Ex-Marine DI Finds a Niche as the City’s ‘Peacemaker’

In 1977, when the San Diego city attorney’s office needed a calm, thoughtful, non-aggressive person to help defuse neighborhood conflicts, it naturally turned to a retired Marine drill instructor with combat experience in Vietnam.

Ten years later, this unlikely pairing of man and mission is still going strong.

Jerome S. Parker, the city attorney’s first and only dispute resolution officer, is hard at work trying to resolve squabbles over barking dogs, loud music, leaning fences, blurry property lines, untrimmed trees, minor fisticuffs, and other assorted agonies of modern life.

“The goal is to keep these problems out of the criminal justice system,” said City Attorney John Witt. “We want to spare both the people and the system the time and expense of solving problems in a formal fashion.”

Parker is big (6-foot-3, 225 pounds) and gregarious and is rarely at a loss for words. But much of his job as a professional peacemaker is nonverbal.

Key is Listening

“Just listening is 9/10ths of the battle,” said the 54-year-old Parker. “Many of the people are emotionally charged up and upset, and they’ve not had a chance to talk to somebody, particularly somebody with authority.”

In the last fiscal year, the conflict resolution program handled 1,104 cases. Some cases could be dispatched with a phone call, some took months of back-and-forth with the warring parties.

“When I was a DI, I used the authoritarian approach: Do as I say or else,” Parker said with a laugh. “But that doesn’t work in civilian life. People have differences of opinion, and they want to know, ‘why, where, when and how come?’ You have to respect that.”

One of the more protracted disputes involved neighbors in Hillcrest. One family had a barking dog they loved dearly; the single mother next door had a small daughter whose bedroom window was near the dog run.

“Mr. Parker was firm, fair and consistent,” the girl’s mother recalled. “He was very calm but he impressed on everyone that we were going to resolve this. I had exhausted all other remedies through the noise abatement process when I came to him.

“It took seven months, and a number of meetings. But Mr. Parker finally convinced my neighbors to let a relative keep the dog so we could get some sleep.”

A case that was shorter involved a Scripps Ranch mother who was unable to control her teen-age son. He had been arrested several times, including for assaulting a police officer, and had vandalized the family home and threatened his mother.

Both ‘Surprised’

“I was intimidated at the thought of dealing with the city attorney’s office,” she said. “And my son had a great deal of anger. But both of us were surprised to find someone who generated the kind of warmth that Mr. Parker did. He talked to us about communication and about counseling.”

Her son graduated from high school two weeks ago, and the future is now more hopeful. “He’s always talking about, ‘Mr. Parker said this,’ or ‘Mr. Parker said that,’ ” the mother said.

Parker’s cases cover the entire city.

“A neighborhood dispute in La Jolla and Point Loma is just as tense and angry as one in Southeast,” Parker said. “The only difference is that when people from La Jolla and Point Loma come in for a conference, they sometimes bring their attorneys.”

Attorneys aren’t the only weapons that people have brought to Parker’s office in the Executive Building across the street from City Hall.

In a North Park noise dispute, one woman brought a concealed knife, and the other had a handgun in her purse. In an East San Diego flap, one neighbor was afraid to go to the other’s home for a reconciliation dinner for fear he’d be poisoned.

“Most people just want some recognition that their pride or self-esteem has been injured by the other party,” Parker said. “They won’t phrase it like that at first, but once they begin discussing the problem you realize that’s what they want. The goal is get them to recognize it, as well as the other party.”

Vietnam Veteran

A growing number of disputes have come from the city’s burgeoning Indochinese community, an interesting turn of events for Parker, who served as a platoon sergeant during the late 1960s in Vietnam, including at Khe Sanh.

“I know some of the veterans have some animosity toward the Indochinese, but I’ve never been that way,” he said. “I’ve always felt they were swept up in something they couldn’t understand and couldn’t control anymore than the Marines could.”

A native of Baltimore, Parker spent 20 years in the Corps, retiring in 1973 as a gunnery sergeant. He served tours of duty in San Diego County at both Marine Corps Recruit Depot and Camp Pendleton.

He likes Clint Eastwood as the platoon sergeant in “Heartbreak Ridge” and says “Platoon” is an accurate portrayal of the Vietnam War, except that it overemphasized the drug usage.

“In my outfit the motto was: alert and alive,” Parker said. “You stay alert and you stay alive. None of my men used drugs. I think the military drug problem started after 1967.”

For his final three years at Camp Pendleton, Parker was a drug rehabilitation counselor and after retirement he became a counselor for the Model Ex-Offenders Program in San Diego. He was selected as dispute resolution officer from among 109 applicants.

Since he retired as a Marine, Parker received a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science and a master’s in counseling, both from National University. He served on the board of directors of the Golden Hill Meditation Center and sometimes refers cases to the center.

Married with three daughters, Parker lives in Encanto with his wife, Mildred. He is paid $28,620 a year.

Duties of the Job

Parker’s job entails listening to the combatants individually, searching out the facts independently, and then getting the two sides together to search for solutions, possibly outside counseling. Sitting on Parker’s desk is the United Way Directory listing local social service agencies.

Exact statistics don’t exist, but Parker puts his success rate at 80%. Hard-core cases that defy solution are referred for prosecution. Most cases are referred by the city attorney’s staff but sometimes one or both disputants contacts Parker.

“You must be absolutely objective,” Parker said. “Even the table has to be objective. That’s why we have a round table, so everybody feels equal. Anyone at the head of the table feels powerful and we don’t want that.

“You train yourself to be neutral. In mediation people pick up everything. If your body language favors one person, or if you look at one more than the other, then you could turn the other person off, and that’s detrimental to resolving disputes.”

What are the hardest disputes to resolve?

“Family disputes,” Parker said quickly. “People find it very difficult to forgive a family member for outrageous behavior. They’ll forgive a stranger before they’ll forgive a relative. The ice is the hardest to break, but once it’s broken, the bond is powerful.”

And is there a secret to settling disputes?

“Teach people it’s a lot less expensive to be friends than enemies,” he said.