Human Relations Commissions, by Brian Calfano and Valerie Martinez-Ebers (introduction)

INTRODUCTION Too Big a Task?

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he meeting room was filled to the brim with people of varying body postures. Some seemed eager to get a problem off their chest. Others seemed content to simply watch. All appeared to know that what they were about to take part in was about as familiar as a Sunday church service. This community center room had rows of chairs arranged like pews, and chairs also lined the room’s left side. At the front were a couple more rows of chairs facing the audience, but no one was yet in these seats. With the number of people milling about or already seated, several interested parties were left to stand in the hallway to listen for a bit of what this gathering might produce. No one was put off by this. It just seemed to be the normal state of affairs. As the last seat or two filled in, a few attendees huddled closely together whispering intensely about something that seemed like a life or death concern to all of them. Others milled through personal papers or the local newspaper. Several greeted each other with hugs or hearty handshakes. At 10 a.m., as if on cue, a door on the left front side of the room swung open and a line of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) personnel, including precinct captains, strode in, filling the seats in the front. They were followed by a man in a three-piece suit and cufflinks. Standing in center front, he welcomed everyone, bowed his head, and asked everyone to join in prayer. After invoking the name of Jesus Christ for wisdom and guidance over their work, the latest meeting of the Watts Gang Task Force convened.

For the next ninety minutes, police, community leaders, academics, and local clergy took part in their weekly give-and-take discussion (sometimes you might call it a passionate exchange of views) about issues ranging

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from the latest altercation between members of rival gangs in one of the neighborhood’s four public housing projects, information from LAPD precinct officers on recent arrests and other interactions the department has had with residents, and general discussion of what community members can do to help stave off disputes before they escalate. On more than a few occasions, the discussion was steered by attendees who seemed to command a great deal of respect from everyone in the room—longtime residents, most of whom had lost children to gang violence in the neighborhood. These people, with lines of experience and pain on their faces and in their eyes, offered a familiar refrain: we have to do something to get Watts out of its rut, especially the violence that robs children of their future.

And, make no mistake, violence continues to plague Watts. The area’s median age is just twenty-eight. There are long stretches—months—where the area goes without a homicide, only for innocent residents to be gunned down in sprays of bullets by passing cars. After such tragedies, task force meetings are hotbeds of grief, recrimination, and calls for calm and reconciliation. In many ways, the process is a familiar cycle, with the same participants making the same general statements, and the same police and local officials listening with intent.

But sometimes there is a break in this informal status quo. At one meeting, a Latina and her daughter, neither of whom spoke English, stood at the back of a task force meeting waiting to speak during the open comment period. Both were agitated, tired, and desperate to have those in the room (most of whom did not speak Spanish) understand their plight. An interpreter working for the city walked over to the two and ascertained what was wrong; then the interpreter lifted up a clear plastic bag with some drywall in it. The women had been eating dinner the night before in their Watts apartment when gunfire erupted outside. Bullets entered the apartment and embedded in the walls and ceiling. There was no evidence the women were targets of the shooters, but that did not matter. In a place where they did not speak the dominant language and had few, if any, contacts with community or city services to help guide them through this trying time, the bullets were a reminder of the women’s vulnerability.

Equally as shocking as the women’s story was the palpable lack of empathy or acknowledgment of the issue by many of the other neighborhood

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residents in attendance, most of whom were African American. Although Watts’ population is roughly three-quarters Latino, it is African Americans, with their relative advantage in leveraging community resources like houses of worship into political representation and influence, who are arguably Watts’ most visible representatives. This arrangement can leave Latinos without a sense that city and community institutions are interested in their well-being, which is only reinforced by language and cultural barriers among new Latino immigrants.

But observing this meeting and others like it, there’s a sense that some of the concerns expressed are part of a familiar set of complaints, a litany of refrains that almost seem like a ritual for regular attendees. One wonders what, if anything, can be done to truly change the dynamic in Watts—or even among the task force, for that matter. And we are certainly not the first to document the rather circular nature of progress for racial and ethnic minorities in urban America.

Watts and its surrounding neighborhoods, what is now called South Los Angeles (a name change from the former “South Central” to disassociate the area from harsh stereotypes), are key to the lore of America’s urban centers as ungovernable cauldrons of crime and decaying infrastructure. The 1965 uprising of mainly African American residents over police abuse helped cement “Watts” as a code word for neighborhoods where blacks and other minorities burn down economic and institutional order. Even after the fires stopped in the 1960s, Watts served as an infamous symbol of gangrelated violence brought on, critics assailed, by government attempts at social engineering in the form of public housing projects. The drug-fueled shooting sprees between rival gangs and the paramilitary tactics used by the LAPD under longtime chiefs William Parker and Daryl Gates eventually brought community leaders, residents, and politicians together to attempt to find some understanding of what each group could do, working in tandem with a reformed LAPD, to address community concerns before bloodshed and unrest develops. To be sure, the community, the police, and the city have worked hard over the last thirty years to coproduce a renaissance of sorts in Watts. Like any situation, nothing is as extreme as stereotypes can make it, and this is true of Watts’s one square mile.

In fact, driving down Compton Avenue through the neighborhood, you might think that you’re in the Holy City. The street is lined with churches

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and worship centers. In the absence of a robust retail or commercial district, these churches, along with the restaurants and auto repair shops nearby, are the Watts community anchors. It’s not Wilshire Boulevard, but neither is it the den of run-down crack houses some might mentally conjure when they hear “Watts.” Neither is there the degree of blight and structural abandonment that has historically plagued northern and eastern cities such as Detroit, Baltimore, and Camden, New Jersey. The California sun and conga line of commercial jets on their approach to nearby LAX help too, giving the area a bit of the wonderland feeling the rest of Southern California exudes.

But whatever progress Watts and the surrounding communities have enjoyed, and whatever spiritual and organizational resources they bring to bear, are not enough to guarantee there will never be another civil uprising over systemic issues such as poverty, crime, and distrust of the police.

In its way, the Watts Gang Task Force resembles the larger neighborhood as a collective with potential but one that is also weighed down by the realities of trying to bring lasting, positive change to a situation where some people may be beyond the point of living out different circumstances. In some cases, the limitations may be physical, as with addictions of various types. In other instances, the challenge may be emotional and psychological, especially if one’s coping mechanisms are ill-equipped to deal with the stresses that come with poverty and concerns for safety. But trust may also be a problem—namely, lack of trust that “the system” can ever be changed to the point of bettering the lives of those who have been dealt a tough hand.

The Watts Gang Task Force exists, in part, to be a bridge between residents, police, and the City of Los Angeles. The task force was started and supported for several years by staffers at the City of Los Angeles Human Relations Commission (LAHRC). Like most of the work the LAHRC does, the task force was designed to provide an outlet for different perspectives to be heard in a respectful environment, and where community members could come to air concerns and provide input into new ways that the city and LAPD would engage residents. In this way LAHRC’s groundwork provided much of the rhetorical glue that enabled initial buy-in for the task force’s mission. But the commission was not empowered to do more than that. It is, as we demonstrate in later chapters, a commission with a mandate to foster discussion but not to dole out punishment. Ironically,

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the LAHRC came into existence as a result of recommendations following the 1965 Watts uprising, so it is perhaps apropos that the commission was a starting influence behind a task force that, while showing great promise, appears to not have the necessary answers or capacity to address the larger, structural inequalities that drive the present conditions in Watts and similar neighborhoods.

In fact, using Watts as the opening vignette in a book about human relations commissions is itself greatly instructive for the juxtaposition it provides in describing aspects of the racial, economic, and political currents that are likely too strong for any one government agency to overcome, let alone one that is limited to facilitating group discussions, as is the LAHRC. As we show throughout this book, the tasks before commissions, even where the bodies enjoy federal funding and statutory mandates for code enforcement, are much larger than government organizations can address. And yet much of society tends to assume that figuring out how to improve the lives of residents in places like Watts will be the government’s worry—the public sector’s mission is to figure out what to do with those less fortunate.

Of course, the problem with this thinking is that government cannot “do it all,” especially when systemic factors have led to present conditions.

Like the Watts Gang Task Force, human relations commissions across the country can point to specific examples where their efforts have made a positive difference, but none make a direct claim on solving the larger problems that necessitate these commissions in the first place. What’s more, it is not even clear that commissions make discernable progress in dealing with some of the major intergroup challenges their communities face.

So why write a book about these government bodies? Our reason can be summed up like this: Just because progress might be fleeting, commissions are no less important for understanding the potentials and limitations of government to right societal wrongs, one neighborhood, one issue, and one task force at a time. Like most human endeavors, the work of improving intergroup relations, deterring and punishing acts of racial discrimination, and building trust across groups from disparate backgrounds and perspectives is fluid, nonlinear, exhilarating, and heartbreaking (and perhaps all of these in a short span of time). Even in instances where improvements might be on the horizon, there are always

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those cases like the Latinas at the task force meeting who received little empathy from other community members to remind those who do this important work that their efforts typify what it means to be human.

It is for these tireless and unsung faces of local government’s best intentions that we offer this book.

Brian Calfano and Valerie Martinez-Ebers examine the history and current efforts of human relations commissions in promoting positive intergroup outcomes and enforcing antidiscrimination laws. Drawing on a wide range of theories and methods from political science, social psychology, and public administration, they assess policy approaches, successes, and failures in four cities.

“Human Relations Commissions provides historical and practical details on beginning, continuing, and expanding human relations commissions. Calfano and Martinez-Ebers aptly highlight the tools necessary for engaging and identifying potential partners to promote good relations in any community.”—Beverly Watts, former president of the International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies and executive director of the Tennessee Human Rights Commission “Calfano and Martinez-Ebers have provided needed focus on local policy making by turning to human relations commissions and examining the effects of their work—not just on the communities they are created to serve but also on the leaders themselves who invest so greatly in the effort of making our pluralistic society more congenial. This is important work.”—Gary Segura, dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA “Human Relations Commissions presents an important application of bureaucracy and public administration literatures. This in-depth assessment demonstrates that staffers embody values that are critical in making both governments and neighborhoods fair and responsive to diverse constituencies. This book should be required reading for those interested in equity, public values, and the role of local governments.”—Kenneth J. Meier, coauthor of The Politics of African American Education: Representation, Partisanship, and Educational Equity “Filling a canyon-like void in political science, urban studies, policy and administration, and more, Human Relations Commissions opens a whole new world to the relationship of HRCs and municipal governments. The synthesis of the authors’ varied methodologies and research orientations has created a fascinating book.”

—John Bretting, University of Texas at El Paso BRIAN CALFANO is associate professor of political science and journalism at the University of Cincinnati. He is a former policy advisor for the City of Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, and his many publications include A Matter of Discretion: The Politics of Catholic Priests in the United States and Ireland (2017) and Muslims, Identity, and American Politics (2018).

VALERIE MARTINEZ-EBERS is director of the Latina/o and Mexican American Studies program and University Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. A former editor of the American Political Science Review, she is coauthor of Políticas: Latina Public Officials in Texas (2008); Latino Lives in America: Making It Home (2010); and Latinos in the New Millennium: An Almanac of Opinion, Behavior, and Policy Preferences (2012), among other works.

Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky Cover image: Police in the Watts area of Los Angeles, Calif., Aug. 1965. © AP Photo

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