It
was a senseless, brutal attack: a teenager storming up to a New York
City teacher, swinging a baseball bat, clubbing him in the head
until he lost consciousness, and leaving him to die. The teacher lived, and for
the next several years, he grappled not only with the trauma of the violence
but with a feeling of guilt: What had he done to deserve that attack?
The
case was one of many that went through New York’s
criminal-justice system. But it also ended up in the hands of Rochester’s Center for
Dispute Settlement, an organization whose work is often as low-key and unpublicized
as its executive director, Andrew Thomas.
Thomas
is retiring this spring after 26 years leading the organization he helped
found. In that position, both Thomas and his organization have been involved
with numerous criminal-justice issues. But equally important, and more
numerous, are cases involving disputes between ordinary people: divorces,
custody disputes, arguments between neighbors, disputes over wills and estates.
Thomas
has been the architect of an organization that started as a small regional
office of the American Arbitration Association and went on to become an
independent mediation and dispute-settlement agency, the third oldest office of
its kind in the country.
Today,
CDS has 13 offices in eight counties and handles more than 3,000 cases a year.
While its work and importance may not be familiar to many people outside of the
legal and law enforcement communities in Rochester, CDS has a
national and international reputation. Delegations from other countries
frequently come to the US and spend a
week at CDS.
“We’ve
had people from the Middle East, South Africa — all over
the world,” says Thomas. “They want to learn about our programs and see how
they can take them back home.”
Americans
seem to have a propensity for solving conflicts through violence or litigation.
CDS has pursued an alternative route: peaceful resolution.
Thomas began
his career as assistant youth director with the YMCA and later became director of the City
of Rochester’s human-services
department. In 1979, the American Arbitration Association hired him to head its
Rochester offices
during Rochester’s emotional
school-integration conflict. Almost immediately, he was involved in making the
office an independent agency.
The
field of mediation wasn’t a big one at the time, and, he says, “I can’t say I
knew I was making the big career move.”
The
next year, Thomas was tapped for work that has had a major impact on one of the
most difficult and most sensitive types of conflicts: those between police and
community residents. The RochesterTimes-Union, the now-defunct afternoon
daily newspaper, had run a series of articles on police behavior, including
charges of police brutality. City officials appointed Thomas and the late
Charles Crimi, a prominent, respected attorney, to
investigate the cases cited in the T-U’s report
as well as to review police department policies and procedures.
Released
in 1981, the Crimi-Thomas Report contained more than
100 recommendations and led to the city’s first citizen-review process for
complaints lodged against Rochester police. CDS
now trains the members of the citizens review board.
While
that kind of involvement has periodically put CDS in the spotlight, the bulk of
the agency’s cases are not that high-profile. But its work impacts thousands of
lives every year.
For
example, the New York City teacher
beaten by his student wanted to meet the boy. The teenager had nearly killed
him, and the teacher wanted to know why, says Thomas: “Why did you do this to me?
What did I do to you? Did I do something to a member of your family? Did I say
something? What did I do to deserve this?”
CDS
was called in, and after two or three years of discussions with prison
officials, the agency was able to get permission for the teacher to talk with
the teenager. As it turned out, the youth didn’t know why he had assaulted the
teacher. “He admitted that it was his lifestyle. He had some problems with
drugs. He also said he went to the teacher and asked for help, and he needed it
right then.”
“He
said he was so angry he took a baseball bat and he tried to kill him,” says
Thomas.
After
the two talked, two things happened. For the teacher, “mediation was extremely
important, because it helped him stop feeling guilty,” says Thomas. “It never
occurred to him that he wasn’t to blame. And he finally accepted it and walked
away. He was able to go on with his life.”
As
for the teenager, who ended up in the Elmira correctional
facility with a 15-year sentence: “One of our people did a follow-up with him,”
says Thomas. “He was doing very well there, but he
attributed his turnaround to that meeting. It brought home the severity of his
act.”
And,
says Thomas, the youth said that meeting his victim was tougher than being
incarcerated. “Communication can bring closure that even a prison term can’t,”
says Thomas.
That attitude
is characteristic of Thomas. A soft-spoken man, he uses phrases like
“everyone has value” and “everyone’s opinion matters.” And such convictions are
the cornerstone to successful mediation, says Thomas.
Mediation
isn’t intended to replace the court system, says Thomas, but it can create a
safe place to air differences. And, he says, you can win a case in court and
still feel as if you lost.
“If
the person is looking for someone to blame or they are looking for a settlement
in the form of money, then they’re going to court,” says Thomas. “But that
isn’t always a way to bring settlement or closure.”
Thomas
uses the example of two neighbors who get into a personal dispute. First, one
calls the police. “Next time, the other one calls the police. Then the other
calls the police, and this time, he gets an attorney. It keeps escalating: ‘You
caused me pain. I’m going to make sure you feel what I feel, so now you’re
going to court, and you can miss work and pay legal fees.'”
“There
are underlying issues,” says Thomas, “and they’re using the courts to get
attention, to make that point. But these folks will never be able to go to
court and discuss their personal issues.”
CDS,
which now offers 19 different programs for peaceful conflict resolution, has a
staff of 37 and a pool of 175 highly trained volunteers. Cases come in from a
variety of sources: law enforcement, the district attorney’s offices, school
systems, walk-ins. And its four divisions work with the city, towns, and
villages; with family courts over custody and visitation disputes; with the Rochester and Irondequoit police
departments and the MonroeCounty sheriff’s
department.
“The
hardest part is getting people to the table as early as possible,” he says.
“Once they get too positioned, the need to win takes over. They begin to lose
the good faith.”
“Conflict
can always generate pain,” says Thomas, and then each party becomes intent on
causing pain to the other.
If
the parties in a dispute can agree to talk to one another, says Thomas, they’ll
reach a resolution 75 percent of the time. The other 25 percent may need a
little time to think about it. Then, says Thomas, “they usually drop their
charge.”
The hardest conflicts to resolve? Those
involving moral issues, says Thomas. “Disputes over the scarcity of resources
can lead to physical confrontation,” he says, “but even more difficult are
those that arise over values, morals, and religious beliefs: ‘This is gospel,
and that’s all I want to hear.’ That sort of thing can lead to civil war.”
Peaceful
resolutions to disputes don’t have to be limited to domestic disputes and
arguments between neighbors, says Thomas; they can be used at the global level,
too.
“The
role of mediation, whether it is here or working with delegates in the Middle
East, Iraq, is to listen to each other’s differences and find ways to respect
each other despite those differences,” says Thomas. “It’s not always about a
‘win-win.’ Getting people to a point where they have a resolution they can live
with is, by itself, a different level of understanding.”
This article appears in May 18-24, 2005.
