November 16, 2005
Spanish (Or An
Immigration Moratorium) For Police Officers
Last month, I
linked to this story,
among others, about Americans having to learn
Spanish to keep up with the pace of Mexican immigration.
The author quotes
Peter Brimelow on “Creeping
institutional bilingualism”, and says
“With rapid
immigration, many monolingual Americans are learning
another language.”
[Second
language a part of building community,
Philadelphia Inquirer | Oct. 18, 2005, by Todd
Mason]
The story includes
a
photograph of Detective Jack Trevisan, resting his
head on his hand while studying, with the notation that
“Latinos now
constitute 27 percent of
[his] borough’s 5,300 residents.”
I sympathize with
him, I don’t like studying languages myself; it
strains my Anglo-Saxon brain.
But while I’d
oppose forcing detectives to learn Spanish, or firing
those who don’t, since it tends to turn into an
affirmative action program for Hispanics, I do think
that it’s a good idea for detectives to learn to speak
Spanish—because it’s increasingly the language of crime.
An officer’s personal safety is at risk when he doesn’t
know what people around him are saying.
That’s the point
made by Steve Albrecht in his book
Streetwork: The Way To Police Officer Safety And
Survival.
“Uncovering good
information on the streets can lead you to felony
arrests, help you cancel cases and protect you and
your partner from assaults.
“To use this kind of
information effectively, you need the ability to
decipher what you hear on the street from citizens,
witnesses, victims, and your own snitches. If it’s in
English, it’s usually no problem to translate street
talking into something useful. But what if these
conversations are in Spanish? The information may just
as valuable but if you aren’t bilingual, and can’t
understand it, what good does it do you?
“‘Why should I care,’
you may say, ‘I don’t work in a Spanish-speaking area.’
Think again. With Mexico on our border, and a
rapidly growing Hispanic population in this country, it
makes sense for police officers to learn as much Spanish
as possible.”
Albrecht goes on to
describe an incident in which knowing Spanish made him
safer:
“One night I pinched
two gang members and took them uptown. En route to jail,
I heard them carry on a whispered conversation in
Spanish. I listened carefully and extracted enough to
realize that they were planning to try to either jump me
or escape when we reached the jail entrance.”
He was able to
remove them from the vehicle ve-e-ery carefully, and got
them inside without incident.
Various quick and
dirty guides to street Spanish are available, for
example a video called
Interactive Survival Spanish - High Risk Vehicle Stops,
and
this book, where one Amazon reviewer says
“I use the manual at
my briefings to teach my officers what I call survival
Spanish. Teaching simple commands like ‘Manos Ariba’
(Hands up) can be a life saver at a
car stop.”
Make no mistake about it, Hispanic crime is on the
increase. A knowledge of Spanish will be as useful for
an officer's personal safety as a knowledge of Arabic
will be for an American soldier.
You can't take a translator down an alley with you, and
even if you could, would you
trust him with your life?
And English-speaking officers may need the language
skills to protect their careers. I said I’d
oppose forcing
detectives to learn Spanish. But city councils don't
listen to me, and eventually, detectives and patrol
officers who can't speak Spanish may find their careers
dead-ending.
Furthermore, if the English-speaking police can't learn
Spanish that means that their departments will become
controlled by Hispanic officers, which can lead to two
problems;
corruption, as seen in the
Mexican police force; and disloyalty, expressed in
an
unwillingness to, for example,
round up illegals.
As far as corruption is concerned, we've already seen
incidences of it. The point here is that
corruption is endemic to Mexico, and that therefore,
more Mexican-born officers will mean more corruption.
As far as loyalty is concerned, I
learned recently that the head of the Border Patrol,
David Aguilar, is
considered a "trusted spokesperson within the
Hispanic community, communicating border-crossing
policies that have a profound impact on Hispanic
communities along the border."
That doesn’t give me a warm glow of confidence.
I
only
hope that the PR flack who wrote that was talking
about the “Hispanic
communities”
on the American side.
Remember the
Muslim FBI agent who
said that "a Muslim doesn't record another
Muslim?"
What will happen when a large proportion of police
officers are
Spanish-speakers who were born in Mexico? (And yes,
I know that there are
patriotic Hispanics, and
heroic Latino police officers. This is not the place
for their stories.)
So, yes, it's important for police to learn Spanish, for
more than one kind of survival. But not for the
feel-good community outreach reasons, to better
serve "under-served"
Hispanic communities, but to
protect themselves, and the American public, from
those
Hispanic communities.
Alternatively, of course, the U.S. could always stop
immigration.
Nah—that would be too easy.
