MOUNT VERNON, N.Y.: A Police Effort to Improve Relations Starts With Language

[Harold Schiffman]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 24, 2008
Mount Vernon Journal
A Police Effort to Improve Relations Starts With Language
By FERNANDA SANTOS

MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. — Two weeks ago, the police commissioner here,
David E. Chong, held a news conference that he said was unlike any he
had ever held before. The reporters gathered before him were from
newspapers and radio stations largely unknown to him or to the
community at large, and all of them wrote or broadcast in a language
that none of the city's police officers could understand: Portuguese.
The mainstream news media were not invited. Commissioner Chong had
grown concerned about accounts from some of the fast growing community
of Portuguese-speaking Brazilians: Robberies were going unreported,
domestic abuse was going unpunished, speeding and parking tickets were
largely uncontested — and sometimes unpaid — because Brazilian
immigrants were uncomfortable talking to the police.

So on April 8, the commissioner invited Brazilian reporters to Mount
Vernon Police Department headquarters and spoke directly to their
intended audience, generating news throughout the New York
metropolitan region: "Cidade de Mount Vernon Quer Ter Policiais
Brasileiros" — City of Mount Vernon Wants Brazilian Police Officers —
announced the weekly newspaper Comunidade News of Danbury, Conn.
"Polícia de Mount Vernon Contrata Brasileiros" — Mount Vernon Police
Are Hiring Brazilians — said the biweekly Brazilian Times of Newark.
"For this to come out with all the immigration trash-talking that's
going on these days was big news," Lucio Souza, president of
Comunidade News, said in an interview in Portuguese, the main language
of Brazil.

"When you're trying to unite the community, when you're trying to make
the immigrant feel part of life in the city, you can build something
better," Mr. Souza said. "The question is, will Mount Vernon carry it
through? We'll be watching." There are 201 active officers in the
Mount Vernon Police Department, a mixed force that is 59 percent
white, 30 percent black and 8 percent Latino, according to official
statistics. The city is itself a melting pot, its 72,000 residents
packed tightly within 4.4 square miles. Based on 2006 Census figures,
58 percent of them are black, 25 percent are white and 13 percent are
Latino.  Ninety-seven countries are represented in Mount Vernon: small
contingents from Senegal and Cape Verde; large groups from the West
Indian nations of Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago; a modest
presence from China and Korea; and relatively recent arrivals from
Latin America, according to the mayor's office.

Brazilians are by and large considered the city's fastest- growing
immigrant community, though there are no official statistics on that.
But an informal survey by the Civic Center, an immigrant advocacy
organization, concluded that Brazilians constitute 8 percent of Mount
Vernon's residents. "Brazilians have been in Mount Vernon for quite
some time, but they've sort of isolated themselves because of the
language issue and also because a lot of them are here illegally,"
said Ricardo B. Braxtor, executive director of the Civic Center and a
naturalized American citizen from Brazil. With Commissioner Chong's
initiative, "some of us have suddenly felt safe to come out of the
shadows."

Claudinéia Cardinali, a freelance journalist who covered the event for
The Brazilian Times, said Brazilians had long avoided any interaction
with the police. She said that some victims of robbery — a common
crime against the construction workers who leave their homes before
sunrise, she said — simply live with the loss, that women put up with
physical abuse from their husbands for perilously long times, and that
drivers pulled over for a traffic violation break down crying in front
of the police officer, thinking that they are going to be arrested.

"There's a general sense of distrust of the authorities here, in part
because of the distrust that Brazilians have of the police in Brazil,"
Ms. Cardinali explained in Portuguese. "And on the other side, there's
a general frustration on the part of the officers for being unable to
get through to the community." Altogether, at least one-quarter of the
police officers here are fluent in Spanish, French or Haitian Creole,
"but none of them speak Portuguese," Commissioner Chong said. To make
up for that, the commissioner said, he is recruiting
Portuguese-speaking volunteers to help the police translate
conversations between officers and Brazilian crime victims. He will
officially begin the program and the recruitment campaign at a
community meeting on Wednesday. To become police officers, immigrants
must be naturalized citizens, and many of the Brazilians who live here
are not. The Police Department must also contend with a cultural bias:
In Brazil, where patrolmen make about $500 a month, policing is viewed
as a second-class occupation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/nyregion/24brazil.html?ref=nyregion


-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
its members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
or sponsor of
the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a
message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
*******************************************