Busting Vietnamese Language Barrier : Westminster Pushes to Hire Bilingual Police Who Can Overcome Mistrust in Asians

WESTMINSTER — When a young Vietnamese girl was killed in her home recently, the homicide investigation was delayed by two precious hours because no one in the police station spoke her family’s language.

Only when Public Service Officer Jenny Truong was called from home at 2 a.m. could the police question the victim’s relatives, most of whom spoke only their native tongue.

“She had to stay all night, and then work the next day,” Sgt. Bill Lewis said of Truong. “We had the whole family waiting to get statements. Time is crucial in a homicide case, and it delayed the process. . . . Jenny will have to go to court too, and that means her regular work schedule will have to be rearranged.”

In a city where nearly a quarter of the population is Vietnamese, only a single member of the 101-officer police force speaks that language, a situation that not only snarls police work, but also leads to mistrust and distance between the Asian population and the largely white police force.

“The people are still afraid of the Police Department,” said Chuyen Nguyen, former general secretary of the Vietnamese Community Council of Southern California. “In the Little Saigon area, the Vietnamese feel they are singled out for traffic tickets, and they don’t feel they are being treated fairly in accidents because they can’t communicate well. More Vietnamese officers, or translators, would help.”

Vietnamese business leaders in the city of 70,000 also believe that they would profit from a more bilingual police force because officers would better understand Vietnamese culture and would-be criminals would fear the police force’s investigative capabilities.

“I believe it would lower crime,” said Tan Hong, owner of Tick Tock Watches in the Asian Garden Mall. “They would understand the Vietnamese culture and Vietnamese officers would be taken more seriously.”

Well aware of the difficulty, City Councilman Tony Lam, the first Vietnamese elected official in the nation, is pushing the Police Department to recruit and hire more Vietnamese officers.

“In the past, (the Police Department) didn’t want to open their own clique or circle,” Lam said. “But that attitude is changing. I believe strongly that there are people ready to apply for the job, and we must find the ways and means to get them in.”

The department has been given permission to hire two new officers, and Police Chief James Cook said he hopes both will be Vietnamese. Cook said he hopes to add two Vietnamese officers to the force within six months or a year; two potential officers have begun the evaluation process.

“We’re trying very hard to recruit Vietnamese police officers,” Cook said. “It’s a tremendous priority. About 23% of the people we work with in Westminster and the surrounding cities are Asian and Vietnamese, and that means we have trouble communicating with 23% of the people we work with.

“Right now it takes twice as much time to interpret what the problem is and understand what the people are telling us,” he added. “We need to be able to communicate quickly and easily.”

The Police Department also has no official translators, relying instead on interns and public service officers like Truong. But translating is not officially part of their jobs, nor is law enforcement, and they are often not available for translating.

“Our boss doesn’t want us to do translations during working hours,” said Christopher Duong, the other Vietnamese public service officer who, with Truong, performs community education tasks, including teaching crime prevention. “It takes time away from the crime prevention program. We’ll only do (translating) on a case-by-case basis.”

Cook said the best way to recruit more Vietnamese officers is by bringing Vietnamese youth into the system and into the “police culture.”

The department has a number of programs for young people interested in police work, including Explorer Scouts, a program for high school students under the auspices of the Boy Scouts. Paid police interns work in the department 20 hours a week. Public service officers hold paid, full-time positions.

“The best way to bring in Vietnamese officers is to bring them into the system earlier,” Cook said. “By doing that, we can ease them into the police environment, they can see what police work is like, and families can see it in a better light.”

A number of Vietnamese-Americans have attempted to become police officers within the last several years, but they never made it through the 20-week police academy program or the six-month probation period.

Much like the police force itself, unsuccessful Vietnamese officers have been hamstrung by the language barrier. The officers, Cook said, couldn’t adequately write the detailed descriptions necessary in police reports.

Officer Manh Ingwerson, the only Vietnamese law enforcement officer on the force, agrees that potential officers have had difficulty with English, but says it is hard to find people who are fluent in both English and Vietnamese.

“We definitely need more Vietnamese police officers,” said Ingwerson, 35, who came to this country in 1968. “But if you hire second-generation Vietnamese, they often can’t speak or read Vietnamese, and the first generation, their English isn’t as good.”

Ingwerson, who has been on the force for nine years, also says many Vietnamese don’t know what to expect when they decide to become police officers.

“It’s not as easy as everyone thinks it is,” Ingwerson said. “In Vietnam, it’s easy. Here, there is a lot of training.” Duong acknowledged that in order to become police officers, some Vietnamese must learn to defy certain cultural norms that teach them not to be overly aggressive. “They are not aggressive enough with the public to take control of the incidents on the scene,” said Duong, who plans to apply to the Police Academy next year. Some have “failed because they are not aggressive enough to protect themselves or their partners.”

But the department has had a difficult time recruiting Vietnamese officers, Cook and others said, mainly because of the differences in tradition between Vietnam and this country.

“The Vietnamese culture looks down on police work as not a very rewarding and prestigious profession, and it is difficult for us to overcome the problem,” Cook said. “Cadets have trouble with wives or family members when they try to become police officers.”

Nguyen, of the Vietnamese Community Council, said many families don’t want their children becoming involved in what they see as a violent profession.

“When the Vietnamese children first came to this country, the stigma of war had traumatized their families and parents,” Nguyen said. “No one wanted to encourage children to be involved with guns and weapons.”

Ingwerson agreed that the biggest obstacle in recruiting more Vietnamese officers is the families of the would-be police officers.

“Families don’t want their sons becoming officers. They’d rather have them become engineers or doctors,” he said. “We have to change the perceptions of the family. But it may take a while.”