The gaggle of folks gathered in a conference room at the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Center on St. Paul's West Side peppered Thomas Perez, and rightfully so, with questions surrounding some really pressing and thorny social issues of the day. The group — including a county commissioner, a handful of city- and county-prosecutor types and Jose Santos, head of the local La Familia nonprofit and longtime West Side resident — on Wednesday queried the man who heads the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division about racial disparities or inequities in education and mental health services. They also asked him about...