[lg policy] SF woman settles lawsuit for 2014 arrest after police deny her a translator

Harold Schiffman haroldfs at gmail.com
Fri Mar 9 15:52:28 UTC 2018 

SF woman settles lawsuit for 2014 arrest after police deny her a translator

By Bob Egelko <https://www.sfgate.com/author/bob-egelko/>
Updated 5:52 pm, Thursday, March 8, 2018

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   [image: Dora Mejia (left) and her attorney, Saira Hussain with Advancing
   Justice and Asian Law Caucus, arrive at a press conference Thursday in San
   Francisco to announce a settlement was reached with the city and its Police
   Department. Photo: Jessica Christian, The Chronicle]

Photo: Jessica Christian, The Chronicle
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Dora Mejia (left) and her attorney, Saira Hussain with Advancing Justice
and Asian Law Caucus, arrive at a press conference Thursday in San
Francisco to announce a settlement was reached with the city and its ...
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Advocates for victims of domestic violence and police translation services
announced a $50,000 settlement Thursday for a San Francisco woman who said
she was sexually assaulted by her ex-partner, and was then arrested by
officers who wouldn’t provide her an interpreter.

“I had to stand up” and “demand that language access is a right for all of
us,” Dora Mejia, 40, said through a Spanish-speaking interpreter at a rally
celebrating the resolution of her case. “Liberty does not have a price.”

In her lawsuit against the city and its Police Department, Mejia said her
ex-partner attacked her in her Mission District apartment in May 2014, and
he then called police to falsely accuse her of attacking him. When officers
arrived, the ex-partner had left.

Mejia said the officers refused
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-officers-violated-Spanish-speaking-woman-s-7542875.php>to
provide her with an interpreter, told her to communicate in English the
best she could, and showed no interest when she tried to describe past
abuses by her former partner. The officers then provided an interpreter to
the ex-partner for a phone interview, listened to his account and arrested
her, leaving her three children with him, she said.
------------------------------
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Mejia spent the night in jail, but was released on bond and freed when
prosecutors declined to charge her. Meanwhile, she said, her ex-partner had
obtained a restraining order that separated her from her children for a
month.

She sued the officers and the city, seeking damages for lost wages and pain
and suffering, and court orders requiring compliance with department
policies. One of those policies, adopted in 2007, requires police to
identify a person’s primary language and provide interpretive services,
either through a bilingual officer in person or by telephone.

In a report on the case in September 2015, the city’s Office of Citizen
Complaints found
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-officers-violated-Spanish-speaking-woman-s-7542875.php>that
the officers had violated department policies on language services, had
failed to properly investigate the case and had arrested Mejia “without
cause.”

One of the officers spoke to Mejia’s 5-year-old daughter, who said she had
seen her mother’s partner get on top of her and tried to kiss her before
she pushed him away. Police ignored that evidence and, by failing to
provide an interpreter, prevented Mejia from explaining her case or
contradicting her ex-partner, the office’s report said.

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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