By GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO
The Associated Press
FORT VALLEY, Ga. — “What’s that word?” asks Peach County Deputy Sheriff Shane Broome, looking disconsolately at his “Survival Spanish” textbook.
Prodded by classmates — all public safety officers from central Georgia _ Broome reads out loud “a la izquierda,” or “to the left.” Then his teacher continues around the room, having the two dozen students repeat basic commands in Spanish.
“It’s been a big problem,” Broome said later of his inability to speak with the many Hispanics who don’t speak English that he stops when patrolling Interstate 75. “It’s hard to even know if they’re even able to drive. I’d try to take the one or two words I know — I know driver’s license, “licencia” — and sign it out.”
He hopes the traffic stops will go smoother after this three-day class offered at the Georgia Public Safety Training Center, especially since he plans to keep his textbook — with its translations for everything from “windshield wiper” to “drop that weapon” — in his patrol car.
Every day, emergency responders and law enforcement officers nationwide help non-English speaking people whose lives might be in immediate danger.
Many dispatchers and officers are going out of their way to learn Spanish, recruit bilingual employees and buy translating technology as they adapt to changing demographics so they can continue to keep the community — and themselves — safe.
It all starts at emergency hot line call centers. Over the last two years, there’s been increasing demand nationwide for on-the-phone interpreters such as those provided by Monterey, California-based Language Line Services. Spanish is the most requested language.
When a non-English speaker dials the emergency number 911, the dispatcher gets a live interpreter who, for about $1.65 (euro1.26) a minute, holds a three-way conversation to assess the emergency. Most are straightforward police or medical calls, like burglaries and heart attacks, but interpreters are especially useful in breaking through cultural barriers in cases such as domestic violence, said Danyune Geertsen, a company interpreter.
“A person speaking Spanish on every shift would be a dream come true,” said Mary-Anne Eaton, E-911 director in Tift County in southern Georgia, home to thousands of immigrants who pick peanuts, peaches and cotton in the area’s fields. Of her 27 dispatchers, only one speaks Spanish.
Even a little survival Spanish goes a long way — which is why Peach County’s 911 Director Sheryl Hobbs attended the class at the safety training center.
“When your house is on fire, you don’t want to wait,” Hobbs said. “Those 45 seconds make a big difference.”
Past the initial call, things get dicier for emergency responders.
“It gets real hard to deal with because ... we don’t know what the problem is beyond what we see,” said Dennis Garrett, a firefighter from neighboring Houston County who also attended the class. He studied phrases like “Is this an emergency?” on flash cards that he’d be tested on later.
With increasing pressure on local police to help enforce immigration laws, tensions between immigrants and officers run high and the language barrier hurts both.
Even in border states like Arizona, long accustomed to a strong Hispanic presence, some agencies resent the added pressure of learning a new language.
“I’m not going to train my officers to speak Spanish when the illegals are in this country,” said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who made news in Phoenix for having inmates take English classes.
But most officers are trying to understand and make themselves understood. In north Georgia, where the carpet industry had attracted thousands of immigrants, State Patrol Lt. Kermit Stokes outfitted his troopers with a $850 (euro650) handheld device that translates commands in various languages.
“Once the person realizes what the device is, they’re excited and relieved there’s a way to communicate,” Stokes said.
Many other officers say they’re happy to take classes like Ortiz’s, which cover both basic vocabulary and cultural mores, like not throwing out the word “amigo” to Hispanics stopped for traffic violations.
“I don’t mind trying to learn to understand them because I have the opportunity,” said Broome, the sheriff’s deputy. “They don’t have a class to go to, but you know what, they live here.”
For routine situations, language-trained officers can take some weight off bilingual partners, who are in high demand, especially in small departments that routinely lose them to larger, higher-paying agencies. Even in areas like Arizona’s Yuma County, which borders Mexico and California and where half of the sheriff’s officers are of Hispanic descent, it’s a challenge to find and retain bilingual employees, said Capt. Eben Brachter.
In Tifton, Georgia, police chief Jim Smith hopes to hold on to the only two bilingual officers on his 50-person force — brothers Freddy and Balmori Amaya, who joined this summer. They live with their El Salvador-born parents and siblings in one of the trailer parks where six Mexican immigrants were killed in a string of robberies last year.
Freddy Amaya’s Spanish might have saved a life on his first burglary call. He and his partner responded to an alarm at a pawn shop at 3 a.m. Searching the scrubby lot with his flashlight, he stepped onto the Hispanic suspect, who seemed panicked at the English commands and was about to run in front of the officers’ drawn guns.
He dropped to the ground and surrendered when Amaya, in Spanish, told not to run.
“Maybe because he saw me speaking Spanish, I had more authority,” Amaya said. “I really love my job.”