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The Tower of Babel in Mesopotamia could not be built, the Old Testament says, because the people spoke different languages. Since they could not understand each other, they could not work together. They had to stop building the tower.

We live in a country, the United States of America, that has been built by a wide variety of people from different cultures with different languages. Although our country has no official language, English has served as our common ground. It is useful to know the same language; it is how we move forward as a society.

Newcomers to the United States can take time to learn English, a difficult language, as they struggle with finding work and making their way in an unfamiliar place. Free classes are offered locally through the Board of Cooperative Educational Services to adults who speak other languages and want to learn English. We commend the many programs that help immigrants in their quest and we urge our readers to volunteer to teach English. Rich friendships can develop from such tutoring.

One of the places where a lack of understanding English can cause problems is with law enforcement. Police can be called into sometimes tense situations where not knowing English can be tough for both crime victims as well as for the police themselves.

According to a spokesman for the Albany County Sheriff’s Office, William Rice, Spanish and Chinese are the two most likely languages, other than English, that police here encounter. Rice told our reporter Elizabeth Floyd Mair how helpful Investigator Hector Fernandez is. He’s served as a translator for other police departments too.

Fernandez is from Puerto Rico and grew up in Brooklyn, Rice said, calling him a “great asset.”

We would posit that he is an asset with more than his language skills. Having an officer who is familiar with a culture can help not just in investigating crime but in preventing them in the first place, building trust with a community that shares common roots.

We urge that towns like Guilderland, with a growing immigrant population, to seek officers who can relate to those cultures and speak their languages. A guide for law enforcement produced by the federal departments of Homeland Security and of Justice outlines strategies that may be useful for our local departments to follow.

The first step is training officers to determine if a person has limited English proficiency, which the guide says is not always simple; it urges, “Do not make assumptions about an individual’s primary language. For example, many persons from Mexico do not speak Spanish, but rather an indigenous language.”

The guide also recommends police departments determine the languages spoken in their jurisdictions by getting demographic data through federal and local sources, including school districts, as well as reaching out to community organizations to learn about specific language needs.

The guide further urges departments to collect data, recording languages encountered for assistance rendered. “Maintaining such data helps your office to understand who it serves, and potentially helps to justify funding requests,” the guide says.

“Make a plan,” the guide goes on “to develop a language-access policy and protocol” for staff to follow. Staff is to be routinely trained about language-access services. Bilingual staff is to be recruited and trained in the ethics of interpretation. Signs and documents should be translated, and the public should be informed of the policy.

The guide says to avoid using friends and family members of people with limited English but to work with other agencies.

Finally, the guide recommends using telephonic interpretation for everything from investigation to witness interviews. Officers are to have cell phones with the telephonic interpretation number on speed dial. The guide notes, “A 10-minute conversation can cost less than $10.”

If these guidelines had been followed by the Albany County Sheriff’s Office in 2010, the life of Marcos DeJesus Alvarez may have been spared. An undocumented immigrant working in the United States, sending money home to his family in Mexico, Alvarez was walking along a dark part of Watervliet-Shaker Road near the airport in Colonie when a deputy on patrol stopped to question him.

According to Chief Deputy William Rice, the deputy, Vincent Igoe, tried speaking to Alvarez in Spanish but, as it turned out, Alvarez spoke an indigenous language unrelated to Spanish. Although unarmed, Alvarez was shot dead in the brief encounter.

Such a death, of course, is tragic for Alvarez and his family but it also must be awful for the officer who, unable to communicate, fired the fatal shot. A grand jury reviewed the evidence and declined to prosecute Igoe but the sheriff’s office later came to an undisclosed settlement with Alvarez’s family.

Would the tragedy have been averted if the department had a plan in place that included every officer having a cell phone with speaker set to speed dial for translation services? We’ll never know but we believe it would be worthwhile for each of our local departments to come up with a plan and, if one is already in place, update it regularly, making both staff and the public aware.

The benefits of knowing languages besides English aren’t always life-saving but they are benefits nonetheless.

Altamont’s Jill Kaufman said that, when French-speaking people from Montreal speeding through the village told her “No English,” she answered in French and they spoke in English after that. Kaufman has helped lost German tourists, speaking to them in their own tongue.

She finds that it makes people feel welcome to hear their own language.

But Kaufman also has some other worthwhile advice, which transcends language: “Basically, if your tone of voice is respectful and supportive — probably 80 percent is nonverbal.” What police officers need to be able to do, Kaufman said, is read people.

That’s good advice for any of us, not just police officers.

 

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