What police do when English isn’t enough

Jill Kaufman

The Enterprise — Elizabeth Floyd Mair 
Altamont Police Officer Jill Kaufman has called upon her knowledge of vocabulary in a number of different languages — including German, French, Korean, and Spanish — but says that an officer’s tone of voice and respectful attitude is key to interacting with people, regardless of where they are from. 

ALBANY COUNTY — “Put your hands up and stay where you are!”

What if you could not understand that shouted command?

The United States Census Bureau estimates that there are about 24,000 people in Albany, Rensselaer, and Saratoga counties who speak English less than “very well.” Some of these people, at some point, will encounter police, whether as victims, witnesses, or suspects.

All state agencies that provide direct public services in New York are required to offer free interpretation and translation for vital forms and instructions, according to an executive order issued by Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2012.

Law-enforcement agencies in our area have a variety of tools and techniques for trying to communicate with people whose ability to speak English is limited.

Altamont Police

Altamont Police Officer Jill Kaufman can speak a smattering of — and can make people laugh in — languages including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, German, French, and Spanish. She patrols the Victorian village, population 1,700.

She has spoken to German tourists who were lost, she said. She was parked on Main Street and saw them come down the hill and turn the corner onto Maple Avenue three times, with the wife in the front seat, looking at a map. She finally pulled them over and said in English, “You look like you’re lost.” They said to her, “No English.”

So she replied, “Benötigen Sie Wegbeschreibung? Welche Strasse?” which she said means, “You need directions? What street?”

It turned out they were trying to take Route 146 toward Albany.

She told them, in German, to go 5.6 miles east on Route 146 and turn right at the second traffic light.

Another time, she stopped some French-speaking people from Montreal, speeding on Main Street, she said. They said to her, “No English.”

She quipped to them, in French, “For me it’s no problem, but it might piss off my chief of police. Can I have your identification?”

She added, drolly, “It’s amazing, but they spoke English after that.”

But it isn’t just her ability to charm and disarm people in a multitude of languages that makes Kaufman helpful in a situation involving language barriers; it’s also her humanity.

“We have visitors,” she said, “that come to the Capital District from all over the world, and even if an officer, because of his family history or study, has 20 words of the visitor’s language, I find it immediately puts them at ease, because they no longer feel like they’re drowning in a foreign language.”

The legend on the side of her police car, Kaufman noted, says “To protect and to serve.” Part of that, she said, is communicating with people. “And any arrow in our quiver that we can use to communicate better is helpful.”

There are no requirements, she pointed out, for officers to speak other languages. “Basically if your tone of voice is respectful and supportive — probably 80 percent is nonverbal.”

What police officers need to be able to do, according to Kaufman, is read people.

Kaufman served in the uniformed division of the United States Secret Service under three presidents — Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter — and later went to work as a New York State environmental conservation police officer, retiring as a police major at the Albany headquarters. She is an interior firefighter in East Greenbush, will soon be an emergency medical technician—basic, and, “if things go well,” she said, she will start paramedic training in the fall.

“Any public safety or language skill helps to round us out. Being exposed to things, so that they’re not new, allows us to be calm, and calm is always good in an emergency,” Kaufman said.

The chief of the Altamont Police Department, Todd Pucci, said that he once asked Kaufman to help out with talking to a couple of Spanish-speaking employees at the Altamont fairgrounds. He also once called upon his adult daughter, who has a hearing impairment and is fluent in American Sign Language, to act as a mediary when a couple, both deaf, came in, wanting to make a complaint.

He has also occasionally used Google Translate, for very basic questions, he said.

As an individual, Pucci said, he recently bought a gadget called the Pilot, an earpiece language translator that he hopes will make it easier for him and his wife to get around during a planned trip to Europe. It uses Bluetooth to interpret among spoken English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, through a free app that must be downloaded on the speaker’s and listener’s phones.

Bethlehem Police

There are a couple of different mechanisms that the Bethlehem Police use to try to work through situations involving people who don’t speak English, said spokesman Commander Adam Hornick.

First, police try to find a third-party intermediary — “If they are the victim or someone reporting the crime, oftentimes they know someone that can translate, at least it’s enough for us to get a basis for the incident and try to develop what’s going on.”

As the case moves forward in the legal system, it may not be possible to use that person, but the police department has other resources, including a language line, or commercial interpretation service, that it can use.

“But,” Hornick said, “if police don’t know the name of someone’s language or dialect, it’s very difficult for us to call the language line.”

In one case, police got a third-party intermediary on the phone, whom the person knew, and were able to find out what language the person was speaking, and then were able to contact the language line, he said. The language in question was a Burmese dialect.

An identity-theft case in 2013 involved a Glenmont Chinese buffet in which employees used a “skimmer” device to steal customers’ credit-card information, Hornick said, Bethlehem Police used a number of interpreters, including one who spoke the Fujianese dialect that was the native dialect of one defendant. The only Fujianese interpreter to be found was in New York City, so that translation had to be done over the phone.

Usually, though, Hornick said, “We try at all costs to get someone there, in the courtroom, who speaks the language. It makes it a lot easier to communicate through them. We make every effort to do it in person.”

The department sometimes relies on the FBI, as in a case involving a juvenile who was injured and needed emergency medical care. The department determined that the person spoke a Chinese dialect, and the FBI was able to send over a linguist to help translate, Hornick said.

It can be very challenging for 9-1-1 dispatchers who need to figure out what’s going on, when people calling don’t speak much English, Hornick said. It can also be scary for officers when they don’t know what exactly they’re walking into.

But, he noted, it’s also frightening for the victim or for the person under arrest, if they don’t know what’s happening. “So we make every effort to do it [translation] in person, and then, if not, we use audio, or the written version.” By “the written version,” he said, he was referring to Google Translate or translation apps.

The Bethlehem Police encounter perhaps 15 to 20 cases a year in which they must use outside translators, Hornick estimated. He said the force also has about another 10 to 12 cases each year in which someone is present who can translate.

Hornick said, “We do have a very diverse culture in town.”

Albany County Sheriff’s Office

The Albany County Sheriff’s Office often reaches out to the federal Homeland Security Department for help with communicating with defendants who do not speak English, said Chief Deputy William M. Rice, the department’s spokesman.

Rice referred to a human-trafficking case from 2015, in which, he said, “We had the bunch of prostitutes being transported up here,” and numerous arrests were made in Colonie. He said that the Albany County District Attorney’s Office used a service, in that case, to translate multiple dialects of Chinese.

He added that people in the case who were discovered to be victims were offered treatment; for those who accepted it, “obviously, the cases against them were sealed and dismissed because of that,” he said.

Investigator Hector Fernandez, a native speaker of Spanish who is originally from Puerto Rico but grew up in Brooklyn, “is a great asset to the department,” Rice said. Fernandez helps translate in many cases in which the sheriff’s department needs to communicate with people in Spanish, Rice said. He also assisted the Troy Police Department in its investigation of the murder of two men; three Spanish-speaking men are currently awaiting trial in that case, and Fernandez assisted in their interviews, Rice said.

Rice said many deputies “have a little bit of Spanish, not much, but enough to get by,” although not enough to conduct an interview.

He himself has communicated on the job with members of the public who did not speak a lot of English, Rice said, and has always managed to get the information he needed.

It takes a lot of time and patience, he said. “You try to use your hands to describe certain things as well as your language.” Another thing he does is use different words with the same meaning. He might first ask for a “driver’s license,” and, if that doesn’t work, try “photo I.D.” or just “I.D.” Sometimes, he said, “One of those words will click with them.”

Rice mentioned a case that emphasizes how high the stakes are: in 2010, sheriff’s deputy Vincent Igoe encountered a man walking alone along a darkened part of Watervliet-Shaker Road behind the airport. Igoe shouted commands at him — in Spanish, Rice said. The brief encounter ended in the deputy shooting and killing the unarmed man, Marcos DeJesus Alvarez, an undocumented immigrant working in the United States and sending money home to his family in Mexico. Alvarez is said to have spoken an indigenous language unrelated to Spanish. A county grand jury reviewed evidence and declined to prosecute Igoe, but the sheriff’s department later came to an undisclosed settlement with his family.

New York State Police

Policing is a people skill, said Trooper Mark Cepiel, spokesman for the New York State Police’s Troop G. “We don’t police trees and rocks, things like that. We interact with people. Being an effective communicator is key,” he said.

Some things are “very universal to all mankind,” Cepiel said, noting that a smile can be used to “de-escalate any situation that is occurring and put folks at ease until we can effectively communicate.”

State Police are trained at the academy, he said, to try to distinguish among reasons why a person may not be responding as expected, to look for signs that the person may be deaf, have special needs or be on the autism spectrum, or speak only limited English.

As troopers interact with people who are not communicating as expected, they look for clues to narrow things down, he said. Clues that could indicate lack of fluency in English include: failure to ask any questions as officers explain things, nodding or saying “yes” to everything, giving inappropriate, inconsistent, or nonsensical answers, or looking confused.

Troopers are also taught, he said, to recognize differences among cultures, such as that women from some Middle Eastern countries might be unable to answer questions posed by a man who is a stranger.

As soon as police realize that there may be a language barrier, Cepiel said, they can show a New York State Language Identification Tool — a sheet written in more than 35 languages, asking the person to point at his or her native language, and saying that an interpreter will be called, at no cost.

The service that police departments call to request an interpreter, Language Line, lists on its website 255 languages that its translators speak, including lesser-known languages such as Cebuano (a language spoken in the Philippines), Dari (a variety of Persian, spoken in Afghanistan), and Pulaar (spoken in parts of the Senegal River valley). More languages may be available with additional time or an appointment, according to the service’s website.

Cepiel said that in emergency situations, when it’s necessary to get information fast, police might use an unofficial translator such as a family member or a bystander.

There are also phone apps that can be used for basic information such as “Wait here, we’re getting an interpreter,” in an emergency situation, he said.

“But we would never Mirandize anyone using a phone app,” said Cepiel, referring to informing an arrested person of his legal rights. Once the Language Line is accessed, that’s when “the official capacity starts,” he said.

Police don’t always have the luxury of time; there are some decisions that are split-second, Cepiel said. “If there’s a clear and obvious weapon, and noncompliance —” he said, trailing off.

But, he added, “We have both lethal and nonlethal tools at our disposal. Preservation of life for everyone is what it’s about.”

People who are not listening or complying can be brought under control by any of a series of escalating steps that are all “designed to not be lethal,” he said, listing voice and words, hands, a baton, a Taser, and “even handcuffs.”

Translators can be called later, Cepiel said, but the biggest challenge for police is the initial encounter.

Defense attorney’s view

Ted Hartman represents Solomon Najera-Hernandez, one of three defendants awaiting trial, charged with murdering two men in Troy.

Najera-Hernandez is a native speaker of an indigenous Mexican language, one of three Chatino languages.

The Chatino family of languages is completely unrelated to Spanish; Chatino languages are not Indo-European, but are from a separate macro-family called Otomanguean languages that developed over thousands of years, long before any contact occurred between indigenous Mexicans and Europeans, said Anthony C. Woodbury, professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin.

The three Chatino languages are not mutually intelligible, said Woodbury, just as speakers of Spanish cannot understand French. Some speakers of Chatino languages speak Spanish, while others do not.

Hartman speaks directly with Najera-Hernandez in Spanish, with no intermediary. His client “understands a good deal of Spanish,” Hartman said.

Hartman learned Spanish in school and then, as a public defender in New Orleans for many years, began to focus on Spanish and learned a lot more “from hours of talking to clients in jails,” and from talking with their families.

Najera-Hernandez makes do with Spanish translation during legal proceedings.

Hartman said that his client was interviewed in Virginia by New York State Police and Troy detectives in Spanish, and then ultimately signed a statement that was written in English. “Nobody knows exactly what was translated to him. We have to take the detectives’ word for it that they translated accurately,” said Hartman of the signed statement.

Hartman said that sometimes there are advantages to the delay caused by the need for translators, and that, as a defense attorney, he is not “so motivated” to want police to have “apparatus in place” for speaking with defendants who don’t speak English.

“Confessions usually happen when someone gets arrested on the scene and they blurt out what happened. And they can’t do that — it’s almost giving you a delay mechanism in place, because you have to wait to get the translator, to talk to them. And by that time, they have counsel,” he said.

 

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