of black/white it was Hispanic/black/white and
American Indian and Asian, and women and disabled. In the black communities, this was often
perceived as diluting the resources available for African American. Similarly with Hispanics.
The broadening of the federal government’s response to civil rights abuses was rejected by
many civil rights groups focusing on race related issues. They felt it was an intentional dilution
of resources intended to deal with race-related discrimination.
Question:
Did CRS handle that kind of case?
Answer:
CRS maintained that its mission was race related and should remain that way, and it never
changed. To this day it hasn't changed. It doesn't get involved in the disabled, doesn't get
involved in aging. What it does do, is respond from time to time to extraordinarily heightened
crisis where it makes sense for public, social, or political reasons, to become involved. Kent
State is one example. That was a heightened conflict of national interest. It would not have been
appropriate to tell the Special Assistant to the President of the United States that we don't do
student campus conflicts. Fighting over scraps is what it comes to. Until there are more
resources, you are going to have these problems. But the agency has always hued the line on race
related matters.
Question:
So if mediation wasn't the original intention of CRS in handling civil rights issues that came
up, what was the original intent and how was CRS intended to go in and work with them?
Answer:
CRS was established in 1964, under Title 10, a very short title under the Civil Rights Acts.
It's role was to assist communities that were having racial or ethnic conflicts. To help
communities with racial and ethnic disputes, differences, and disagreements to keep the peace.
Question:
Now did CRS start acting in this preventive way early on or is this something that came in
later?
Answer:
CRS was a small agency. It used consultants around the country before it had field offices
and they tended to respond to the highest crises. As a result they went to the most volatile
situations. So they were on the bridge in Selma and in those types of situations they were there.
I’m sure Ozell told you on his tape, they were in Memphis when Martin Luther King, Jr., was
killed. They were there in a whole variety of ways. There were those who were working with
the police, there were those who were working with the striking sanitation workers, some with
other city officials, so you had a lot of people there.
Martin Walsh
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
The part of it that is more
difficult to deal with is some of the remnants of what is out there. Dealing with the first 60%,
70%, 80% was the easiest. The hardest is the last 20% and I think that's where we are now. The
hardest is the type of corrective action that has to be taken to remove some of the long standing
discriminatory actions that are part of our system, part of our culture, part of everyone who lives
or who comes to the United States. For example, the new immigrants coming in quickly adopt
the type of perceptions and feelings about race that characterize the general population. I think
that it's tougher now in one sense, but I think the environment for CRS is easier and it's up to us
to try to move the ball a little further, to try to get to the end zone. That's our challenge. How to
get to some of those remaining issues and to unearth them. I think there are some things that we
do, some things that the media do and others do that uncover issues that we can work on. When
they're uncovered, it makes it easier for us. Take the question of racial profiling. We know that
police and others have been doing it, and there were people being stopped. But now that it's an
issue that the media and others have helped to put out there, it can be dealt with much more
easily. We can train people to deal with it and I think we can correct it, in general. At least some
of the major parts of it and make it costly for those who don't. That's part of the dynamic that's
out there.
Martin Walsh
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
We are getting new ways and new manners of looking at that because
basically what we are trying to do in police-community relations is to develop a good relationship
and a good relationship has to be based upon justice and equity to the communities. To
accomplish this require different steps along the way. I think that's where CRS's process is.
| Will Reed
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Answer:
Well, sometimes because of budgetary constraints, we had to cut
certain things
short. We had to leave a situation because we had put too many man hours and dollars into it
and so it
was time to get off this case. There was a lot of money being spent on some cases. But if we
were
allowed to stay and the funds were, while maybe not unlimited, at least a little bit more
extensive, we could
have been more effective in certain situations. And in training, we were allocated so many bucks
for
training in a certain situation, if we had had more time and the money was allocated just a little
bit more
liberally, we could have done some good training in certain areas. Like I trained here a lot, but
there were
other communities that asked me to come and do some training in the area of conflict resolution
and
corrections, and we didn't have the money for that. Now we did get to Eagle County and did the
kind of
training that they wanted, but there were other places we didn't get to. Not only did you get
requests from
officialdom, you got the request from communities.
And the other thing was that I thought that we could have spent more money in letting the
overall
community know about the role of CRS. Some people, no matter what you've done or no matter
how long
you've done it, "You're with the community what? And you did what?" And if you tell people
about what
you did sometimes, they don't believe you. Not that I really care, but I think we should have had
more,
people should have become much more educated about what we did. They know about the FBI.
They
should have known about us. Why couldn't we spend more money on public relations?
Question:
Did all of the regions have the same budget?
Answer:
Well each region might have been allocated, some regions because of a certain situation that
might
have been going on in that region, might have been allocated a little bit more. For example, there
were
occasions when we were allocated more money because of Wounded Knee, for example. But
none of us
had enough money for public relations. If we had allowed the opportunity for people to at least
become
aware of what we did, we could have gotten more money because people would say, "They're the
group
that really resolved that thing up there."
But the biggest thing is this is a new state of the art, a new science, a new technique.
Mediation
and conflict resolution, that's only been on the horizon the last twenty years for most people. So
you can't
find too many people other than CRS, who've had the practical experience at doing it. That's the
reason
some have bad attitudes. Seriously, we could have had a lab and training positions for people
coming
from everywhere to our training programs. Then we could send them out into their communities
and they
could professionally set up their shops. If we could have done that, we wouldn't be in the
position where
we are still today relying so much on guns. And I heavily believe that.
And it's moving along slower than it should. The profession itself. It's not moving like it
should.
It's not being recognized as it should be. You've still got some people who don't take mediation
seriously.
You're seen a lot of times as social workers, do-gooders and everything else.
| Angel Alderete
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
CRS has survived, but the actual work
hasn't.
Now it's solely a kind of thing where the agency provides what they call technical assistance and
maybe something that might relate to what was known as mediation, but there's not the same
kind of involvement. Maybe the times are different.
Certainly you can't expect that what you were doing and the kinds of dynamics that were
involved in the seventies and eighties are going to be involved today.
Leo Cardenas
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Sort of going back to the initial
question
about how the Civil Rights Movement has changed over the years, and you've expressed that
now there's sort of a monetary component to that. Does that change the role of CRS once they
get involved?
Answer:
It raises it to a different level. Using the NCAA case as an example, once we were able to
find
someone in authority that had an impact on the dispute and we were able to express the type of
services that we were able to offer, the acceptance was there. And because there are
more resources, they're able to investigate us rather quickly and either accept us or not accept us.
In this particular case, we were able to say, "We'll offer you a three-member team and it
will be one Hispanic, one black, and one white, and at least one female and one male." It's those
types of things which, in the final analysis, don't make any difference at all. But in terms of
gaining an entry and getting everybody to the table, they become very important.
Question:
So now would you say that it's typical of CRS to find their role in
various conflicts now, as opposed to in the past, that organizations and groups have come to CRS
and asked for their involvement?
Answer:
Some of that is CRS itself. CRS, first of all, has never had sufficient resources with which
to
provide the service. Currently, with only 41 people, and even when I was here I had a staff of
nine people, we would pick and choose. Now you really have to pick and choose, and pick and
choose only those situations in which you almost have to prove to yourself or tell yourself, or
come to some conclusion that you're going to be successful. That's all you can do. There's just
not that many people on staff.
Bob Hughes
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
I've got a totally different question for you.
How did the changing nature of the Civil Rights Movement and the protest activity over the
years shape the challenges that you faced as a mediator, or shape the work that you do?
Wording it differently, was there any difference from the early days to the later days in terms of
what you could or couldn't do?
Answer:
Hmm...the only thing that I can think of along this general line are the changes of mediation
itself as they evolved. In Georgia I was involved in a mediation in which we didn't have any
ground rules at that stage. That was before CRS became involved in formal mediation. For
example, staying out on like the picket line, not a labor management, but a civil rights picket
line, and the leader of the protest group and the official from the institution were out there and
we were talking. Another conciliator and I said, "Well let's jot that down." So on the roof of
this car we jotted these things down. Okay, now you initial it, you initial it, and they did and that
was an agreement and at that moment that kind of confirmed what we had been saying verbally.
Question:
So things got more formal over time I guess?
Answer:
Right, if there was going to be mediation now you go through these steps.
Question:
If I can just ask one question to build on that, how did that affect your job?
Answer:
Well I think formal mediation was a very useful tool for CRS to get at complex issues and to
get a handle on things. Especially when a conciliated verbal agreement on the street or in a
meeting room lasts as long as the memory of the people who are sitting there. But in Fairbanks
some of the school cases we had mediation between the Fairbanks Native Association and
Fairbanks North Star School District. For two years we met every six months or so to review the
progress on the mediation agreement. For two years not a single person was involved in those
sessions that were in the mediation. The Fairbanks FNA leadership had changed and others had
been elected. The school superintendent left there and went away.
Julian Klugman
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Question:
How big is CRS?
Answer:
About seventy people.
Question:
Really is that all?
Answer:
Yeah, it's basically been decimated. And the average age of the Regional Director in CRS is
over sixty.
Efrain Martinez
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Did you mostly work by yourself?
Answer:
Most of the time, due to staff limitations. Once in a while we
would ask for help and got help for a specific assignment.
Most of the time, there's no room for error, so you call on people that you trust because
you've seen them work and they are ultimate professionals, and
they're going to make you look good. But that doesn't give
opportunity to others who have not had the experience, but in high-stakes situations, you are
going to go with your best. The ideal situation is to
get some veterans there with some of the younger ones to work
together so they could also be trained in doing the job. That
way while you're doing the job, it has benefits for both. A
lot of our staff are leaving CRS, though.
Question:
By choice?
Answer:
Yeah, and through budget cuts. We brought in a lot of new people, then we had the
budget cuts. So we had to let go of a lot
of younger people and by younger people I mean fourteen-year
veterans. And we lost some great people. I worked with
them in the most violent and most tense situations and they held
their own and they persevered, and really helped.
Question:
What's the average number of
employees for each region?
Answer:
Right now it's about two or three. With the new budget we're
trying to get some more, in fact we announced for a position in
Los Angeles, and we're trying to get more regional directors.
We've got a new one here in Denver. We need one for Dallas, my
regional office and the one in Philadelphia. But sometimes I go outside CRS for help. I've gone
to
the Dispute Resolution Center in Houston for some help.
Werner Petterson
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Question:
Did you
ever encounter any (maybe not in this case) situations where there was the potential for
violence?
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.
Nancy Ferrell
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Question:
Did the changing nature of the civil rights movement affect your
work?
Answer:
What do you mean by changing nature?
Question:
There appears to have been a lot more protest activity in the early years of CRS. There was
much more active advocacy going on among minority groups than in later years.
Answer:
Absolutely. Many of the veteran people came out of that advocacy role. They were
community advocates and they came into the institution under that. That's why for me to say
something like honoring the institution, it throws a flag up from their history. In order to get
positive change, that's the way to do it. You honor everybody involved, and you get everyone to
rise to the occasion. In the early days, that was not an option. Many of those institutions were
blatantly not going to rise to any occasion. In the change, there was an awareness that we've got
to change. "We'll certainly do it of our own accord rather than be forced into it by the
government or the community." Being able to choose was a face saving option for them, and if
they could save face, they're more likely to do more, do it in a more productive way, and change
with the community involvement. Using strategies for institutional change, looking at
institutions for their current redress systems, being pro-active with identifying ways of meeting
voluntary compliance with civil rights law; all of those things were a shift. In the early days, you
were on the streets and you were out there trying to keep communities from being killed or
destroyed. It was very much a more volatile situation. Crisis-response was the norm. By the
time I came along, crisis-response happened occasionally, but it wasn't the norm. You needed to
be available and prepared for that, that's your first response always, but if you just waited until
there was an eruption, then we wouldn't have a role to play. So the role had to change if we were
going to have a long term role to play. It became more planned response. Also, I loved forms
and I loved creating forms. I had this tension reduction resolution plan. It was a matrix of
responses that we had in certain situations. Again, I think it was more helpful to set something in
history and also be able to help people who were new to the field. Here are some things that
were done in the past. Tension reduction plans. I had a matrix. I'm a process thinker, and that's
one of the reasons this job was so fitting for me. That may have been one of the new directions
of the agency, to be a process agency rather than a crisis-response agency.
Question:
Is this related to what we've heard from a few people, who have said there was a change
somewhere along the line of the agency, where the agency became programmatic?
Answer:
There was a time when they first started when they definitely were just crisis teams. They
went out as teams to respond to crisis. Then these programmatic functions were centralized out
of Washington. They had an educational program, law enforcement teams, and a community
specialist. So people were specialists in those fields. The next shift was where everybody
became a generalist. You had territories.
|
|
|
|
|
