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Ron Wakabayashi was the Regional Director of the Western Region of the Community Relations Service from 1999 to 2020.
There are 3 parts of this interview and a summary: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 and The Summary This is Part 3.
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Okay. I can edit this first part out. So hi, this is Heidi Burgess and I'm here for our third interview with Ron Wakabayashi, got closer that time. And we are talking about his work as a regional director at the Western region of the Community Relations. And the first two times that we talked, we talked about specific cases. And today I want to look more generally across the cases so that we're comparing trends that you've seen over the years. And the first question that I have is if somebody was talking to you, if you were talking to a person starting out in CRS and they asked, what are the typical roadblock or stumbling blocks that you run into frequently? And do you have any tricks for getting around them? Were there certain problems that came up very often?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:01:25): I think there's several that come up. One is that, you know, after you've been there for a while, that, you know, and as ... you work and gets better known by community organizations and by, you know, government and police, they, they know how to use you and that's both good and bad. Sometimes it's helpful because they call you into a case early, you know, which I think is generally helpful sometimes it's, you know, they're trying to use you or use the department because you're affiliated with a branch of the federal government to create an impression of ... federal government support and potential intervention, you know, in a different way than the way, you know, that we as mediators and conciliators would operate. So sometimes it, you know, they'll ... they may kinda infer or try to create an atmosphere where we're not community relation service, but you know, much more of a sense that we might be an enforcement arm.
Heidi Burgess (00:02:40): Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:02:41): You know, and I think you, you have to watch being exploited. Now, one of the things for me that was helpful is because I ran an advocacy organization. I mean, I understand their interests, their interest is that they've got to represent their constituency and be perceived and act as an advocate. You know, that's different than my interest that I, you know, I wanted be a neutral third party, impartial wanting to help problem solve and what was helpful because I had that role before I could explain to them, I understand your role in your interest, because I've been in that place, but this is, this is different, you know, for me. And you know, it's, it's like in disclosure, it's interacting with the parties. I'm gonna disclose that I'm, I'm an impartial neutral, you know? I mean you could. Yeah. I mean, I can't, I can't control what they could say. The other thing that I think comes up, you know, for a new staffer is, is just being ... a governmental employee, particularly a federal one. Now on one level feds have ... are really very good at having a regulation or a policy on anything you can imagine, but they're frequently conflicting and depending on who is your leadership, hold on one second.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:04:07): Depending on who, depending on who your leadership is ... they will kind of resort to, or lean on different policies or regulations or practices that they're familiar with. So there's, there's an inconsistency that comes up and it's very difficult to resolve because there's so many conflicting policies because they're really never, not never, but they're rarely kind of gone through and called out to see what is the current policy, you know, so, so it's confusing. The other thing about federal service is that, you know, just like any other political environment is that you're vulnerable to the kind of the political trends that take place and the sensitivities and the perceptions that exist. So, you know, for example, I, you know, like in working within like on a case in the community on one, on one day, you know, you can be welcome and warmly received in a community the day after inauguration, you're viewed as suspicious, you know, which is a barrier.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:05:17): One other thing about being a fed, I think, which is difficult is that ... one of the things about CRS that has an advantage over most other federal agencies is that we're small and in general, that gives us a greater agility. We can get to a ... critical incident, much quicker than other agencies do, because by the time they vet an issue within their bureaucracy, the issue is pretty well established. We can, we could, and we should be out there, you know, early. So we're agile in one sense, in another sense, your leadership is not so agile because they're tied into kind of, you know, like the upline, you know, when is in the department and whether interests, you know, are, are being carried, you know, like sort of government wide and it tends to be cautious. It tends to be focused on, on metrics in order to kind of sell the ... agency and what they're doing. But the nature of what we do, doesn't lend itself very well to metrics, you know? And in fact, one of the problems, I think that CRS incurs is we had a director that, that shifted the emphasis on our work plans, our ... personal work plans to be services oriented. In other words, if I did two services, I got a credit toward my ... evaluation.
Heidi Burgess (00:06:54): And what's a service considered to be?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:06:57): A service could be, you know, like a consultation. It could be a facilitated dialogue. It could be a mediation, it could be a whole variety of things, but the, but they got focused on services. And you know, what, what that occurs is like not all services are the same, like for example, like what is a consultation? So if you gave a party, a couple of documents that spoke to their, their issues and their concerns, sometimes that's a very helpful activity to kinda help, you know, move the process along. Sometimes it's just giving a service, so you get case credit.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:07:41): And so it created, I think for a time, you know, case credit, you know, kind of dependency within conciliators, but also within the agency, because it gave you numbers to report upline and to the Congress, you know, it became, you know, part of the culture of the agency rather than measuring impact. And, you know, and then ... the agency can become very, and depending on the administration, very, you know, conservative and not in the political sense, but conservative in the sense of ... not be very risk taking. So like the current CRS has, for example, a list of approved programs and services that align to different situations and you can do those. The problem is like, and only those, and have to do them exactly as they're written, you know? And so a thing like we, one of the things that CRS developed was a spirit program and the spirit program is, is really a facilitated dialogue and a problems identification process.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:09:01): And it's an unusual process from the standpoint that we will do in the first phase, you know, organize groups like in the school that are, that are, you know, homogeneous. So, you know, we would pull out a group of black students, Latino students, Asian students, and process through them, you know, what are the issues that those students have? And in theory, it's the extract, you know, and it's giving sort of the comfort and security for people to identify issues. Okay. And that's round one round two is heterogeneous groups. And then the problem solving happens in heterogeneous groups. That's the design of it. Now homogeneous groups, you know, like out here in California, that at a particular school, there are Latino students, but you would have people from the north and the south, nortenos and surenos, there's as much different in conflict among those as any other groups. So it makes sense to separate those into two different groups, the process won't allow that.
Heidi Burgess (00:10:12): And what happens if you do?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:10:14): Then you get people at headquarters who have no experience in the field that says you can't do that because they ...
Heidi Burgess (00:10:22): Are they watching that closely?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:10:24): Oh yeah. They review, they review the cases, you know, and, you know, nortenos and surenos, they are both Latinos by categories. And so it's not arguing that they're not, but it's arguing that that's, that's not ... what the situation involves.
Heidi Burgess (00:10:43): So you don't have any flexibility?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:10:46): The current, and, you know, some, it depends on your administration, but I think it's, it's just vulnerable to kind of like I think government tends to wanna stay safe. It tends to, you know, like not want internal controversies. So you do only safe things. Doing services is pretty safe, you know, go out there and do it.
Heidi Burgess (00:11:09): Unless you do it the wrong way, I guess.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:11:11): Yeah. So on one hand, I think CRS, like, and there was a period in, in CRS, when you talked to the old timers, when he goes almost like wild frontier, you, you know, there was not what we would call standard operating procedures, and there's some problems with that, but there's also a lot of creativity and innovation. Right. So, yeah, the thing is, I think it needs a balance. I mean, you don't want people kind of, you know, like, you know, going out outside the boundaries, you know, but at the same time you don't want them just to kind of be, become robots right. And do mechanical things. So, I mean, it's, it's like, I think it's a different kind of situational awareness. It's know who you are as a fed. And I actually, I think that's part of what the training should be.
Heidi Burgess (00:12:06): Okay. Good. One of the things I was wondering when you said that you're given credits for services, does that mean that you don't get credit for taking time to record what happened in a particular intervention or collaborate with colleagues to try to compare notes on who's doing what or what people have done in similar situations in the past, that kind of thing is that rewarded or not?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:12:38): I think it's rewarded informally. It's rewarded from the standpoint of, of people who are practitioners, your colleagues, you know, I think colleagues recognize the value of all the things you said of like debriefing a situation, studying a situation and all that. But within the reporting structure there, you know, there's, there's no reward for that.
Heidi Burgess (00:12:59): Hmm. OK.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:12:59): Yeah. And so like, if you just, if you, if you want to be an employee that just kind of draws your paycheck, you know, you could be that and survive very easily, but if your interest is, and ... is in the creativity and the application of the practice, you know, you've gotta manage your way through that, this, you know, and I actually, I think overall in terms of government service, there are far worse places. I mean, there are far worse where it's, it's so rigid. So, you know, while I'm ... raising, like, I think what I think is a flaw in CRS, you know, it's, it's a situation that you can work through. I mean, it's ... a thing that you ought to be conscious of and manage.Heidi Burgess (00:13:44): Okay. That's good to know. Let me go on to a totally different question. We talked about this in passing in the earlier interviews, I think, but in the interviews that we did in our first round of this project, people talked a lot about the media and managing the media, not wanting the media in mediations, because then they turned into more of a zoo than if they were private and there were questions about when to bring them in and how to bring them in and why to bring them in what what's your experience with using or not using the media?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:14:23): Well, you know, in that sense of using like, or the media using you,
Heidi Burgess (00:14:29): I was thinking, as I said that yes,
Ron Wakabayashi (00:14:31): That you know, I mean, you know, I think it's the same thing that, you know, like as mediators one of the things that we're, we're kind of trained and conscious of are like, what are the interests of parties? And there's this, you know, like if we're talking about a dispute, we tend to look at parties as the people who are, but there are other parties and other interests that are there. And it's recognizing that, that like the arena that you're working in has all these other interests and in a high-profile case, the media, you know, would like to kinda get the story ... and get in there. I generally, well, not generally, both by like, sort of for CRS, we do not allow media in, you know, our position, but it's perfectly permissible. If the parties want the media in, you know, that's their right.
Heidi Burgess (00:15:26): So you let them override you.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:15:29): Yeah. The media. . . Even for ourselves, like we, you know, we don't talk to media directly. That's not permitted. And so, I mean, there's been strange situations where I'm standing next to a reporter, he's on the phone with headquarters, I'm on the phone with headquarters. We're standing next to each other. I can hear him ask the question to headquarters. They're asking me the, you know, the question I'm answering, he can hear my, and then he can hear my answer repeated to him.
Heidi Burgess (00:16:00): That's crazy.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:16:01): It's crazy. But it's kinda like, I can't, you know, it's, I mean, I understand the reason for it, but, you know, it's, I think it's really tough to write those kind of rules. I mean, like, I understand the principle of it, you know, that, you know, like, because I know that there are there, you know, like you can have an untrained or an undisciplined conciliator, you know, like, why don't they jump in front of the media? You know, I, and I don't, I don't think that's a professional thing. I don't think it's a good thing. I don't think it works for our practice, but you know, at the same time when we think about media, media is one of the sources for us of information. You know, I mean, for me when, when I'm assessing a case, like, I mean, I keep my relationship with, with, you know, with journalists, you know.
Heidi Burgess (00:16:51): How do you do that if you can't talk to them?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:16:54): You know, on a personal level I can, you know, can't talk to them, you know, like in terms of cases, but in general conversation. And then we do, like, there are all these journalists associations and things like that. Like I think during 911 the, the south Asian journalist association by far was the best source of ... rumor control of getting clear information, taking place of all the media that I could find. So, you know, I attached myself to, you know, their website and monitor them, you know, just all the time because they, they had, you know, relevant information, but you know, and many of those people have kind of ascended into, you know, the media world or in, in significant positions, you know now, but you know, it's not like media is your enemy. I think with anybody, if you can, you kinda have to cross train, you know, this is my role and responsibility. This is my lane. I, you know, I have to stay within this lane if you just understand mine. And I understand yours, you know, we know where we can intersect and share like, you know, media frequently was a source of like a case. I would get reporters calling like, you know, are you guys in this case? I said, you know, I can't tell you that.
Heidi Burgess (00:18:17): <laugh>
Ron Wakabayashi (00:18:18): But, but I think you called me to let me know, you know, he says, well, you know, you know, that works too.
Heidi Burgess (00:18:28): Yeah. Right. So if, say you're doing a mediation between community activists and a police chief or a school board and the police chief or the school board says, we want the media there, or the activists say that we want the media there and then the media come, but start getting out of hand or somehow interrupting the proceedings. Then can you ask for them to interact with them to get them to change what they're doing or leave or something?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:19:07): Sure. I think that's just part of the ground rules. I mean like, like even in mediation, you know . . . parties can agree that they want observers, that they want resource people or they want, you know, that's different than the parties themselves.
Heidi Burgess (00:19:21): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:19:22): So it's all part of the ground rules if they want, if they want media there and they agree to it, they can. But even that they have, you know, like all those people to still have different roles and ground rules. I mean, if you're sitting outside the table, your role is outside the table. Right. And I think the mediator's role is to ... help, you know, in a sense, you know, if, you know, if you just carry out the neutral role, our role is to kind of ensure that, you know, like a process of communication between parties and dispute about what they're in their disputed bound, working toward a resolution of it. That's, that's your role, you know, it's, you know ... the resources around the table, you know, and I think I talked about a case where I did call on some of the resources, you know, with the permission of the parties, you know, like what would you do if you were them? And they ... were people had offered the solution, but I think it you know, you're kind of a gatekeeper and keeping, you know, like a linear conversation to the extent you can, you know, I mean, disputants necessarily not necessarily, but generally you don't have feelings about what they're, what, you know, their issue. And so, it can become more emotional. So you're, you're helping kind of manage through that.
Heidi Burgess (00:20:51): Have you ever seen them when they have the media there, that people are playing to the camera and overplaying their hand because they're trying to look good to the outside world.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:21:03): Yeah. And that's, that's really, you know, like generally, like, because that, that is a that's I think just shorter of being a human tendency, not everybody does it, but many do. Right. And, and it's, and it's hard not to be, but cause even like, if we, if you think about like, even yourself as, if you think yourself as neutral, you still influence, you know, with the conversation, even if you're not saying anything directly, and even if you are, you know, absolutely neutral, you know, you could be perceived different ways. I mean, depending on like an identity facet, you know, that you're male or you age or class or whatever, you know, the, the parties could be thinking, well, you think this, or you, you know whatever, you know, you're still a factor in the room. We all influence it. So, you know, I think, you know, like before you've been particularly, you know, like the, the media again, or even, you know, like sometimes groups will want like a more aggressive advocate as a witness because they know they'll act out afterwards.
Heidi Burgess (00:22:05): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:22:07): And that's why I think you wanna agreement among parties. Like there are dynamics that are involved, but they'll play the cameras they'll, you know, like it will have the influence, you know, just see like it will, you know, and, but that's your call.
Heidi Burgess (00:22:24): And I presume if one side wants them and the other side doesn't then that's just another thing to mediate.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:22:29): Yeah. Yeah. It's not, there's no agreement on that.
Heidi Burgess (00:22:32): Right. Okay, next question. We kinda covered the last time too, a little bit was, were your goals short-term just to get an agreement of the situation that was going on at the moment or were they more long-term trying to set up a process so that the parties would be able to work together more effectively in the future?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:23:01): Or both? Well, yeah, I think the bias in like just the, the agency, I mean community relations, service, like overwhelmingly, you know, like the nature of what we're responding to are critical incidents. So they, there was an immediacy there just to, and in my own view like that, you know, I felt like if I can get people engaged, you know, that, you know, because frequently, you know, we, we don't do the, the back end of the resolution process. If you can get to tabletop, you know, we're, we're frequent like, like there's a protest going on, like and getting disagreements on the spot. You know, and, and so I think that's the bias in our experience. I think if I was, if I was in an agency where we were doing much more tabletop, I might do it differently. But because you know, our role was, you know, like in situations that were typically, you know, like, you know ... there's upset involved and it's still fresh. You know, you haven't had time to get even to engagement
Heidi Burgess (00:24:04): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:24:05): To agreement, like, you know, like, do you think you could even sit down with these people? You know, we're at the phase of, no, I can't sit down with them, you know, protest. I don't like them. I wanna throw rocks and yell and scream. You know, it's, it's moving into the next period. So, you know, there, there's a bias that I'm looking at at like initial solutions. Like, so at anything I can grab on early on that ... smells of an agreement between the two parties, I will wrap it up, you know, and put a bow on it and say, that sounds like that we agreed on this because I wanna create, you know, like you know, a reinforcement that, hey, we agreed, man that was great.
Heidi Burgess (00:24:47): Right. Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:24:49): You know, and ... for people to understand, start understand what, what agreement starts, meaning it, it's not all big stuff. Sometimes you build with little stuff and the little stuff, you know, feels okay, then it feels good. And ... it leads to the next step. So yeah, you kind of help move people into a problem-solving mode.
Heidi Burgess (00:25:11): So, once they get into a problem-solving mode, do you stick with them over the long term? Or do you say, okay, my job's done, you guys do this yourselves?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:25:22): You know? I think, I think it's just a tendency in all of us. I wanna be there, you know, you wanna see it through, through the end. I mean, like I wanna see the kid grow up.
Heidi Burgess (00:25:32): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:25:32): You know? But, but we can't, you know, we're not always able to do it. I mean, that's, I think one of the hardest things for us to let go, you know, because and increasing the world's different. Like when I first started, there were fewer conciliation resources or even like people thinking in that kind of way of that kind of role there's, there's much more now. And, so, you know, I mean we started
Heidi Burgess (00:25:59): Outside of CRS or in CRS?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:26:02): No outside, you know, like my own background is I was the director of Human Relations Commissions, you know, both LA City and LA County. But you know, in those roles, you know, it, the training relative to conflict resolution is not as developed, you know, because you've got a broader spectrum of ... activities that you're involved with. And so like I'll try to work with a commission and help build that capacity in them. And so that, that they can, you know, take it on and, and be the continuity, but it could be a community organization. It could be a church, it could be a civic organization, it could be a government entity. But you know, I think I look for a home, you know, for ... the issue to keep, you know, having, you know, like an ongoing processing because in the nature of that we, we will get called to the next critical incident. And even if we continue with it, you know, we won't be able to spend as much time.
Heidi Burgess (00:27:11): Right. That brings me back to a question that I was thinking of earlier when I don't quite remember what we were talking about. But I was wondering when you said CRS is agile because it's small. That's what we were talking about. I was wondering, how much, how often as a regional director did you have to triage when you had three different things going on at once and not enough people to go to all three? So which one are you gonna go to? Or which one are you gonna pull out of early because you have to go somewhere else?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:27:44): Yeah, I think that's constant and I don't wanna overstate it. It's not every day that, that, you know, it feels like it's, you know, it's ... a decision that kind of is really weighty, you know, but it does happen that you get, you know, critical incidents that have a confluence in terms of time or even space and you know, and I think there's, there's other management issues that are involved with that, you know, like who, you know, who the staff is best suited for something, you know, or, you know, like, I have a view that each one of us, every person on this planet, we work a case differently. We have, we have different insights, different relationships and understandings, you know, it just would operate a different sequence. And so, you're sorting through that constantly. And then even personal kind of things like, hey, ma'am my guy just, you know, is, is a new father.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:28:32): You know, I'd like to keep him home, you know, I'll go do that one. Yeah. You know, because the circumstances is like, you know, like, you know, my kid is grown, you know, I have greater flexibility and that's not true of all regional directors, you know? But, you know ... I would take what would be more difficult for the, for my staff to do, either in terms of convenience or, you know, situations, whatever. So it, and I like that it gives me an additional option if I'll do that. And like they changed that where they said, you know, regional directors don't do any cases. So, that got more difficult to do, but there's kind of degrees of that. Like, even though, like we couldn't do, we were kind of instructed not to do cases.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:29:30): You could do a lot of kind of ground and legwork to help your conciliators. In other words, you become an assistant to them, you know, to carry on. So, you know, I mean, I think it's, it's constantly kind of managing, you know, those kinds of factors but it's also triage, you know, and I think just generally for me, because I came into the organization, like out of the experience in Los Angeles with civil unrest where ... that kind of violence it was, was my top priority. In fact, my view of the agency, although this is not formally written, that you know, our priority be, should be on stopping major violence. And you know, I think we can do that even with a small staff because we don't solve all of it. You know, there's awful lot of other people that do, but we can do some facilitation to trigger early, early intervention in it, you know.
Heidi Burgess (00:30:38): Do you think you're more effective stopping major violence in a preventive mode so that you get into a problem where you can see things are getting tense, but it hasn't gotten violent yet, or are you better off, are you effective once the violence has started stopping it from escalating?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:30:59): No. Yeah. I mean, I'm more absolute on this one, you know, violence is not a good thing, period, you know, and you know, the ... I think the practicality of it is, you know, like, you know, the kind of events that, that you would, you would characterize as like a major incident where violence could be involved is really a very small percentage, you know, of what's on our plate. You know, most of it is like, you know, you're running into kind of the situation where there's a flare up, you know, and I even mean a police shooting, a police shooting is probably on more on the major end, you know, when you, where you had a death involved and people are in like a very emotional about, about what's taking place that's toward the higher risk end end of things.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:31:46): But even there, you know, like, you know, you can look at a continuum of ... situations. It, it could, you know, it arranges everything from a traffic stop, you know, to an officer involved shooting and all along that continuum, you know, like ... when one of us calls one, and this is kind of a unique thing to being a Justice Department employee. If I called you up and you're a mayor or a police chief and said, hi, you know, this is, you know, my name's Ron Wakabayshi I'm with the Department of Justice, Community Relations Service and I read or heard about this situation that happened, you know, in your city, in your jurisdiction. Can you tell me about, you know, what you know about that and what's going on with that? And that's just a plain inquiry. Right?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:32:35): But when I hang up that phone, the behavior that happens is like, hey, Justice Department is interested in this thing. We better take a look at this. We better get on it. So it's a catalyst role. In fact, if I was the director, I would require this, like, you know, like, you know, one of the things that we do is we're, we're gonna be like a radar system. We're gonna scan for situations that develop and minimally, you know, we're gonna call and ask, you know, you know, the, you know, people who are involved that we can identify just to give us an update on the situation that just connects us. But it also triggers their behavior, you know, to take a look at it and see if they can fix something. So then there's two options. They may be able to hit it off early or two if it's beyond them, they can call us back and we could resource it or we could help find a resource.
Heidi Burgess (00:33:27): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:33:28): But that, that's not a whole lot of energy and a whole lot of, and you can do, you can cover a lot of territory doing that.
Heidi Burgess (00:33:35): How do you keep your eye out? What are you watching to find out about incidents that you need to be aware of?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:33:45): You know, I think that ... that's, right now it's ... a portfolio of different things. So there, there are groups that have their own list serves, like, like the NACOLE the group that does citizens oversight. They have a list of where their members kind of list, you know, police incidents.
Heidi Burgess (00:34:06): Oh.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:34:08): So it's, it's a media thing. And most of it is not stuff you can read, but it's a quick, like one minute read and you can, you can read, oh, this one's something we could check out. You can do Google alerts. Right. You can get a, you know, that come that way. You, you get other people who are at certain intersections of conflict, you know, certainly as you get to know, you know, like elected officials and you get to know, you know law enforcement, they become a source. And even deeper as you get to know communities, there are just, there're just folks in organizations that are on the ground that are in touch and they, they start calling, you know, I know, like with the sheriff's department, there's one woman that I know that's out at every incident, you know, and they've made her honorary person, but she just goes to give a hug, you know, but she, but she's, you know, she's someone at that intersection, you know, when there is an incident, I mean, like, I think there's a lot of people, I mean, I said earlier journalists are monitoring it.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:35:14): There was, there was a guy in Seattle that I don't know why he did this, but he had police scanners, you know, and all this stuff, this is the way he lived, but, and he did, he was kind of his own self-styled EMT.
Heidi Burgess (00:35:29): Huh.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:35:30): You know, but he knew what was going on. I know a woman in Phoenix, you know, she's got all these police scanners and is monitoring incidents and she was involved with ... immigration work, you know, and looking out for the welfare of immigrants. But she, you know, but she's a, a great source. I mean, so a lot of the bloggers, you know, I mean, actually I talked to an IT guy and I asked him like, you know, do you think you could, you know, create an algorithm, you know, that can monitor internet to identify, you know, like most of these situations developing, like when you getting clusters or different kinds of things on social media or whatever. And he said, yes, but, you know, but ... government will never have it because there'll be too many barriers to it. I think that's true. And it maybe even be the right thing that government doesn't get it, but you know, it just says that there are ways to, for yourself to construct, you know, a warning system.
Heidi Burgess (00:36:29): Yeah. It just sounds to me like you could put somebody on this full time and,
Ron Wakabayashi (00:36:34): And you can. It's a great use of student interns.
Heidi Burgess (00:36:38): Okay. Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:36:39): Right. You know, and it's a great learning for them. And actually their proficiency, like in terms of like technology is usually much better than us older folks.
Heidi Burgess (00:36:50): Right. Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:36:52): You know, and they'll know the difference. I mean, like you know, like with, within CRS, like if we talk to the current conciliators in management about, what's the difference between passive and ... active involvement in social media, you know, and you'll give a blank stare and passive, you know, use is perfectly okay. You know, you just, you just go on, go on and ... drop a search word into the Twitter or Facebook and see what's going on. Right. Right. Active
Heidi Burgess (00:37:23): Call it lurking.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:37:25): Yeah. Active is different, you know, that's not, that's not permissible.
Heidi Burgess (00:37:29): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:37:30): You know, for us to do so we, you know, we can't do that for some things for like, especially like extremist groups, you know, someone would have to do active because usually you have to be invited in, you have to, you have to do more than lurk. You have to lurk in, do enough to get invited in and then ... you can get into different spaces.
Heidi Burgess (00:37:56): Yeah. And I would imagine you're not allowed to do that. Are you
Ron Wakabayashi (00:37:59): Not to do it, but you're, but you're allowed to know people who do it.
Heidi Burgess (00:38:03): Okay. Yeah. So this question may be a repeat of what we've already talked about or you may have something more, how do you measure success?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:38:20): That's really a hard question.
Heidi Burgess (00:38:24): Or I guess another way to ask, ask it is, do you worry about it?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:38:31): You know, I think my standards are pretty low and yet they are very practical. I mean, I think that if I can get parties engaged, you know, if there's a dispute, but I can get them at least degree that they'll talk, the odds are then that they're not gonna beat each other up or do something else, you know? And like I would, I would view that as, as success. I don't think there is any kind of final resolution. I mean like the nature of life is like we're, we're in, you know, like a giant ocean of ... people's stuff. And there's different currents that, that you can't see that are just swishing things all around and that's just a constant thing. Um, and so I don't think there's a final thing where you can fix all of that, you know, and that's pretty grandiose thinking anyway, that, you know, you could, you could fix it.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:39:27): But like, if we know that there are always these kind of cross currents that are operating, like in the kind of environment that we're in and, you know, we just take the time to say, like, let's, let's keep an eye on those, you know? And when some of those, you know, becomes larger, like, you know, like, you know, we had this, that Tongan, um, volcano eruption, right. You know, that's a once in the century event. Right. But it does happen, but you know, but, but we, we've learned a lot about like how you deal with once and century events. I mean, we can forecast it coming. Right. And we, and with the smaller events, I think we can do things to just kind of even get to what I've said, like engagement, you know, if the parties are talking, I don't think it, I don't think our work is brain surgery because if it was, I couldn't do it, you know, not bright enough, but ... I think if you just kind of just pay attention and listen to folks, you know, you can, you hear stuff, you know, like this anti-Asian violence that cropped up, we were way ahead of becoming national news. You know? I mean, we, I mean, like my staff, you know, you can see the things happening in the dynamics. I mean, had this growth in homelessness, the growth in the homelessness, like put, you know, like a lot of like dynamics in place in certain kind of neighborhoods where there are concentrations. And in fact, you know, right, right near Lunar New Year, Lunar New Year has always been a time where street crime in Chinatown increased, you know, because, you know, during Lunar New Year, the old timers are carrying, you know, they they're, they're giving, you know, monetary gifts to their grandchildren, to friends, you know, it's, you know, the, I see the red envelopes that's customary, but like the people who live around them, like learn that, but it also becomes the source of victimization and crime.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:41:32): So it's not necessarily hate crime, but it's a rise in crime that's gonna happen during Lunar New Year, which is in my view, it's more a crime of opportunity, but it's gonna raise the anxiety of people in Chinatown, you know, and, you know, in this country, so many things that go on kind of get framed in a racial, you know, definition and, you know, sometimes that's useful to understand the problem that's going on. And sometimes it's not it conceals it, I think, you know, like the economic disparity is a bigger issue and this mental health issue. When you look at kind of the egregious stuff going on with, with communities, I mean, people that push people off platforms into subways, you know, that that's generally, you know, I mean, and you know, like a random act, you know, that's a psychological problem. You know, I mean ... there's racial elements in it and I understand the anxiety, but, you know, that, that our mental health system doesn't treat those folks. I mean, just a degree of homelessness, you know, would explain a whole lot.
Heidi Burgess (00:42:49): Are the homeless a constituent group that CRS focuses on or do you stay the realm of race and gender relations?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:43:01): Well, you know, like our legacy statute is race, color, national origin.
Heidi Burgess (00:43:05): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:43:06): You know, and even in Shepard Byrd hate crime homelessness, I mean, was, you know, was specifically brought up, you know, as a category, it's not, it's not a protected class.
Heidi Burgess (00:43:16): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:43:17): So, so it's not, but if you look at who are the homeless and what, how they profile, you know, it is.
Heidi Burgess (00:43:24): Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:43:25): You know, so, you know, and there are things when you look at like, you know, before the, you know, like if you looked at homelessness, you know, 10 years ago, there was just this irrational violence, people would just go and, and beat up a homeless person just because they're vulnerable. It may not hit the statutory requirement, but it, I that's hate. And, you know, when you look at the percentage of the homeless that are black, you know, there's a disparity that, that dynamic is so it's tricky. It's, it's kind of like the stuff that for the agency, you can get beat up on that you're outside your jurisdiction, you know? So it's ... one that's not slammed dunk in your jurisdiction, but I think for us working in the field, you know, that, you know, it's associated.
Heidi Burgess (00:44:28): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:44:30): So it's ... tough. You know, I know that ... Brian Levin, who runs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, he's clearly an advocate that homelessness should be a category a protected category. Because it happens so frequently. And I share that with him, but ... I don't think that it technically is.
Heidi Burgess (00:44:53): Okay. Switching gears a little bit, but maybe not. How do you see the change in the civil rights movement and race relations over the period starting when you first started at CRS going up to now, what I've observed recently is what appears to me to be a whole lot less willingness to negotiate or to collaborate with authorities on the part of both progressives and perhaps even less so I'm not sure the racial minorities. There seems to be more of a push for justice as opposed to compromise. Do you, does this affect the way CRS operates? Do you see that? Do you not see that?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:45:54): No, I well, I think there's this like a ... I think that's a complicated question that, you know, when we talk about like, sort of the extremes, like the alt-right and, you know, like represented by proud boys and groups like that, or what's called Antifa, you know, which we called anarchists before, but both of those, like by their ... ideology, you know, will not deal with government. And so that's a difficult realm to operate in because you're, if you're government, they don't wanna deal with you period and that manifestation is like larger and more pronounced than it was before. So I think that that's significant. I think it's ... not the, the whole environment, you know, like I think there still is, you know ... a population of folks that is, are generally just interested in like at a real rudimentary level.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:46:56): Like, hey, we just wanna see what's right. What's fair. You know, you know, and those words get really complicated when you, we get, when you get, academics and you get lawyers into it because those, those are, can be really complex, you know, concepts of what's right. But, you know, just among regular folks, I mean, like just at a gut level thing, we just want what's right. We just want, and that's most of the everyday domain that you're operating in. And I think you can solve things, you know, at that level. Or you can get things to engagement at that level because the people are just interested in like, you know, let's just make it right. Let's make it fair. You know? And it's not like real hard corners on the definitions, it's, it's just like, you know, does this feel okay to you?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:47:47): You know, it may not be ... this feel okay to you, you know, at that level of human problem solving, you know, if we can get, you know, like kind of just take advantage that it's there. I think there, there are just hard, the harder corners that are there and that's going and that's, I think that's politically very challenging for everybody. And it's stuff that we all have to know, like, especially those who are in the work, we've gotta learn to navigate. Like I know I, like I was talking to people about like even doing what's called town halls and things like that, where you have public testimony, you know? I mean, I, you know, what I recommend to people is changing that format a little bit. Like if we're gonna do a public comment, you know, and it's by the controversy and it's emotional, I think I would set up a thing of like, we're gonna do that on stage.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:48:36): We'll have the audience so people could witness it and I can, that's a fishbowl, but you know, if you're, if you wanna testify sure. You sign up and do the other stuff, but we'll ask escort you upstairs on the stage. And the listeners will be on stage too. We'll have an easy chairs. We'll still have time limits, but you know, one of the things just by doing that. So like, if you're, if you're on the audience floor with ... you know, like your constituency, you're gonna be a cheerleader, you know, you're gonna play ... playing to the audience. If we have you on stage, just talking to folks, you know, like, you know, and there's ... and ... then they do it reasonably, you know, like, so yeah, the purpose of this is that people are hurting and like, we'd like to understand that and we really wanna listen to here and here's the deal we're up here away from everyone else. Just us. We're gonna listen. They can listen to us too, but we wanna understand what the thing is. Now, if we, which we got so many people, so we're gonna, we may run out time. But if we run out of time, there's another group of folks and they, you know, you'll go off stage with them and they'll continue and capture all of it for people who we are not comfortable doing it this way. Here's an email address. Here's a text message. There's some newsprint out there. There's some pads and paper, different ways. You can get it, get it to us. But I think it's like kinda expanding the listening, you know, like if you wanna listen and you wanna hear you design it for that. And I think, you know, like, you know, we've, I mean, I've used that format.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:50:10): It works, you know, if you said like, I wanna listen, or even like the ... I think ... we talked earlier just about the reframing thing. Tell me, I wanna listen to it and I'm gonna say it back to you. So I make sure I got it right. But it's just an active listening thing. And it just changes dynamics. I mean ... I've done this with police and afterwards they come back says, you know, like ... just, you know, I'm not in a hot situation when a guy has a gun, but you know, when you're just talking to like a domestic call and they're all excited, it works, it calms them down. You know, they get focused on wanting to tell their story and tell you in a way that because you're gonna repeat it back. They want ... you know, they don't want to leave something out or unclear or say in a kind of way that's misleading because they're gonna get it fed back to them. I mean It's all captured. And it's like, you know, like it worked, it works.
Heidi Burgess (00:51:15): Do you train the officials, the police or the school superintendent or whoever you're gonna have in that town hall up on stage. Do you train them to do that?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:51:27): Mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. And I wouldn't even call that training. It's more explaining because that's not the, you know, it's just explaining sort of conceptually what you're trying to do, you really wanna to listen and when you ... and you wanna listen, you know, what that does is it helps them focus on telling you their truth.
Heidi Burgess (00:51:47): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:51:48): You know, and you could do more than one round on it, you know, you can go back and forth on it, like right. You know, get it wrong. Well, help me again, what did they get wrong? You know? But that just engages further.
Heidi Burgess (00:52:01): And can you help the normal, the regular people, the advocates in doing that too? Or is that a harder audience to get involved with that?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:52:15): You know, I think it's the same kind of thing. If we think about the dynamics that when I said I was the director of, of an advocacy organization. Okay. So you see that as your role, your mission, your identity, you need to be an advocate. I think that like, and it's to be respected, we want you to be an advocate. And one is I think to let people know, I understand that that's your role. I understand that that's your role and this is my role, but there's ... a window and there's an opportunity that we can, you know, this is ... a time that worked together and ... we can make one little inroad maybe, you know, and whether we seize that time or not, you know, and that's a choice, you know? And I think it's, it's helping them out to get outside their role. Like if I'm an advocate and they're my constituency, you know, if I can help them reinterpret their roles is that, you know, like it's sort of interest and position.
Heidi Burgess (00:53:21): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:53:22): You know, what is your interest in advocating that, you know, because the advocacy is the position.
Heidi Burgess (00:53:29): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:53:31): You know, and it's ... really, it's remarkable to me that like for us in the profession, that mediation, we have this stuff. Right. And we can give it, I mean, that, that's kind of like, that's like 101 in mediation training. Right. But it's ... so critical. I mean, it's really the whole nexus of it.
Heidi Burgess (00:53:52): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:53:53): And it's not brain surgery, you know? So I, that's why I saying, I don't think it's even training. It's like helping people look at. So like, even if we're doing things like we talk about like facilitating conversation, you know, facilitated dialogues and stuff like I'm working right now on ... a hate crime training in a sense so we have, you know, like a tabletop simulation. So the first slide kind of creates a situation where, okay, this looks like a hate crime has like all the ingredients of it. But ... the audience is I wanna have the U.S. Attorney, the district attorney, the, you know, city attorneys, law enforcement, you know, or representatives of those office community folks know that. And then you go through that, like, okay, we have this incident take place, looks and smells like a hate crime just to the, you know, the circumstantial stuff.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:54:50): What are you guys doing at this point? You go through them and you facilitate a cross training, you know? And because with the prosecutors, they have a legal need to say, it's gonna meet certain standard for the community folks. This is not, I'm terrified. I'm terrified for my kids and my parents. You, you know, you can help draw out the different interests, but then you could do what I, what we just said about like a listening thing with them, you know, can we do a little exercise? Like you explain how you're feeling and you feed it back to them. So the, and then you do the same thing about your role as like law enforcement, because the prosecutors seem like, you know, if I'm gonna go after, you know, this guy, you know, I wanna get the evidence, I need to have that to get the court. I need it to stick, community doesn't understand that.
Heidi Burgess (00:55:40): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:55:41): But if you can get them to understand that they really have kind of common interest when you get exchange, you know, what you end up with is like, I want to help you, you know, rather than because if you don't, they get in each other's way.
Heidi Burgess (00:55:55): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:55:56): So yeah. I, so, I think, yeah, it's, it's not brain surgery, but it's trainable and you could build it into a lot of different situations.
Heidi Burgess (00:56:06): Right. So sort of a related question to where we started, we went off in a different direction. Does the political polarization of the country affect what CRS is doing?
Ron Wakabayashi (00:56:22): Yeah. It does because I think we've got to, you know, like the, the high-profile stuff, you know ... are the extremes, you know? And there's an additional step that you've gotta do. Like either if you're dealing, you know, like, you know, you can't really deal with the extremes very well because you know, ideologically, they don't want, they won't engage. So how do you impact their influence on the dynamics of it? And you can't cut that out completely, you know, but you ... can help folks saying, you know, like get to the point of like, you know, but for you not, I understand this other stuff, but you know, what is it that you want out of this, you know, and just kind of help focus it. I think it requires us to manage a case differently. You know? I mean, we have to be conscious that, of the presence of that dynamic, but that dynamic, at least so far as I've seen, has not, does not sustain, you know, they quit because you can only take that so far.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:57:26): And just from a community organizing standpoint, unless you can have some success, you know, it dissipates, you know, and that's been true both on the left and the right, you know, it works very much in the short-term. I mean, you could say stuff like defund the police and it gets, it grabs the media, because it sounds radical. But when you sit down and talk to 'em that's, you know, it ... t's not what they mean. I mean like let's, it gets back into what is your interest? What about grandma down the street, man? She just ... been like, she's been purse snatched and her house was broken into, you know, so what do we wanna do for grandma? What's our interest, you know ... you dare say none that we don't care about her. You know, we care about her, but it's ... kind of the unintended consequence, like of what people see as law enforcement, you know, but if you can get that into a ... I don't think there's like kind of a concrete fix.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:58:28): Like if the law enforcement was organized this way, we work perfect. You know, it's, it's ongoing change. Like even like things like civilian review, the data is that peer review by law enforcement, you know, gives stricter punishments for law enforcement then citizen review. And you show the data, they'll say, say we want citizen review, because you know, they're just policing themselves. So well there's stuff to that. One is they understand what the standards are better. That may not be the answer either because there's also kind of the blue line stuff. That dynamic is there. You know, it's all, it's, you know, you look it's complicated and there's not like a single solution to it. Even if you did like appointments from the community or election by the community, go check out, you know, like the history on those and who wins those elections, you know, it's not people, you know, from the neighborhood that get elected, you know, it's people from other neighborhoods that get elected.
Heidi Burgess (00:59:30): Huh.
Ron Wakabayashi (00:59:32): You know, and what does that do for you? Right. So, you know, I mean it it's, I think you have to study it like to help shed light on things but you know, it gets back into like, it's really like, it's ... I think mediation has such a genius. Like the difference between the interest and position is, you know, when someone points it out to you, it's like, oh yeah, right. It's, you know, that's really an important distinction, you know, and gives a, one gives a pathway and the other doesn't and ... you get these aha moments, but you can see other people get them as you go through it.
Heidi Burgess (01:00:16): What do you do though, with the extremists? When I was doing consensus, building collaboration myself, we always tried to make sure that we had all the relevant parties at the table, because there was the theory that if you didn't have somebody at the table, then they get act as a spoiler afterwards and try to undo the agreement. So, if you don't have Antifa and Proud Boys at the table and come up with an agreement that they don't like, and then they try to undercut it, how do you avoid that?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:00:52): I ... think at the front end, like it's, it's like that, you know, like, the ideologies of the two groups, both extremes, you know, are not toward any kind of conciliation.
Heidi Burgess (01:01:04): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:01:05): You know, it's like, the thing is like, you know, I want you dead and you want me dead, you know, there's only one solution to that. One of us has to die, you know? Well, go do that over there. You know, because over here we're gonna do ... and one of the conditions of the conversation here is that we don't want anyone to die, you know? And if you can't meet that, you know, like, you know, you're in a whole different realm.
Heidi Burgess (01:01:29): Just push 'em aside and let them do their thing.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:01:31): Well, no, I'm gonna let that's their choice. Like the conditions that come in, you know, I mean, I agree with like the basic concept of we wanna be inclusive if you wanna be inclusive. Yeah. It's open to everyone. But to be open to everyone is to ... say like, we don't want anyone to die. You know, everybody's in, everyone's got equal stand. If that's not the deal, you know ... that's a different universe that you wanna play in, you know? So if you don't, you know, those are the rules of this sandbox you want, you know, you want to play in this sandbox, that's that's there. I don't, I don't feel the need to be inclusive of everything. I mean, there's crazy people. I don't wanna include them. You know? I mean, I want them taken care of, but like it's ... if someone's dangerous or just kind of like really counterproductive because it can't be linear. I mean the capacity's not there, you know? I mean, what does inclusive mean? You know, there's gotta be some threshold of being able to participate and either by your ideology or your capacity, if you can't cut, participate you know, it's, I don't know if it's so much exclusion, but it's include inclusion there's, you know, to be in the sandbox, this is what you have to agree to, you know?
Heidi Burgess (01:02:48): And did you have problems of people who weren't in the sandbox trying to undercut the agreements that were made or was that not an issue?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:02:56): Sure. That's the case because like their interest is not for those kind of resolutions. Like they ... you know, they'll try to undermine it and they'll try to make you look bad or whatever else, but it's not, you know, like I think the important thing for us and our work is like, that's not my position. I'm a neutral in this thing. In fact, that's one of the safest thing about like, you know, it's kind of being chicken. I don't have a position, I don't have a position. People have a position in terms of my role. If I had a position, I can't play this role.
Heidi Burgess (01:03:30): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:03:30): You know? And actually, there's a great deal of potential safety in that because you, you know ... you become, you get more at risk in a target. If you have a position you don't and saying, I can't have a position on this in this role. I can't, you know that the whole idea of this is that you need someone to, you know, that will not take a position, you know, to make this work. And so, you give that up to do this.
Heidi Burgess (01:04:04): Makes sense.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:04:05): No, but you know, no. So, I think it there's a difference between exclusion and inclusion.
Heidi Burgess (01:04:11): Right. Okay. Similar historical questions. Have you seen changes in policing and the types of issues that arise with police over the time you were at CRS going all the way up to now?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:04:30): Oh yeah. I mean the, when we first said the idea of community policing was a fringe issue, you know, is touchy, feely, and you just, you know, now everyone speaks to it. I mean even the most authoritarian departments talk about, we do community policing. They may not understand all of it and clearly in some ways, clearly they don't, but you don't hear many voices that are contrary. This says, now we're against community policing. Therefore, they just redefine it differently or they have a different concept of it. So that world has changed quite a bit, you know I mean the discussion is, you know, becomes things of like, yeah you know, like how do you address implicit bias, you know, before if you asked like law enforcement. Okay. What do you think about implicit bias? You would go like, I don't know what you're talking about.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:05:22): Implicit what, what is that now? I think you get a much higher percentage of people saying, okay, I understand what they're talking about, what they mean by it. You know, I don't get it all, but you know, I know what they mean by that. You know, I could see some of it, you know, it's moved, it's moved quite a bit and you know, like I was just talking to some folks about doing some work with some police, you know, and you ... if you do their own self-assessment, like and you couldn't ... get away with this before, but if I got two, this is old school, this is analog two ... newsprint pads and one you titled law enforcement and the other, you titled peace officer because they're both right. And you said, okay, like first let's go on this one. And so like during your typical day, let's write down all the things that you, that you do typical day that are law enforcement and typical things that are peace officer. Okay. And I'll go write them down, you know, by the end of this.
Heidi Burgess (01:06:42): So, so I'm thinking that they're the same. So, what would go on the peace officer list that wouldn't be on the law enforcement list?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:06:50): There were daily activities that they're doing, you know, stops for domestic violence.
Heidi Burgess (01:06:55): So, peace officer is more preventive and law enforcement is more reactive.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:07:01): Well, you can, you can define it that way, where it's like, one is more like keeping the peace, you know, how do we keep calm? And the other is how do we enforce things we have to, so we, law enforcement is like to stop bad guys.
Heidi Burgess (01:07:17): Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:07:18): Officers is helping us, can we all get along.
Heidi Burgess (01:07:21): Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:07:22): And ... so during the day, you know, like there, during a typical day for law enforcement, a patrol officer, he's doing overwhelmingly peacekeeping. So then you take, okay, like, well, tear that off and let's stick those up on the wall is, you know, learning a typical day. You do, you may do a thing, you know, on law enforcement, but that's rare, you know? I mean, you have got officers that go through their whole career who never pull their piece, their guns, but they do all this other stuff. So now let's take those same headings. The training that you receive let's list all the things on those sides. It's overwhelmingly law enforcement.
Heidi Burgess (01:08:03): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:08:04): Okay. So, what message do you get about what you're supposed to do and be if that's all your training and if you're not trained to do other stuff, how well do you do that? You know, cause you know, the stuff on domestic violence, you know, stuff about listening skills, all that stuff works there.
Heidi Burgess (01:08:26): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:08:27): You know, and so, you know, like you can kind of use this as kind of an exercise extracting kind of the information from them that say like, it sounds like this stuff over here is more community policing stuff that we've talked about. Right. And they move. So I, the stuff is all there.
Heidi Burgess (01:08:51): Is the police training today, still the same. Is it all law enforcement and not keeping the peace? Or is it getting better?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:08:59): It's, it's getting better. But it tends to be like they'll do things like we, you know, we need to have an understanding about culture diversity, but culture diversity is a tricky thing. I mean, it tends to be tacos on Tuesday, you know, that, you know, like what people can understand culturally are more objective culture. This is what people wear. This is what their holidays are. This is what they eat, you know, and I think, you know, like diversity training should be more, what are people's buttons, you know, and how did they get there?
Heidi Burgess (01:09:39): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:09:40): You know ... I think you can do that. Or ... I like when, even when I was a human relations director, I wouldn't do diversity training because of the tacos and Tuesday view I have of it. I focused on like identity management that, you know, all of us are the one constant in every transaction that we have and we have multiple identity facets and certain, only a certain ones are dominant in a transaction. Most of the time, like your interaction with your husband has so many facets that someone said, what's he like, you know, it'll take you, you know, a book to write that what he's like. Very complicated human being. Right. But if someone you're just encountering, it's like, well, you know, Heidi is like, you know, a woman, you know, she's about in this age group, you know, she's white, you know ... you do all those kind. And like, so like if you had, like, if you, this is another analog metaphor, if in your file cabinet, you pull out your ... manila folder folder on white women and you only have three pieces of paper in it. You almost have to go the stereotype.
Heidi Burgess (01:11:01): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:11:02): If I go to your, if you go to your own folder about white women, since you are one, you probably have a drawer full. And this is like, okay, what are white women like, well, okay I need to write book. It's harder to stereotype.
Heidi Burgess (01:11:15): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:11:16): You know, but it's, you know, you can use that metaphor, say like, you know, like that's what implicit bias involves, you know, that we have, you know, like this analog metaphor of a file cabinet. So, you know, I think that policing is different in that, you know, like you could, the training hasn't done a lot of that, but I think it's possible to do and it's gotten better. I mean, I think they've gotten beyond tacos on Tuesday. But it, I think it's ... tough to fit when you think about law enforcement. Like when we, this one department that we're, we're working with right now, you know, the amount of time it takes to flip a culture, you know, to get in training time because in spite of everything, you know, their time is pretty stacked up because you know, school teachers and law enforcement we'd load everything on them.
Heidi Burgess (01:12:13): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:12:15): You know, you know, because it's convenient.
Heidi Burgess (01:12:18): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:12:20): You know, and in many ways it's not fair. And with law enforcement, they do have that aspect of like, you know, I mean it drilled into them like at the end of the day, you know, be safe out there at the end of the day you wanna come home.
Heidi Burgess (01:12:33): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:12:35): Well that'll make me a little nervous if I hear that every day for, you know. So, but I think it's ... made improvements. But it, I think, you know, as we get older, you start learning like these things take a long time to have it. You know because you can write it up pretty fast.
Heidi Burgess (01:12:58): Right. Let me ask the same question about education. Do you think the schools have changed over the period that, between when you started and now?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:13:12): They must have, you know, because when I went to school, like there was still corporal punishment.
Heidi Burgess (01:13:18): I don't think I had that
Ron Wakabayashi (01:13:19): You know, those triangular rulers.
Heidi Burgess (01:13:21): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:13:22): I remember getting whacked.
Heidi Burgess (01:13:25): Wow.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:13:26): You know, I get whacked. They can't do that now they get sued.
Heidi Burgess (01:13:31): Right
Ron Wakabayashi (01:13:31): Right. They get arrested. Like it's a moving target. Like even, even though like even culturally, like there's a practice of, you know, like when you're bad, like when I hit my kid sister, my dad burned me with incense.
Heidi Burgess (01:13:48): Whoa.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:13:49): And I could see the thing glowing. I still got the scar.
Heidi Burgess (01:13:54): Whoa.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:13:55): And we would call that child abuse today.
Heidi Burgess (01:13:57): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:13:59): You know, I don't consider it child abuse. It hurt like heck.
Heidi Burgess (01:14:04): And you didn't hit her again. Huh.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:14:05): But, but yeah. But the context, I understood the context of it right now and saying, okay know, like for him that was not child abuse. That was just standard, you know, it'd be child abuse. So there's a lot of stuff that's situational that changes. And so, it's hard to compare the different eras, you know, in schools and education. I mean there's things now, like even what we're doing now on zoom, this is just so remarkable to me that we can do.
Heidi Burgess (01:14:36): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:14:37): You know? Yeah. During the pandemic, I couldn't see most of the extended family. We can zoom.
Heidi Burgess (01:14:45): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:14:46): You know, I mean, we're gonna have it next week because then like there's babies, my oldest sister passed she's passed, you know? And I mean, there's, there's just so much that happens even in a year to, but I can gather the whole clan you know?
Heidi Burgess (01:15:02): Yeah. Zoom's wonderful. Although I gather it doesn't work too well for kindergartners. I have a kindergartner granddaughter who tried zoom kindergarten. That really was not terribly effective.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:15:16): You know, what's funny to me is when I see like little like pre-toddlers that they'll walk up to any screen and touch it, you know?
Heidi Burgess (01:15:26): Yeah. And they'll try to, when you're doing a zoom with your granddaughter, she'll try to feed you, which I think is great because it shows, they think you're there. So that's way better than not reacting to it, but it is interesting,
Ron Wakabayashi (01:15:44): But I think it's scary enough, you know, like global warming scares the heck out of me, you know? I mean I'm, I think I'm fortunate like I probably won't have to suffer the worst of it, but you know, I mean that's, that's going to overwhelm everything.
Heidi Burgess (01:16:03): Yeah.
Heidi Burgess (01:16:06): Yeah. Again, going to historical considerations, do you see administrative changes either within CRS, we've talked about that some also within the federal government overall, certainly there's changes from Republican to Democrat and back and forth, but do you see any trends long term in terms of their attitude towards CRS or the kinds of work that CRS does?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:16:41): I think of late the, you know, well, there's been, an elevation of interest in conflict resolution and in the work we do, you know, I still think there's this and there's an increasing understanding of what's involved, you know because it was it's interesting, you know, like before, like if there was any kind of like racial conflict, you know, like, you know, you're gonna read this paper in the newspaper eventually if it was big enough that they sent this out, you know, and like when you're, if you're inside, you're going like, well it's too late to send this out. You know, there's really very little you can do when everything's burning.
Heidi Burgess (01:17:34): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:17:35): You know, I mean, you know, like, you know, if you could send me out and gimme a hose it's so the understanding is improved. Like they know that the need to do it earlier, but and there's, there are more practitioners, not just in CRS, but like around who can interpret it. Like the ... head of the Civil Rights Division in California's Attorney General's office has got his master's in conflict resolution. So you find more characters like this around who get, who get it much more. And I think that audience is expanding, you know, because I think that the previous understanding was like, you know, you run into a crowd and hold your arms out and say, everyone, stop. I don't know how you stop a riot, you know, you, it's hard enough to figure out how one starts.
Heidi Burgess (01:18:33): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:18:34): But stopping is even harder, you know, how do you tone it down. So, but I think there, there's kind of a growing understanding of like, there is ... a methodology, there's a way, and people can, you know, that you can study rather than random things of stop or, you know, and not thinking it through. I think that has advanced even in, you know, like in all circles, but not universally, but that's true of all things. I mean, you could, you know, like I know when I listen to the conversations about vaccines, I can't it ... blows me away to listen to what some elected officials say about COVID you know, I can't, you know, I've accepted science. Right. So, but you know,
Heidi Burgess (01:19:41): That's what CRS can't get involved in probably just as well.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:19:48): Yeah. You know but I think, you know, like, even like when you get the ... things about like, the, you know, how they poll everything numbers, like the anti-vaxxers versus, you know, like you see the percentages, but the percentages on almost anything, anything, and like, I've, we've seen a whole lot more percentages of public attitude and those numbers have surprised me. Like, if you said like 40% of people, like, you know, were mistrustful of it, that would've surprised me.
Heidi Burgess (01:20:20): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:20:21): You know? And like, so now that I'm seeing this 40% number in so many places, you know, it's like saying like people are more divided, you know, at a real fundamental level than I thought, you know, I thought that number was more like 20% it's double. And so conflict resolution is, seems like even harder.
Heidi Burgess (01:20:47): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:20:47): When you, when it's, and ... so like it modifies goals, I mean, like, it's of like, what's peacekeeping, if you have that level of difference that seems like it's almost structural the way we're, we're built. You know, I think for me personally, it kind of takes me toward like, no, there's more things I wanna avoid than I did before, before I would engage it because I think you could, you know, this change was possible now I'm I think in some ways I'm more pessimistic thing.
Heidi Burgess (01:21:24): I just find it phenomenal that a disease could be made political. I mean, is, I can't think of anything that is less political than a disease. A virus is gonna infect a person, regardless of whether they're Republican or Democrat. The fact that that became political is just phenomenal to me, but it also strikes me as a tenor of our time that absolutely everything is political.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:21:52): Yeah. And it's, you know, and you know, and there's things that like will, I mean, like right now Ukraine worries the heck out of me, you know, like I'm really gonna watch the winter Olympics, you know, because it's in China and watch this, you know we're gonna boycott that, you know, and it's China has had a very severe close down policy.
Heidi Burgess (01:22:22): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:22:22): You know ... I don't know how to prevent this. You it's really kind of what's ... what is it gonna trigger? You know, that, so I don't know, it's, in some ways, you know, like I think it's, I've retreated some saying, you know, I don't, I don't think as much of like, sort of the conflict in the world is, is fixable, you know? And so, before I think my attitude was more like, I want to engage it so we can help fix more of it. And now it's probably more selective in saying like, no, I wanna pick the ones I think we can fix that, you know, like have the most relevance to like kind of the ... place and time I have left, you know, so the police department, I said, I'm working with, you know, that's the one in my community and it just happens that, you know, there's a window. So yeah. I wanna do that one even though I'm retired.
Heidi Burgess (01:23:30): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:23:31): You know, and with ... DCP, the reparations thing is just personally you like interesting to me just because I was the director of the JCL when we did the Japanese American redress and you can see the, the parallels in the process. And I feel fortunate in ... having had a prequel, you know, and I think we, you know, our meeting this morning was really that like California's becoming very close to like producing a report that will run about a thousand pages on the .... and you know, even the Kerner report was only 40 pages on the legacy. And this one goes probably in the most depth in linking it. And I think is gonna be a very powerful document once it's released in, in public conversation, even though it's a thousand pages because a thousand pages, when you think about all of what's involved is really very concise.
Heidi Burgess (01:24:37): So, what's it documenting?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:24:39): The legacy of slavery.
Heidi Burgess (01:24:41): Okay. In California or nationwide?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:24:43): It's nationwide it has to be nationwide in the sense, but it's California, it's got clearly California because it's a California commission and California's a little, not a little, but it's different because we weren't a slave state. And so the concept of reparation is not, I mean, it's a little convoluted that you have to get there, but ... the reports have to content of the report I think's gonna be really useful because it's convenience, even though it's a thousand pages, it's in one spot.
Heidi Burgess (01:25:14): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:25:15): You know and they've done a good job with it and you know, and it's just sort of a discussion. I mean like part of what we're doing with it ties to like prior experience. But you know, the people that followed reparations, you know, like we're ... it's really a narrow audience of people who followed it from the time [Representative] Conyers introduced reparations commission bill that he introduced right after we had a successful passage of our bill, but it's not moved since, but you know, Biden said he, you know, he supports it. So, and ... it's gonna come to at least a floor vote and pass the house. It won't pass the Senate, but it'll have more profile than it's ever had. It's had Ta-Nehisi Coates and some literature on it has elevated its, you know, its profile, but the core people following it are really a narrow group of what and they use the language American descendants of child slavery. And they're using that as that, that should be the beneficiary definition, not Caribbeans who came later and not all this, but that has all kinds of other implications in terms of conflict because you know, you have all the Caribbeans that came later and the chronologies like Jim Crow and all that comes after slavery, you know, and how do you deal with that? And in sort of the courts, you know, courts have not favored, you know, race-based remedies, you know, as well as problem based you know remedies. So there's, there's all these things that are gonna play out. So we're ... it's in the period where, you know, all the factors for this, all this agitation is there. But it's out there, there's nothing, you know, like any of us could do the to stop it. We can, we can help make it some ... ways better for people to understand the dynamics. And California's got a public engagement process with this, they drop 800,000 into buying, you know, the format for this process. They've hired communication managers, you know, and there'll be a real process to do public engagement, but that, you know, and the report coming out, I think will elevate the conversation, expand it, which will bring in a different audience, not just the more narrow descendants, but a broader audience and that'll change the discussion.
Heidi Burgess (01:28:00): It will also create a lot more conflict. Will it not?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:28:03): I think so, but it's kind of like, I mean, as part of our job I think is to look ahead and say, you know, what are the dynamics in place and what are the conflicts that come out that. I think our conflict with China is going to keep the Asian hate crime stuff high, you know, there'll be, and there's other incidental stuff like this is Lunar New Year and Lunar New Year has more crime in general because they know that people are carrying cash for the know, I see the red envelopes and those things. And it goes up every year in Chinatown during this time period. But it, but this year it's gonna be equated with hate crime, no matter what. And ... a lot of that is gonna be African American perpetrators and it's gonna drive rifts there.
Heidi Burgess (01:28:54): So is this something that CRS is likely to get involved in?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:28:57): Unfortunately, because the current CRS does not have the apparatus to kind of look down field.
Heidi Burgess (01:29:05): Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:29:06): You know, I mean because and they should be, they should be looking at that
Heidi Burgess (01:29:09): Is that because they're too small.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:29:12): No it's because the leadership does not come out of field experience.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:29:17): You know, I think people in the field can look at this. I mean, we're look, you know, you'll look at like with the stuff going on with China, you know that there's gonna be more cases at universities with professors being sanctioned for being spies. You know, that just happens. You know, it happened before it's gonna happen again. You know, there'll be controversies around Olympics. I mean, some, something will go on with some of the competition between that and the athletes, COVID is gonna kind of help keep a separation of ... athletes from the public. But under other times, you know, that interaction will have some controversy, you know, both in both directions, you know, they're Chinese folks that they're really very anti-American because that's what they learn, you know, and they'll tick us off and then, you know, there's just, I think it's just playing, you know, like it's looking, I mean it, I think part of the role for CRS is that we should be looking for those things, you know, where is it gonna pop up? And to preposition, you know, like FEMA prepositions water, we need to preposition relationships so that it pops there. You know ... you have someone's phone number, hey, I just read.
Heidi Burgess (01:30:30): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:30:32): You know, you need us, we'll be there. You know.
Heidi Burgess (01:30:36): What percent of your cases do you initiate like that versus, well, you're not at CRS, but when you were at CRS, what percent do you initiate compared to somebody calling you and saying, hey, we need your help.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:30:51): I think about half of it we initiated, we would watch for things, you know ... some of it, you know, cases are situation like police shootings, you can look at some departments like, you know, you guys have had six in a row, you know, the next one's likely to go off, you know, you can preposition some of that. But some departments, you know, it's just like you, can you catch a like a bad incident, just, you know ... and I can give examples of that, but like just there's stuff where, you know, you said that couldn't possibly have happened, but it did, you know? And so, it looks really bad and it's just gonna take time to kind of process through, but you kind of know where that will end up because the, you know, the information will, will kind of even it out saying like it was, is just kind of really bad situation. I mean, there's always kind of the foundation that this is always a, you know, like a foundation of folks who are, are very suspicious of law enforcement period, that's gonna be there. But you know ... like Ferguson was a situation where it's a town of 20,000 people, had 30,000, 35,000 warrants issued the year before Michael Brown was killed. 25% of the city revenue comes from that.
Heidi Burgess (01:32:14): Whoa
Ron Wakabayashi (01:32:14): Those same proportions were for the, you know .. 21 cities are ... in the St. Louis metroplex, you know, that's a structural situation, but you could see it develop, right. Like thing, you know, like if you did anytime, like if you, if you have 20,000 people and you stopped that many to issue 35,000 warrants, then police committee relations are probably gonna be tense. And then if they learned that it's a main, you know, revenue stream for the city, not just for that town, but for all the surrounding towns, you know, then you know, it's got a lot of legs on it. Right. But it's hard to see all that stuff, you know, beforehand.
Heidi Burgess (01:33:01): I guess those are astounding numbers though.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:33:04): Yeah. But when you get into it, but it's, but you could spot some of that kind of stuff beforehand sometimes. And just know that situation you know, situations like that exist. Like I know in California we looked at like cities that disrupted and we have two kinds of cities in California, what they call charter cities, you know and ... you know ... like public law city. So in the state constitution, you can form a city and there's a template for how the city is set up, you know ... council districts and all that stuff. So you have a general law city, and then you have, you know charter cities, when you looked at the cities that, that had major disruptions, they were all general law cities, the general ... law cities all called for at large elections. So you had very little minority representation in that structure, the charter law cities had district elections. So you had ...
Heidi Burgess (01:34:08): Interesting.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:34:10): And then you can sort it out and going, you know, but we backed into that when we just saw these cities disrupting and this happened to kind of like, look at the charter general and because we knew the council setups and like that's part of the problem.
Heidi Burgess (01:34:27): It's fascinating.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:34:28): But then you can back up and say, hey, this was structural.
Heidi Burgess (01:34:33): Right. So, it sounds like if people feel like they have a voice they're less likely to riot or to be disruptive than if they don't feel like they have a voice.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:34:46): Yeah. So engagement is critical
Heidi Burgess (01:34:51): And they must think that having a representative is adequate engagement, adequate representation, which is interesting to me.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:35:02): Yeah. Well, just generally, like there's gonna be conflict, you know, I view conflict as natural. In fact, it's useful right to, you know, help identify issues. But like, you know, it's like when my son was a little kid and I won every checker games we played eventually turned the board over, said we aren't playing.
Heidi Burgess (01:35:20): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:35:21): I ain't playing that, you know? Yeah. One time he tried to say like, I could jump two spaces, you know, he changed the rules. I mean, those are all metaphors for how I plays out in communities.
Heidi Burgess (01:35:34): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:35:35): So, yeah, no, I do think engagement is like a ... critical issue. Like because people don't have to win all the time. They just, but if you feel, if they feel like you can't win.
Heidi Burgess (01:35:47): Yeah. Never can win. Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:35:49): What does that put you? So brain surgery.
Heidi Burgess (01:36:00): It takes skill. However, I don't think that I would want to walk into one of those situations, even being a trained mediator. I think that it takes a lot of skill and experience that.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:36:15): You know, it is just interesting to me, like among my colleagues in CRS, like if we were, if we were on the ground of the public protest and then, you know, like you have an incident, you know, like, and you see the crowd stamped or you hear a shot or whatever, there are those of us who run toward it. And there are those who run away from it.
Heidi Burgess (01:36:37): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:36:38): You know, and that's just, I don't know how to explain that, you know, that distinction, but I know who's who.
Heidi Burgess (01:36:45): And CRS has both?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:36:47): Well, we have both, and I think that's in every population, you know ... I've learned, I run toward it. And that may not always be smart. I'm probably one of the people that are gonna get killed, you know, doing that kind of stuff. But it's ... really pretty reflexive that I saw that, you know, how people react. And then, you know, when you start looking in different situations, like, you know, protests, protests environments versus celebratory riots, you know, like sometimes you ... have rights because there's a championship.
Heidi Burgess (01:37:28): Oh. Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:37:28): Okay. So you have like in a celebratory crowd, if something happens, you know, you go bang, they run away from it in a protest crowd, they run toward it.
Heidi Burgess (01:37:40): Right. It's I never understood celebratory for protests. I don't know. It just.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:37:45): It's not protests, but it is, you know, it's ...
Heidi Burgess (01:37:47): Just, yeah. It's just mob behavior.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:37:50): Yeah. And yeah, they'll sit fire to beds and do all, yeah.
Heidi Burgess (01:37:55): Tear down the goal post
Ron Wakabayashi (01:37:57): It's called alcohol and testosterone.
Heidi Burgess (01:37:59): Oh yeah. It's probably so
Ron Wakabayashi (01:38:03): It's a dangerous mix.
Heidi Burgess (01:38:05): I'd agree with you there. I'm looking at our questions to see if we can get through most of them before our time runs up. I should check with you though. Since we got a late start, we're running later than we were planning. Are you okay with that?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:38:21): I'm okay with that. I'm good. At 2:30 we're you know, I've got DCP again.
Heidi Burgess (01:38:25): This is okay. Oh, two in one day
Ron Wakabayashi (01:38:30): It's just one. Yeah. This is an unusual day.
Heidi Burgess (01:38:34): Alright so let's see here. We talked about administrative changes, question about case decisions who decides, what cases you take. Is it the regional director or the conciliators or the boss in Washington who was making the decision about what cases get taken and which don't?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:39:02): I think that's inconsistent in the agency, like ... and it's gonna vary now there's variables, like, you know, while I was there, like I had my conciliators in region nine were the A team, I mean, like, you know, I had, I mean, they were better than me. I trusted them completely and I have this view that, that every person would handle a case a little differently that that's necessary. And so, if they spot the case that they wanted, you know almost a hundred percent of the time meant, you know, it's their case. Technically it was the regional director's call. I, you know, and there's a few rare times when I would change it. But, generally I would do that. Now we've had situations where we've had Washington jump in and say, no, you know, we want that case nationally.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:39:57): And generally I would resist that, because they're too far away from it. I mean, the reason why they want a case is political. And I would, I would want some like I understand we have to go into a mode or we need to kind of really keep you informed on what's going on, but you know, one, you can't do a case from that distance. And two you know, you just don't know the, the nuances and the relationships and all that, but they have the authority to do that. So on occasions, you know, they would ... do it most, you know, they didn't do it in my region, but in other regions it happened they'd take it over and ...
Heidi Burgess (01:40:37): Were these real high-profile cases like Ferguson or...?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:40:45): Yeah, yeah. Ferguson and Baltimore, you know, you know, and in large part it didn't turn out.
Heidi Burgess (01:40:52): Well, what about Portland?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:40:55): Portland, you know, was, was weird because they ... the jurisdiction on Portland was not clear because like the, you know, in the end, you know, like when they got really nasty, it was really Proud Boys and Antifa they're going at each other in open space. It was pretty much mutual combat, I mean, even called it then state out. So ...
Heidi Burgess (01:41:15): It started out as I remember, as an attack on the federal building, which put feds in an interesting position there.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:41:24): Yeah. But it, but the jurisdictional thing didn't jump out, you know, because it was in that whole wake after George Floyd.
Heidi Burgess (01:41:30): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:41:31): And there was so much going on in George Floyd that, you know, like, you know, we were spread all over. So we're looking at what cases Portland part of that bias is that we had a conciliator that covered that area, who, that was not his, his strong suit to do.
Heidi Burgess (01:41:56): Oh.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:41:57): And so, I think he was intimidated by the situation. Actually with Portland, you know, like it, because that's stayed live since, I left CRS, we've picked it up in the bridges project.
Heidi Burgess (01:42:12): Oh
Ron Wakabayashi (01:42:13): You know, because that one is ... extraordinarily violent and persistent. But it's, it's really complicated. And part of the Portland situation is like the way they're structured. Like most cities, you know, like when you talk about law enforcement, we kind of have a straight line of authority, but like in Portland, the mayor, this mayor has supervision over the, police department, you know? No, I'm sorry. A councilman has supervision over the police department.
Heidi Burgess (01:42:51): Oh.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:42:52): And the mayor has ...
Heidi Burgess (01:42:53): One particular councilman?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:42:55): Yeah. The, because it's a structure of it is that the departments are supervised by different council members, you know? And so they've ... got a problem there because the ... two elected are competitive and noncooperative, so there's a lot of dynamics you know, I'm just saying there's a lot of dynamics in Portland that aren't pretty unusual. I mean, most cities, it's a straight line, you know, like the mayor or city manager, this one is weirdness it's conflictual. So, we're ... talking to Portland because, but, and part of it is, is we looked at Portland because it's persisted, but even in Portland, the ... amount of, of engagement of Proud Boys and ... Antifa has decreased what we're keeping an eye on is that the same folks are running up the I-5 corridor, and you can see replications in Tacoma, Olympia, and Seattle.
Heidi Burgess (01:44:08): Wow.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:44:09): You know, and actually some replication in California, in fact ...
Heidi Burgess (01:44:13): What's their goal, what are they trying to accomplish?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:44:19): What, like kind of the short term would be RAHOWA, you know, racial holy war.
Heidi Burgess (01:44:25): Oh, great.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:44:27): You know, I mean, that's part of the ideology, right? That's part of, you know, Turner diaries and all that other stuff. So that's in the ideology. Interesting. The guy who's kind of the ... main agitator is a Korean guy, you know, in ... Proud Boys and goes by the moniker of rooftop Korean.
Heidi Burgess (01:44:49): Wow.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:44:51): So, the current CRS is not literate on all this stuff. It's different. There's ... a time when a lot of the people who were conciliators came out of a street conciliation background and we can talk kind of a common language and like new stuff, like even when they had like Unite the Right 2 in Washington, you know, from out here in the west coast, we called this. So like, that's gonna be a non-event you know, and, but headquarters picked it up and they pulled in the team and they deployed, you know, and we said, look, and they asked us for help, like, okay, we'll do the social media monitoring for you guys, but it's a non-event, you know, like the groups after the first unit, right. They all broke up. They're not talking to each other, you know, it's not gonna come together, but they didn't have the kind of experience to be able to read that, you know.
Heidi Burgess (01:46:08): Why is that are, is the recruitment different or people who are interested in applying different?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:46:19): I don't know how that shift happened. I mean, like, we've went to different kinds of hiring sort of trends, you know, like, you know, at different grade levels, you know, when I came in, you know, like the, all the, it was controversial when I came in, because all the RDS that came in there was about five of us came in at a certain time and we were off from the outside. And I think in general, it sort of set back because most of the people did not have backgrounds in ... street reconciliation and I think were, and were misreading situations, prior to that, you know, like the old timers, you know ... like CRS grew up in the streets.
Heidi Burgess (01:47:07): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:47:09): And I think that was, I mean, it was kind of like there were things about like, there were things that the old timers did that you shouldn't do, you know? But
Heidi Burgess (01:47:19): Give me an example of one that's making you chuckle in your mind.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:47:23): Well, we had one guy, like there was, you know, like you had like black civil rights march going down. And then it was going to intersect with a Klan group coming across the road. They were gonna collide. So our guy went to the March organized and said, you know, my dad he's a minister. Would you mind man like if, we stopped him, I'd like to do a prayer, so a fed should not do that, but he did that to stop the, the march so that Klan guys would go past and they wouldn't have the confrontation. So I know I said like, you're not supposed to do that man, but I'm glad you did, you know, he is like, so I think, you know, like that, that's one of the times where I say I'd rather be scolded afterwards.
Heidi Burgess (01:48:14): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:48:15): You know because as a fed, you shouldn't do that. But ...
Heidi Burgess (01:48:23): It worked.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:48:24): Yeah. You know, but it's not something that we wanna train.
Heidi Burgess (01:48:30): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:48:32): But ... I you know, like I talked to just one guy, Bob Hughes when he was, he was in that original bunch that was brought on and he said like, you know, I applied and says like, you know, I met and they gave me this letter that said I was appointed. And then they said like, and Bob, you have Alabama go. And then what he says, well, we're expecting that the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act is gonna have some pushback, you know, help deal with that, you know? And I'm amazed at that early bunch man like, I ... would feel like what do I do man. You know, I mean, he was, Bob was a white guy from Seattle area, you know? He, he kind of became agile by necessity. He was, he was a great conciliator.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:49:29): And then we went through the period of saying like, you know, there's too much like wild west, if we need to have a standard operating procedure. So they went in and, you know, I think that's generally good. And even the idea of helping, not standardized, but framing what our methodology is like, because when I came in, there was not any real procedure on how we deal with protests. And so like I did the thing, that thing, the protests have three, they have four stages. They have an assembly stage, they have a marching stage, they have a rally stage and a disband stage and each has different characteristics. So if our work plan, address the characteristics of those stages, we would have, you know, a better work plan. So this developed and that's what they still use today, you know? But those were the old marches that go from point A to point B. People don't do that anymore. You know, it's kind of, you go through social media, you show up here and then you divide up folks and they go off into 10 different directions, you know? And they don't tell anybody where they're going. It's different ... it's a different ...
Heidi Burgess (01:50:40): There used to be organizers and there aren't anymore far as I can tell, it's all spontaneous now organized over Twitter and Facebook.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:50:49): Yeah. But they call it flat organizations, but there really are organizers, you know, it really is planned out to the extent of different directions and they really kind of intersect at the end. So they know what they're doing. What they've learned is like, you know, that CNN will follow you for five hours, you know, and you get five hours of media, you know, it, I think it's smart from a tactical standpoint, but ... I think you have to work it differently. I mean, I think, you know, you can figure out where they're going, you can plot where they're going, you know, there's there's stuff, but it's ... they're just people who are interested in doing things like who wants to plot out a march. I mean, what would you do? You know? I mean, because I mean my background early is as an organizer, right. So it's, it's kind of like saying, you know, what would it's ... fascinating. I still keep ties with like, you know, like, there's a group of ... the people who work with Cesar Chavez and we still stay in touch and share stuff. And some of the people from them like, you know, I mean there's folks from that group now that now teach ... at Harvard Marshall Ganz teaches at Harvard right.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:52:10): You know, and ... I had some of my staff take his classes.
Heidi Burgess (01:52:16): Cool.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:52:18): You know, so yeah, it's ... a different CRS in this time period, you know, we'll see what happens like during, you know, after they went to standardizing things like that, then we started get this fear where we're under attack. We were once under attack because Janet Reno actually ordered us deployed for a thing that was not jurisdictional.
Heidi Burgess (01:52:43): Oh
Ron Wakabayashi (01:52:43): Congress got mad and beat us up. And then, you know, when Trump came in and we were on the Heritage Foundation hit list, so we were zeroed out on the presidential budget. So, but you know ... the Congress kept us alive, but then the leadership, you know, through retirements, because we couldn't hire much that was off frozen. The leadership that came in were not field experienced. And I think part of the pressure was to survive and just provide the, the kind of service metrics, you know, that's where the service thing shows up, you know, and doing only kind of pretty restricted regimented cases. And I think in the last, so eight years, it's the culture's changed, you know? Because I think Tommy Battles and I were the last of the old timers to, you know, to hang on there and you know, I mean, clearly we're a retirement age ... but there's some young people that I think are really extraordinarily good, but they're, they're being stifled, I think by all this stuff, I think they'll leave.
Heidi Burgess (01:54:06): Huh.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:54:06): You know, I hope not, but you know, it's, we'll see, we, you know, some Paul Monteiro is the new nominee to head the agency. I mean, Paul's a good guy. I mean, I hope he can help, you know, resuscitate it because I know
Heidi Burgess (01:54:24): The current director is leaving?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:54:26): There is no current director.
Heidi Burgess (01:54:28): Oh, okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:54:30): It's been unfilled for a long time.
Heidi Burgess (01:54:33): Ah why?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:54:34): We have an acting or we have the deputy serving, you know, and de facto in that kind of role.
Heidi Burgess (01:54:41): Is it one of the appointees that Biden just hasn't gotten around to appointing yet? Or why is it unfilled?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:54:47): Biden was slow in appointing, you know, I think took a year to get a nominee and Paul is actually a former acting director.
Heidi Burgess (01:54:56): Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:54:57): Paul was a former Obama staffer, you know, and he's a good guy, but he doesn't come out of the field, but you know, I don't think, you know, that role is to play an external role largely, you know, but our deputy is really a very nice woman, but, and is earnest and is a good manager, but has no field experience. I mean, she made, she's made efforts to learn, but there's just so much to learn, you know?
Heidi Burgess (01:55:29): Yeah. It is brain surgery.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:55:31): Well, the it's more in its volume, the complexity of what country the country is and like the people and different communities. I mean, like when I came to CRS, I thought I understood the country. But like, as you get into different cases and different parts of the country, you know, you learn like, I don't know this country, this place is immense, you know? And I come back to like, you know what, I don't know, Los Angeles.
Heidi Burgess (01:55:59): Wow.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:56:00): It's, you know, it's complex.
Heidi Burgess (01:56:02): Yeah. I'm looking at our time and we're at 1:55. Let me see if there's anything else that we really ought to cover. Anything else that you wanna say about social media that we haven't talked about? We've talked about how you used it to monitor.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:56:27): Well, and ... I talked about the active and passive difference and how I think feds will be kept out of it. And I would say that, you know, there are other people who won't be kept out of it. And for CRS, we ought to stay in touch with those folks, you know, because we can't, you know, we're not gonna be allowed to do that ourselves, you know, at least active social media, passive, you know, we should be doing that. That's that's permissible and ... even like, you know, like I think training people to at least be able to call out numbers to be able to sort it up because you can get an awful lot out of it, even, even the passive way.
Heidi Burgess (01:57:08): What, if anything, can you do about the false rumors that tend to get spread on social media and fake information about what's going on?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:57:19): You know, that's, that's difficult because you know, it ... runs through certain silos, right? I mean, like it's not everyone who, you know, it tends to, to kind of reinforce people who already have a predisposition and runs through those kind of circles. So it's not the kind of rumor control where you worry about the, it infecting just the kind of general population because that doesn't happen. I think the kind of rumor control I'm interested in, it's like, like, in real time, like if you're you have an immediate incident, like the idea of having like a ... community command post, and I think you can accomplish that on, on zoom, but you know, you might notice that like CRS is prohibited from using zoom.
Heidi Burgess (01:58:08): Oh it is?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:58:09): Yeah. And so, you know, the, I mean there's other platforms you could use, but some of those other platforms are more unwieldy and not universal where you can get your parties in, you know, I mean you have to have their phone numbers in an advance. You have to, you know, you can't set up quickly zoom. You could, I mean, you need phone numbers as well, but zoom, you could set up, you know.
Heidi Burgess (01:58:31): Why is it prohibited from using zoom, but it can use other equivalents?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:58:37): It's ... those regulations. I mean, I think if you push it enough, we probably can get a workaround, but in it's essentially because we're in the Department of Justice and there's a sensitivity to law enforcement doing that stuff and the prohibition and it's largely because we're in, if we were in a different department, we probably could do it. It's you know, and you learned that after a while first you think this applies to the whole of government? No, there's some things that, because justice is justice. I mean, there's, there's pluses to being housed in justice, but there's pluses in, if we were independent, you know, originally we were commerce.
Heidi Burgess (01:59:20): Really? I didn't know that.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:59:21): Yeah. Yeah. Because we, you know, the commerce clause was the main thing right to give us entry.
Heidi Burgess (01:59:29): Okay. But it did come out of 1964 civil rights act. Did it not? Okay. And I thought all of that tied into justice, but... apparently not?
Ron Wakabayashi (01:59:40): No, we were like, our regions are commerce regions still.
Heidi Burgess (01:59:44): Oh, okay. I didn't realize that either.
Ron Wakabayashi (01:59:48): Yeah. I mean, they're not that much different, but they're...
Heidi Burgess (01:59:50): And are the regions the same as they were originally, I thought that you or somebody else had told me that regions had collapsed. There were just some big regions.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:00:01): Yeah. Now there's only three groupings. Well like what I had, when I left, I had three regions, you know, I spent most of my career career with Western, you know, what we call Western region and then, but like as different retirements took place, I took over, you know, the Pacific Northwest and the mountain region.
Heidi Burgess (02:00:21): So the Western region originally was just like California.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:00:27): No, it's Guam and Hawaii.
Heidi Burgess (02:00:31): Oh yeah. Forgot about those.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:00:33): Arizona and Nevada.
Heidi Burgess (02:00:35): Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:00:37): You know, and it's one of the harder reasons because you know, we got the, I got the same time zone spread. Right. As you know, if you had the whole, you know, continental US.
Heidi Burgess (02:00:48): Wow. So plus there's a little bit of distance between Alaska and Hawaii.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:00:54): Yeah. And then Alaska, you know, and there's places like, you know, like there's political things where you don't go to Alaska or Hawaii very often just because it becomes more suspect as a junket.
Heidi Burgess (02:01:06): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:01:08): You know
Heidi Burgess (02:01:09): That's, that's where zoom would be particularly useful, but...
Ron Wakabayashi (02:01:14): Yeah. Yeah.
Heidi Burgess (02:01:20): Let me see what else we have skipped over here. Were there any interagency issues where you were told to stay in your lane and stop stepping on the toes of I don't know, FBI or civil rights arm of justice or commerce or whatever.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:01:45): I don't have one with the civil rights arm, although, you know, we did coordinate, like I was, I was very active in Arizona during [Sheriff] Arpaio. And so were they, and ... we very consciously kept a separation between us. So we did coordinate that. Like whenever I was in Arizona, I would, I would check off with them just so that we wouldn't end up in the same space just to not even confuse it.
Heidi Burgess (02:02:14): Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:02:15): During the Trump administration, you know, we had US Attorneys that would, would not want us in certain cases and demand that we go, you know, leave or not go in. And ... this is kind of one of the examples I have, like our leadership signed an MOU with them that we would coordinate a plan with the US Attorney before we entered, which would give them de facto veto.
Heidi Burgess (02:02:52): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:02:54): And so I had one ... US Attorney in particular that veto did you know are coming in there. And I do think that was, you know, not motivated by programmatic reasons. Yeah. You know, and I was, I was, in fact, my resigning or you know, retiring from CRS was tied to that. Like, I ... was in sense that they created that MOU.
Heidi Burgess (02:03:26): Ah,
Ron Wakabayashi (02:03:27): You know, because I think that just violates our own integrity mean like by statute we're an independent agency, you know, I think that violated it. And ... I asked to have a conversation about that. They said yes. And they never did. . . . So I said, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm at this age already, you know, I don't wanna take it any further.
Heidi Burgess (02:03:51): So was that the only issue that caused you to leave or were there other ones too?
Ron Wakabayashi (02:03:56): No, I think age was a large part, you know, like right. You know I...
Heidi Burgess (02:04:11): Although you're still doing the work
Ron Wakabayashi (02:04:12): Well, no, but I was 75 when I retired.
Heidi Burgess (02:04:06): Whoa. Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:04:07): I was,
Heidi Burgess (02:04:07): I guess you are that now?
Ron Wakabayashi (02:04:09): No, I'm 78 now. So no, I mean like the, I mean, it just worked out like to me, you know, like the definition of work and play is the thing there, expenditures of energy and for I'm just really fortunate for overwhelmingly my career was just fun. You know, it was, you know, like it was a challenge to work in some of these case situations to be involved with so many of the people like it ... was really, you know, I mean, I would've paid to work there, you know, it ... you know, I mean, it ... was really an extraordinary experience. I mean, I'm really blessed. You know, I don't think most people get careers like that.
Heidi Burgess (02:04:58): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:05:00): You know? So, you know, I you know, like the world isn't perfect, but you know, it came pretty close, you know? And so I didn't ... want to retire, you know, it's even now, like, I'm not, I'm not sure I understood what retirement really means. Everything. I think it's a financial issue and I have enough retirements and social security and all that ... I'm fortunate that way, you know, it's, I'm not anxious about like, you know, breakfast tomorrow or, you know, I have no debt, you know, so it's pretty easy, but so I could be, selfish and like do things that I still think are fun.
Heidi Burgess (02:05:49): Right.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:05:52): You know, and I, you know, I mean, I like watching football on TV, but, you know, and the pandemic prevents me from traveling, because that makes me scared. But as soon as I get free, boy
Heidi Burgess (02:06:09): I'm with you there.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:06:11): Yeah. Isn't that don't you wanna get out? I mean, I'm getting cabin fever.
Heidi Burgess (02:06:17): Right. I'm really lucky that I live in a gorgeous place, but it would be nice to get out. This is strikes me as an up the place to stop. I have really enjoyed talking to you and very much appreciate your willingness to share, all that you've shared. I guess one more question I should ask is in the back of your mind, are you thinking, gee, she should have asked.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:06:48): That's a good question. Like, that's kind of the question I ask at the end of like, like personnel interviews is there, I should have asked you, I think you could asked me what the meaning of life is.
Heidi Burgess (02:06:59): Okay.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:07:00): Oh, that's, that's the only one you missed and I don't have an answer for that, you know?
Heidi Burgess (02:07:06): Actually think you did have an answer for that, having fun and doing good work.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:07:11): Yeah. It's that. And I think, that, you know, like for most of us living now, in spite of all the, the stuff that's around, we've lived pretty blessed lives and we've lived largely in our lives with having running water, having electricity not being hungry. I mean, our microwave was with, had to go get fixed and that was an inconvenience.
Heidi Burgess (02:07:44): <laugh>
Ron Wakabayashi (02:07:45): So, if you really sit back, like ... I'm, I'm just really fortunate. Like, and so part of it is, part of my good fortune is on the backs of people who've not been so fortunate in doing the work. And, you know, I know there, you know, I said, I think I certain said earlier, I've learned most of what I know from parties that we worked with, you know, who've gone through real hardships, like, you know, this, the group of women that, you know, and this is a multicultural multiracial group of women who've lost their children to violence. I learned so much from them, you know, and ... just how deep an experience it is. Like for those who are unfortunate to like lose a kid, you know, I'm so glad I didn't or I haven't had to go through that. You know, I can't imagine it, but I learned from them how strong a bond that is for folks and that, you know, like if you ever like, organize, like, you know, like for groups, just for conversationally and you know, how you count off, if you do groups by saying, okay, people who've lost a member of the family in the last year and this COVID environment, you got lots.
Heidi Burgess (02:09:14): Yeah.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:09:15): Watch how fast they bond, you know? So there's, you know, it just says a lot to me about sort of like our that there is a human nature to us. That's really powerful that we ... kind of gloss over and you know, don't pay the attention that it should, it should get, because if we did, I think we'd embrace it more, but I appreciate this opportunity too. I've you know, just because I've been so fortunate. Thanks Heidi.
Heidi Burgess (02:09:46): Well, thank you very much. And once again, we really appreciate it and I'll be letting you know about what steps are about getting this stuff posted. I'm sure it's gonna be a while. But we'll share the interviews, the videos with you if you'd like, and you're talking to Bill this afternoon, so you have plenty of contacts. I'm sure to know where this goes, but I'll keep you informed too.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:10:11): Okay.
Heidi Burgess (02:10:12): Really enjoyed it. Great.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:10:14): Me too. Yeah. You take care. Say safe
Heidi Burgess (02:10:17): Thank you much.
Ron Wakabayashi (02:10:18): Okay.
Speaker 3 (02:10:18): Bye. Bye. Bye.
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Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project Phase 2 As a public service, Beyond Intractability hosts this site in conjunction with the earlier Phase I of the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project. IRB statement for Phase II interviews “Research conducted pursuant to Ohio State University Office of Responsible Research Practices IRB protocol 2021E0493.” |
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Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project Phase 2 As a public service, Beyond Intractability hosts this site in conjunction with the earlier Phase I of the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project. IRB statement for Phase II interviews “Research conducted pursuant to Ohio State University Office of Responsible Research Practices IRB protocol 2021E0493.” |
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