U. S. Agency Takes a Spot in the Middle : Mediation: The Justice Department's Community Relations Service works quietly to resolve racially sensitive issues. Four major civil rights efforts are under way here.

By KENNETH REICH

July 21, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In the aftermath of recent racial incidents, the U. S. Justice Department’s Community Relations Service has launched four major civil rights mediation efforts in the Los Angeles area.

Beyond seeking to bring police chiefs and minority group representatives together to find ways to avoid the excessive use of force reflected in the Rodney G. King beating, the federal mediators are trying to ease Korean-black and Cambodian-Latino tensions and to placate concerns over a commercial infringement on Indian burial grounds in Marina del Rey.

The agency, which has six mediators assigned in the four-state region made up of California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii, has spent “over a third of our efforts in Los Angeles” during the past year, according to Julian Klugman, the service’s regional director for 21 years, based in San Francisco.

“It’s obviously very important nationally that we devote resources to Los Angeles,” Klugman said in an interview. “Lessons learned there will be applicable elsewhere.

Since the beating of King on March 3 by Los Angeles police officers, Klugman and Vermont McKinney, a former Jordan High School basketball star and community organizer who has been with the CRS for seven years, have worked behind the scenes to organize discussions between delegations of police chiefs and minority groups.

The mediators are planning a second session between the two groups on Aug. 1 at Cal State Los Angeles in hopes of working out procedures to stem excessive force by police officers throughout the county. The first meeting, held last month in San Pedro, produced an agreement to form a permanent working group to tackle issues aggravating police-minority relations.

“The hard work is to get people to agree to come,” Klugman said. “By the time you get them there, they want to succeed.”

In the current police chief-minority meetings, he adds, “Everyone feels a need to see something positive come out of them.”

Besides the meetings on police-minority relations, the CRS has these other efforts under way in the Los Angeles area:

* Conciliator Stephen Thom has been involved in talks with both Korean-Americans and African-Americans to find a compromise in the dispute and boycott over several grocery store shootings in which both black customers and Korean merchants have died. Thom said he hopes for an announcement soon on steps to alleviate tensions, but gave no indication what it might be.

* In Long Beach, CRS staff members have been in contact with participants in deadly feuding between Cambodian-American and Latino gang members in which 10 people have been killed and more than 50 been injured in the last two years.

* In Marina del Rey, the CRS is attempting to reconcile members of the Gabrieleno Indian tribe and commercial interests in an issue of infringement on Indian burial grounds. Thom reports progress, but doesn’t specify what may take place to resolve the issue.

Klugman said that these are only the most notable of his agency’s recent interventions in the Los Angeles area.

“We’ve also done a lot of work in the schools, in Hawthorne, at Fremont High School and other places,” he said. “We’ve talked to the parties in a tenants matter in Venice. Altogether, we’ve had at least some involvement in probably over 50 disputes of all kinds in the metropolitan area in the last year.”

The CRS is designed to operate in a low-key manner, strictly as a mediator, or less formally, as a conciliator. Separated from the law enforcement functions of the Justice Department, it never brings charges, engages in finger-pointing or testifies in court and seldom issues public reports.

What the CRS does is try to bring contending parties together to discuss solutions to their differences. It acts as the facilitator of the discussions, but usually does not propose solutions of its own.

The agency was proposed by then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson in 1959 and came into existence as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The official mission of the service “is to help communities and persons therein to cope with disputes, disagreements and difficulties relating to discriminatory practices based on race, color or national origin, and thus help them to achieve peaceful progress toward securing for all their citizens a life of justice and equal opportunity.”

About half of all CRS interventions are at the request of one side of a dispute, while the rest are initiated by the CRS itself when it reads or hears of an incident. The San Francisco office files about 300 “alerts” a year of racial or ethnic disputes in the four-state area, and sends mediators out in about 150 cases.

McKinney, who has a wide range of contacts among both minority groups and law enforcement in Southern California, frequently works in the region. Recently, he has been in Hesperia, seeking to ease tensions after interracial fights in school.

A typical McKinney mission was to Palm Springs two years ago, where blacks had sued in federal court to compel what they called a more fair selection of cheerleaders at Palm Springs High School. Blacks also complained that blacks were seldom selected for the baseball team.

Before the suit came to trial, McKinney worked out a mediation agreement under which the procedures were changed and more blacks were selected.

“We talk about the issues,” he said. “We find out if the parties are amenable to our process. Are people amenable to working with us?”

The CRS representatives try “not to get too out front and make ourselves the issue,” McKinney said.

“We are a conduit and a catalyst, pushing for changes that people perceive as being fair,” he said. “Confidentiality is usually a hallmark of our efforts.”

So, CRS officials talk to the press, but in general terms, and they never publicly blame anyone for anything.

The talks between police chiefs and minority representatives in Los Angeles are now at the “problem identification” stage, and only later could there be a formal agreement on new police procedures, Klugman said.

At the first round of meetings, the talk was sometimes “heated, but they weren’t screaming at each other,” he said. “Our intent was not to stop the protests. The protests will go on, but hopefully the resources, money and manpower will be found to assuage some of the grievances.

“The question is expectations,” he declared. “What Vermont and I have learned over the years is that people are people, they have good qualities and bad qualities and we have to be realistic. . . . Sometimes when an aggrieved group is in a minority, we have to tell them they won’t be able to obtain everything they want.”

But, he added, the CRS finds “very few outright bigots” in its mediation sessions, and usually it is possible to work things out. He and McKinney expressed optimism about solutions in Los Angeles.