Mediator Interview Topic - Did other organizations or people within the community help limit the intensity of the conflict or help resolve it? Who? How?

Did other organizations or people within the community help limit the intensity of the conflict or help resolve it? Who? How?

Ozell Sutton

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

The police, they had a curfew and the police have a way of enforcing curfews among black folk. white folk can go on about their business uninterrupted, right? And yet the police run around, and every time they see a black, a car with a lot of blacks in it, they are running up there questioning that. Sticking their shot guns in the window and these kinds of things that provoke not only mistrust, but great anger. So I had to tell the governor, Rockefeller, at the time, and I said, "Governor, tonight I want you to go out in the black area with me." Naturally the rest of the staff hit the ceiling. "The governor go out there?" I say, "yeah, I'm out there and I don't know anyone more important than me." I said, "I want the governor to see how the police are conducting themselves." I said, "no mind can tell him, can describe what he's got to see. I'm not asking him to go out unprotected, his cars going to be, I'm sure, packed up with police in there. There's going to be a police car in front of him, unmarked I hope and one behind him. The governor just must see what's going on." And sure enough, he came out that night and I got in the car with him. And right in front of us was a group of blacks, five of them, who were hospital workers, right? They had a need to be coming through there. They lived in there and they got off at the hospital at 11:30 that night. So, the police immediately acted like they were criminals and violators after the curfew. The police stopped the car and, in a storm trooper kind of way, made them get out of the car, and you could hear the language, which was foul. They were called n*****s and all of that. I said, "Do you hear that governor? Do you see what I'm talking about?" He was so incensed the next morning he called together the chief of police, the head of the national guard unit, and all of those. He said, "Ozell persuaded me to get out," you see they didn't know, until then, that the governor was out in the field. Said, "Ozell persuaded me to go with him last night and I was so incensed! I just want you to know that your conduct out of there is just wild, and uncontrolled, and unnecessary." The mayor was there and he said, "Mr. Mayor, let me tell you one thing. I will take over this city. Ozell now told me there was a curfew and telling you and seeing it is a different matter. I will take over this city so quickly it will get you swimming in your head. Now I don't want any more conduct in that manner. I'm going to have the state police all out there where you are. Everybody is going to be reporting to me every 15 minutes, every time you stop a car I want to know what happened." And he talked about it, said, "Well, that group was one man and three women coming from the hospital," and they ran over there and stuck their guns in the window and made them get out of the car and were treated in such a way that nobody would want his wife treated. I am incensed by the whole thing." And the whole police methods changed after that. So I just go around describing it.

Question:
Was that a long lasting kind of change?

Answer:
Yes, because after the crisis was over the governor was insisting upon it.

Renaldo Rivera

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Question:
What is the response of the enforcement and investigatory communities to CRS' intervention?

Answer:
They have come to see us as another federal partner that can build a bridge with them if they are unable to do it at that time. It's important to be able to do that especially now, since here, in this part of the country, they have less time available to the community. They really have not logistically been able to get to talk with the communities themselves. Our outreach and solidifying relationships help shapes the kinds of questions with which they are going to be faced. We are setting up the second sets of meetings within the next several weeks, with our federal partners so they will have better understanding of the types of scenarios and cases that the community has been presenting to us so that their time is reduced in terms of how they focus on the community concerns. We are channeling information more directly around the community concerns and it's more preparatory for them. It also functions in a second way for us, systematically. We have to keep community tension levels down. It's particularly important here because community tension and escalation winds up adversely effecting the recovery effort in New York City and New Jersey. Community stability is critical to the recovery effort. If you have community instability, the recovery effort is completely retarded. If law enforcement has to deal with community instability or community tension issues, then it's diverted away from its investigatory activity. Our role has become not more expanded, but the mission is more critical. We had really solid relationships with the community groups. We are now able to move toward working with the umbrella groups in the community, again return to those, and now have merged those two, between the community advocacy groups and the umbrella groups in the communities that include Asian and Pacific Islanders in coalitions with the Muslims and South Asians. We are able to move both those two sets of sectors along with the INS and the New York Immigration Service and immigration coalition groups into better communication with the federal partners. This is the next step. All around reducing community tension, depressurizing the situation, responding to community interests and concerns, and providing avenues for dialogue between community interests and federal law enforcement.

Dick Salem

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

So we had a plan that tried to find intermediaries in these communities where perhaps someone who was trusted in that community, could help serve a warrant, so that a routine legal matter could be taken care of without police being blasted away. And in discussing this with the police chief of Richmond, California it seemed to work fine. The chief listened to us and he thanked us. He then wrote a scathing letter to Attorney General John Mitchell expressing surprise that "You would have people like this working for the Justice Department who would not have police do their required work in a required manner.” So we got complaints that way when they disagreed with what we were doing.

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