Hey here is a wild and crazy idea...insist people learn English if they are going to live in this country....
Posted on 11/04/2007 4:45:36 AM PST by radar101
"Policía! Policía!” Gunshots blast through a west Mesa neighborhood on a Friday night and witnesses yell in Spanish for police help.
There’s just been a shooting and officers flood the busy scene to find a man lying in a driveway pressing a shirt to his left thigh. Blood spills onto the driveway, forming a trail up to the door of a modest home.
Dozens of people mill about the area in the 600 block of South Sycamore which is just behind a trailer park near Broadway and Dobson roads . Women scream and neighbors pour out of their homes to check out the commotion.
But who committed the crime?
No one can say.
The officers can’t speak Spanish, and the victims and witnesses can’t speak English. Police call for a Spanish translator. He arrives in about 11 minutes , but the gunman is long gone. Meanwhile, a helicopter hovers overhead ready to search, but the pilot doesn’t know who to look for — nor do the officers responding to the scene.
It’s not until later that translators gather descriptions. But it is too late to look for the gunman .
Scenes like this shooting are becoming more frequent in Mesa as the city’s Spanish-speaking population booms and the number of Spanish-speaking officers remains at about 17 percent of the force.
The language barrier threatens public safety by allowing criminals to escape before translators arrive on scene and by slowing down the time it takes to bring charges against lawbreakers.
“Being able to provide good services to the citizens is the bottom line,” said Mesa Police Association president Fabian Cota. “The fact that officers can’t communicate with victims ... kind of means they are receiving inferior service.”
And it’s not just the public that’s in danger.
The inability to communicate puts officers’ lives at risk, too.
Mesa police Chief George Gascón said he is exploring ways to increase the number of Spanish-speaking officers in the city, but budget constraints leave him with few options.
“We recognize it’s an urgent public safety need. Quite frankly we don’t have the luxury of saying, 'Learn English,’” Gascón said.
“Sometimes communication is a two-way street. You need to have a mutual understanding and a mutual sensitivity.”
Nueve Uno Uno
Last year Mesa spent nearly $118,000 to translate 911 calls that were not in English . More than 99 percent of the time, the calls were in Spanish.
In Mesa’s large 120-employee communication center, only five people speak Spanish. Since those people aren’t always available to take the calls, and emergencies require fast action, 911 operators must rely on a private service called Language Line.
“The first thing operators do is identify the language and look around the room and transfer a call to a (translator),” said Cari Zanella, Mesa communications administrator. “The second line of defense is the Language Line.”
The Language Line works by linking a caller and dispatcher with a translator for instant help.
The line takes only about half a second to use for Spanish speakers, and slightly longer for other languages.
From Sept. 1, 2006, to Aug. 31, Mesa’s dispatchers handled 16,500 calls involving 23 different languages. Nearly all of the foreign language calls were in Spanish with just a few in other languages, mostly Vietnamese and Farsi.
Of the 6,809 languages spoken in the world, Language Line gives Mesa dispatchers access to 98.6 percent of them, according to department figures.
“One of the hardest things when I was an operator was when you couldn’t distinguish the language,” Zanella said.
But in such cases, if the calls are 911 emergencies, operators will dispatch officers to the scene.
“A lot of people are hysterical and freaking out, so the most job satisfaction a 911 operator can have is (knowing) help is on the way,” she said.
Lost in translation
But even though dispatchers can be assured that police are en route, it can still be scary for officers.
During some Spanish-speaking 911 calls, police are dispatched to a location with little or no information on the incident, while 911 operators work to translate the call.
“It is a dynamic situation and we need to get the information out now,” Cota said. “Time is of the essence ... or these people are going to get away.”
In some cases, the officer arrives to find hysterical people, blood and witnesses trying desperately to communicate — with no success if the officer doesn’t speak Spanish.
Gascón is trying to solve the problem by exploring an Internet language program that could help officers become proficient in basic Spanish for a reasonable cost. He also is trying to diversify the police force at the request of City Manager Chris Brady.
But officers say the extra pay to become Spanish certified isn’t always worth the effort.
Mesa’s Spanish Rover program, which deploys Spanish-speaking officers to incidents and crime scenes, is especially busy. In the past two years, two to four Spanish-certified officers have participated in the program, which pays an additional 5 percent of an officer’s salary.
The program is good for the community because it allows officers to call out a translator at a moment’s notice, but tough on the officers, who must work long, difficult hours for a tiny bit of extra pay.
“It’s difficult for us to get them and keep them because they get burned out,” said Sgt. Tony Abalos, who runs the program. “They are usually gone in two years.”
And some officers who speak Spanish even keep it a secret so they aren’t called upon for extra duties.
Phoenix police spokeswoman Stacie Derge said her department offers a hefty paycheck for bilingual officers: $10 extra per hour for all the time they’re speaking another language on duty.
Gascón said the Los Angeles Police Department has assembled a force that has 40 percent Spanish speakers.
But in the immediate future, Mesa officials said there’s no quick solution to combat their language barrier.
“The whole city is really behind the times in terms of serving the Latino community,” said Carmen Guerrera, a 30-year Mesa resident, who sits on the board for the Mesa Association of Hispanic Citizens.
“(But) I think the police have done a lot of good work in the past year. We have a new chief who is very sensitive and is doing his best.”
Spanish charades
Mesa officer Aaron Raine says about 75 percent of the calls he responds to in west Mesa come from Spanish speakers.
“I speak enough Spanish to greet and introduce myself and I kind of have an idea what’s going on from the call comments,” Raine says while cruising the streets of Mesa.
Family members and neighbors often help officers communicate on simple calls, but if the incident is criminal or a real emergency, Raine says he’ll call for help.
“A lot of them get frustrated when officers don’t speak Spanish,” Raine says. “I’ve been on calls where people are yelling at me because I don’t speak enough Spanish.”
Raine says he’d eventually like to take the time to learn the language, to be able to help people and perform his job better.
But on a quiet October evening, Raine must go through the usual strained sentences and charades to make a basic traffic stop.
“Hello, can I please see your license?” the officer politely asks the driver of a truck. “No English” the man replies.
“El luz on placa es no,” the officer says in broken Spanish as he attempts to explain the license plate light is not working.
The man responds with only a blank stare.
Raine gestures for the man to get out of his truck and the two walk around behind the vehicle. The officer points to the darkened license plate light and says “No.”
The man’s eyes widen as he shakes his head. The man is given a warning to replace his license plate light.
Though the traffic stop was OK that night, Raine and other officers know that getting someone out of a car is not always a good idea because it compromises officer safety.
“The little Spanish I can fumble through, the little English they can fumble through and gestures,” Raine says as he gets back into his cruiser. “That’s how it gets done.”
BARF for Illegals
“I’ve been on calls where people are yelling at me because I don’t speak enough Spanish.”
This is happening more and more here in my area of Texas. Even the mexicans who can speak English but use spanish more and work in the public are telling us we need to learn spanish to understand them
That's when you look them in the eye, and politely, but firmly, tell them, "No. This is America and we speak English here. You need to learn English, or go live somewhere else."
“¿No Comprende?”
Get the he!! out of my country!
Screw it. Just deport all the witnesses.
ping
Americans don't understand the Mexican variant of Spaniard culture. They are intensely nationalist, and aggression is considered a virtue. It's a patriarchal culture that values force and acquisition by force - Machismo.
One element of that is forcing the hated gringos to speak the language of the invader. To the Mexican, if you speak his language, he has won and you have lost. This is a triumph and victory to him.
And how that victory is accomplished is unimportant. If they have to achieve it by whining, by wheedling and cajoling, by guilt tripping the gringos, so be it.
To them, the important thing is that they occupy the land, intimidate the inhabitants into doing their bidding (one of which is speaking their language), and ultimately allowing them to dictate laws and taxation.
In other words, colonization and conquest. The age old imperative of a resurgent Spanish empire. Don't ever forget that the men in Mexico City who are behind this are in fact the descendants of those original conquerors. They don't forget, and we shouldn't either.
If you let these people in and let them stay, as our esteemed president does, then nurses, ambulance drivers, police and the whole lot have to do what they have to do.
Don't be polite. It's taken as a sign of weakness.
Spoken like a true Californian who gives up before the fight is over.
I guess it's the climate. Makes people just shrug their shoulders in resignation. La-De-Da, right? It'll all work out in the end, man, let's go surfin...
There is no reason that our police should have to learn the gutter banter of Tijuana street thugs to retain their jobs.
Thanks for answering that post for me. You are right and I am a Californian.
Regards
I'm going to ping you to a thread, put up by a true Californian.....hang on....
My sister is a police officer in AZ.
She has memorized several spanglish phrases(because Mexicans really don’t speak Spanish):
You will go to jail until we can find a translator.
Your child will go to foster care - it will take several weeks for the child to come home.
and so on.
I do find it intersting how good their English skills become as the cuffs go on.
My favorite:
Look Chika, just because I’m Anglo doesn’t mean I no habla. I speak Espagnol just fine - I choose to speak English because this is America. So should you. And yes, on the rare times when I visit Mexico, I use my spanglish.
Not if you’re firm about it. You can be very adamant and remain polite. People will understand by your facial expressions and body language that there is no weakness behind the polite instruction.
I’ve spoken with several officers locally (one from our church) who basically say the same thing. This particular officer doesn’t always let on right away that he can speak some Spanish. He finds that often times he can learn some things that give him the upper hand (and the look on their faces when he does address them in Spanish and they realize they may have said something they didn’t want him to know is priceless).
LOL
You retend to be too stupid to speak/understand English, I’ll pretend to be too stupid to speak/understand spanglish.
Lets see who ‘wins’
You are right - the look is priceless.
Wonder Woman had her “Golden lasso of Truth” my sis has her “Steel hindcuffs of English”. The ride alongs are a howl.
The reason is the pols let them in the country. If you read my comment you would have seen that part.
The police and the EMTs don't decide who they have to deal with. They have to deal with what's out there. If you don't like it, change it.
Hey here is a wild and crazy idea...insist people learn English if they are going to live in this country....
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