Say your neighbor’s dog routinely barks so...

Say your neighbor’s dog routinely barks so loud you can’t sleep, or your landlord won’t make repairs in your apartment. Going to court is often a long and expensive process but dispute resolution services offer a noncourtroom and virtually free alternative designed to defuse potential legal bombs through mediation and/or arbitration.

The Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center has been putting out interpersonal fires since 1990, and offers something extra: culturally sensitive services in Asian languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as in Spanish and English.

Center director Marcia Choo says dispute resolution is tough, challenging work, particularly in a city as ethnically and culturally diverse as Los Angeles. Increasingly, she says, disputes have racial overtones; disagreements between between African-Americans and Latinos are on the rise. And the tension between black and Korean communities goes on.

While many Asian cultures embrace the mediation process in their native countries (often an elder is called upon to settle conflicts) getting along with new American neighbors is an entirely different proposition, Choo say. “In the current climate in this country, people look for financial compensation or revenge when they have a dispute.” As Americans, we’re still learning how to problem-solve. Conflict resolution is still a relatively new thing here. We’re trying to educate people about a different way to deal with each other in their own communities.”

Conflict resolution garnered a flurry of media attention after the 1992 civil unrest, but Choo says real committment to human relations, in both the public and private sector, remains sluggish at best. Despite having its initial $129,000 annual budget slashed over the years (the center is funded by the ten-year-old Los Angeles County Dispute Resolution Program), Choo and her tiny staff of support people and multilingual volunteers press on.

EXAMPLE: CONFLICT BETWEEN AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY AND KOREAN CONTRACTOR

Dispute resolution is never a neat process, but here’s how one case went:

1. A group of African American construction workers pickets a site in South Central where a Korean contractor is rebuilding a burnt-out store. Picketers demand that the contractor hire local black workers. The racial tension escalates as the picketers threaten to shut down the site.

2. Choo is notified and decides to visit the site to try mediating there (paying “street calls” is not a typical conflict resolution method, but Choo says she must do whatever is necessary). Despite briefly being the target herself of racial hostility, she manages to arrange a 4 p.m. meeting at the center between the Korean contractor and the Black Contractors Assn.

3. Choo and representatives from the county Human Relations Commission, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Martin Luther King Community Dispute Resolution Center meet with the two parties. Choo frequently enlists the mediation help of other organizations.

4. Following mediation, in which Choo “equalizes” the situation by clarifying to both parties what the other wants, the Korean contractor and Robert Bridges of the BCA come to an agreement. The contractor agrees to follow RLA guidelines and hire a significant number of local residents.

5. The agreement is turned into a written agreement what would be binding in court, though mediators themselves have no legal power. Choo follows up with a call to the contractor three weeks later, and he says he is happy with how things worked out.

*

“Once they [the Korean contractor and Bridges] got past race and started talking business, about cement mixing and concrete pouring, things worked themselves out,” said Choo.

AN EXPERT’S VIEW

Communities are rubbing raw against each other, and what naturally comes out of conflict is more conflict. Small things get blown way out of proportion. But what’s developing quite wonderfully is people in those communities taking action themselves through dispute resolution. What Marcia and people like her dot is indispensible, cutting-edge work. If people aren’t shown how to resolve conflict, it just won’t happen on its own.”

--Raphael Sonenshine, visiting scholar at USC’s department for Multiethnic and Transnational studies.

*

TO GET INVOLVED: Call (213) 747-9943.

Researched by ERIN J. AUBRY / For The Times