Cops have HART

By Timothy Pratt

Thursday, May 17, 2001 | 11:02 a.m.

The woman was being stabbed and appeared helpless.

Over the previous few months her husband had beaten and threatened to kill her. He told her she better not call the police, or the authorities would send them both back to Central America. He even cut the telephone cord.

A neighbor, who was from the same country, was watching. Like the couple next door, she spoke no English.

When she heard the screams, she quickly dialed 911. But she panicked when the operator said, "Let me get a Spanish-speaking interpreter."

She threw down the phone and dialed a number she had copied from a Spanish-language radio show on La Nueva, KISF 103.5 FM. Officer George Vince, whose heritage is Venezuelan and African, answered.

Vince is one of 118 officers in Metro Police's force of 1,900 who speaks Spanish. More important, he is one of two officers working on a Metro pilot program called HART, or Hispanic American Resource Team, along with Cuban-born Eric Ravelo.

Saving the woman's life and arresting her husband were among the program's early successes, and it was a good example of why it was created only five weeks ago.

The idea is simple -- "helping victims of crime in Las Vegas' Hispanic community, many of whom don't ever go to the police," Vince said.

The above case shows the challenges the two officers face.

According to Census 2000, 22 percent of Clark County residents are Hispanic, with 302,000 of the state's 393,730 Hispanics living here.

There also may be as many as another 125,000 undocumented Hispanic immigrants in the metropolitan area, Sgt. Randy Sutton, creator of HART, said.

Sutton works at Downtown Area Command, which houses the program. "Our area is 38 percent Hispanic," he said.

"This idea came to me as cops on the beat would tell me stories about Hispanics, some of them undocumented, who were victims of crimes and wouldn't report them, either because they didn't speak English or they were afraid they'd be deported.

"I decided we had to do something about this," Sutton said.

Vince and Ravelo now spend part of their days getting the word out. "Anywhere there's a large group of Hispanics," Vince said. That includes schools, community centers and senior citizens' programs.

On a recent visit to Roy Martin Middle School, Vince spoke to a class of 13- to 15-year-olds. "What is a crime?" he asked the group. "And what are rights?" He nicknamed those who answered, "policia," or "abogado," the Spanish words for police and lawyer.

"Rights is a magic word," he said. "Everyone has them, whether they were born here or came through the 'hueco,' or across the border."

The project, a first of its kind, is already attracting national attention. RC Raycroft, a producer of law enforcement training videos, recently filmed Vince and Revelo for a St. Louis-based program, "In the Line of Fire."

The company travels the world looking for innovative programs to feature, Raycroft said. "When I first learned about this program, it set me back," he said.

"I hadn't thought about the immigrant's Catch-22," he said."You leave to get a better life, but when bad things happen to you here, you don't do anything for fear of getting sent back."

Fernando Soriano, executive director of the National Latino Research Center, a clearinghouse for information on Hispanics, agreed.

"Really, though, going to the police is not just an issue for undocumented Latinos, but for non-immigrants as well. Latinos in general don't trust police, especially since they're often victims of profiling," he said.

"I haven't heard of anything like this program, where Latino police officers themselves are reaching out to Latinos," he said. "This is a positive and necessary thing, especially in cities with significant Latino and minority populations," Soriano said.

Sutton heads Community-Oriented Police Services, or COPS, at Downtown Area Command. COPS is a national program several decades old designed to improve relations between police and their communities. He sees HART as an outgrowth of this concept.

Sutton admits that some members of the community and even officers in Metro might harbor prejudices against Hispanics.

"I've told my guys to expect something like this, but so far there's been nothing," he said.

"My grandfather was an immigrant from Russia, and he was practically left to die after an accident in a New York sweatshop," he said.

"To my mind, in 2001, the Hispanics are no different than Russians, or Irish, once were. So I see getting their rights served as a patriotic thing," he said.

Chester White, project director at the Community Policing Consortium, a Washington-based partnership of five law enforcement organizations that provides training and information, says he has never seen a program such as HART.

"With the census figures we're seeing across this nation, this type of program needs to be looked at in detail, to copy what works," he added.

After the program's 24-week trial period, Metro Police will decide whether to spread the program departmentwide. Currently, the program doesn't cost the department, since the two officers are just working it into their daily schedules. Vince admitted his days are now longer than before; he often works 12 hours.

So far, the two officers have opened a dozen cases. Some of these involve frauds committed against dozens of immigrants. Several attempted murders are being investigated. And Vince is getting upward of 30 calls a day to HART's hotline.

Curiously, Vince was once a Border Patrol agent himself. But one day, he found himself called to an El Paso, Texas, supermarket to chase an Indian family of beggars who had arrived from Oaxaca, Mexico.

"They sent me into the store, where I found the family's 5-year-old boy. I had to search his back-pack to see if he had stolen anything. It was full of broken toys and small change."

"As I walked out of the supermarket, holding the little boy's hand, I thought, this is not what I should be doing. There's gotta be a better way."

The HART hotline can be reached at 229-1999 or 249-1901.