Agency on Race Issues in Spotlight

The Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, the city agency taking the lead in trying to defuse tensions at a San Fernando Valley elementary school, is also the subject of a new report concluding that the agency lacks focus and has done little more than produce a calendar and an essay contest.

Beyond the essay contest--which itself was criticized--the commission has had an uneventful, 32-year career marked by few interventions into racial problems, hardly any research and little or no follow-up, according to a study by two USC researchers.

In other words, a city commission with great potential has become largely irrelevant, according to the report.

“It’s not possible for a little commission to make it so that everyone gets along in the city,” said Philip J. Ethington, a USC history professor who wrote the study with Christopher West, a doctoral candidate. “But it should be a forceful body that does concrete things, and it could be a touchstone.”

The report, to be released at a morning news conference today, makes several recommendations that already are being embraced by the commission staff.

The authors suggest that the commission focus on intergroup conflict and injustice and on intergroup relations. They also recommend that the commission adopt a systematic approach to conducting research and to translating that research into strategic policies and programs.

Joe Hicks, a veteran civil rights advocate who took over as executive director of the commission in 1997, said he is attempting to redefine the way human relations work is conducted and how the commission does its job.

To that end, Hicks spent much of Monday at Burton Elementary School, where tensions have been elevated ever since an assault on Principal Norman Bernstein. Bernstein says he was beaten unconscious last week by two men who told him they didn’t want a white principal at the Panorama City campus.

Hicks spent Monday afternoon in a budget meeting with the mayor’s staff, trying to get more than $1 million for next year’s commission budget. (The report recommends more city funding for the commission.)

“We think the recommendations make a lot of sense, and they are, frankly, the kinds of things I was thinking about as I was contemplating taking this job,” Hicks said. “I did not want to preside over some warm and fuzzy thing that celebrated peoples’ cultural holidays and that’s about it. That’s not me.”

Hicks has five field team members working in Pacoima and South Los Angeles. He has implemented a human relations program for teenagers, initiated by Councilman Mike Feuer. And he plans to convene hearings this summer to determine the state of race relations in Los Angeles so he can prepare one-, three-, and five-year human relations plans for the city.

All of these projects are welcomed by the report’s authors, who say that for most of its existence, the commission has operated without clear--or attainable--goals. It hasn’t even kept track of its activities. In conducting their research, the report’s authors found copies of meeting minutes, reports and materials at the home of a longtime commissioner.

The authors found that the commission suffered from a lack of money and staffing, but also observed that opportunities “were squandered,” Ethington said.

The commission spent far too much time on matters unrelated to human relations. At one meeting, commissioners discussed increased parking fees in Griffith Park after a speaker brought the matter to their attention. They decided, the report said, that the fee hikes were a result of Proposition 13.

When it did follow up on a racial problem, the commission was far too reactive and rarely followed through, the report says.

“Chasing the public searchlight” is how the authors described the commission’s work on racial matters. The team could find only two examples of systematic research in the commission’s history--a school questionnaire in 1966 and a survey of attitudes in Baldwin Hills and Pacific Palisades in 1985.

The commission’s finest work, the report found, was during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it monitored the first weeks of school integration and conducted some of the city’s earliest hearings on the racially discriminatory use of force by law enforcement authorities.

But particularly during the tenure of Mayor Tom Bradley, the commission fell out of sight, the authors said.

It is ironic that Bradley, who embodied coalition politics and is widely credited with diversifying City Hall, would ignore a human relations commission. But some critics say Bradley was shortsighted, believing that he could do more to help change racial politics himself without commission intervention.

Mayor Richard Riordan is credited with helping to slowly turn the commission around, mainly by adding to its budget. Feuer also has pushed to give the panel more money and greater power and autonomy so it could function more like a city department.

The report compares the commission unfavorably to the human rights commissions in New York City and San Francisco. In those cities, the report says, the commissions are “better funded and staffed, have clearer definitions of the sociopolitical problem to be addressed, conduct research into those problems in a systematic way and have stronger legal mandates to intervene in those problems.”

Although the authors expect the Human Relations Commission to become more focused and directed under Hicks’ leadership, Ethington said, “it has a fair way to go.”