Editing Kerner Commission (section)

== Operations ==
[[David Ginsburg (lawyer)|David Ginsburg]] was selected by President Johnson to serve as the Commission's executive director within two days of the Commission's official creation.  [[Victor Palmieri]] was then hired by Ginsburg several weeks later to serve as the Commission's deputy executive director. A staff of approximately 200 was quickly hired and an elaborate, multi-faceted strategy for investigating the rioting, determining who had rioted and why, and for developing recommendations was developed. This methodology featured examining the characteristics of 13,000 people who had been arrested for rioting, sending six-member field teams to over twenty cities, interviewing state and local law enforcement personnel, using FBI reports, studying census bureau data, and talking to and conducting public opinion polling of riot area residents.

The Commission was also aided by the work of the National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas, which was appointed by President Johnson and by an advisory panel on private enterprise that the Commission itself created.  The insurance committee, which became known as the Hughes Panel after its chairman, New Jersey governor Richard Hughes, was created because of the concern that insurance companies, which had already begun abandoning minority areas in the years before 1967, would only accelerate this trend now that massive property damage had occurred in cities like Newark and Detroit.  This committee's recommendations were summarized and included as Chapter 14 in the Kerner Report. The Commission's private enterprise panel was created to identify what incentives might encourage businesses to hire low-income workers or expand or relocate to low-income/minority areas. Its recommendations were included in the "employment" subsection of Chapter 17 in the Kerner Report.