NLV police reach out

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, Oct. 17, 2005 | 7:19 a.m.

Al Davis, a North Las Vegas landlord, stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, since he couldn't understand what was being said in the meeting of about 100 of his neighbors.

Davis, who said he manages 23 apartments in the area near the Boys & Girls Club at 2530 E. Carey Ave., the site of the meeting, had already gotten used to using a computer translation program to issue notices in Spanish to his tenants.

But here he was, in the dark, at the first of a series of meetings hosted by the North Las Vegas Police Department to reach out to the area's Latino community.

Of course, fliers for the event said it would be held in Spanish. And the reason for doing so, and for recently launching a telephone hotline in Spanish, are clear: the neighborhood surrounding the site of the late September meeting was 83 percent Hispanic in the 2000 Census, a number that observers say has most likely increased.

And, according to the same data, nearly half of those residents spoke English "not well" or "not at all."

So the choice for the police department, in what may be ground zero for the Hispanic population boom in the Las Vegas Valley, is often to speak Spanish or not communicate.

"It's absolutely important for law enforcement officers to communicate with the community they serve," said Andres Ramirez, a political consultant who ran for mayor of North Las Vegas in June and lost with 41 percent of the vote.

"There's a huge disconnect when they don't understand the culture or speak the language," he said.

At the meeting, Officer Jorge Correa had no problem connecting with the audience, some of whom he knew from his daily rounds as a cop on the beat.

Correa told them about the top five types of calls neighborhood residents had made from April to August.

Number one was "disturbances," at 257 of 1,106 calls, a category which includes arguments between neighbors or loud music.

But the second highest number of calls were "911 disconnects." There were 129 of those. That means more than 10 percent of all the calls involved people who had hung up before saying a word. The police call back and often get a second hang-up, he said. And then they have to go to the source of the call, in case someone is in danger.

What they find in many cases, Correa said, is that the caller was trying to dial "011," the first numbers in a call to Mexico, and had made a mistake.

The statistic was another indication of the different challenges police face in the many Hispanic neighborhoods of North Las Vegas.

Correa asked his audience to be more careful when dialing family members south of the border.

A recent ride-along with Correa provided further indications of what policing in the neighborhood is like.

Correa first noted one thing: being from Colombia, he had to learn some new vocabulary in Spanish when he became a beat cop three years ago, in order to communicate more effectively with Hispanics of Mexican background.

Such everyday things as a sidewalk or the trunk of a car are labeled with different words in different Spanish-speaking countries, he noted.

Correa is one of 18 bilingual officers in a force of 250 -- 8 percent in a city that was 37.6 percent Hispanic in the 2000 Census.

By comparison, Henderson has 27 bilingual officers out of 257, or 10.5 percent, according to spokesman Todd Rassmussen. The 200 Census found that 10.7 percent of Henderson's population was Hispanic.

Metro Police didn't return calls seeking information on the subject.

As Correa drove east on Carey Boulevard on Wednesday morning, the sight of mothers taking children to school reminded him of one message he hopes to get out in the upcoming meetings his department will be holding with the Hispanic community.

"Adults tell children, 'Do this or do that or I'll tell them (the police) to take you away,' " Correa said.

"People in general are scared of the police in countries like Mexico.

"And they learn this at 2, 3 years old."

Correa hopes to convince residents that the police can help make their neighborhoods safer.

Shortly after, he pulled a woman over who didn't come to a full stop at a stop sign only to find she had no driver's license and offered a Mexican voter's registration card as identification.

"That's pretty common in this neighborhood," he said, adding that some identification is better than none. In this case, it allowed him to give the woman a ticket for driving without a license -- and for not having a child seat for one of her two children -- instead of taking her to jail.

At a little before 11 a.m., Correa got a call about a Spanish-speaking woman who said her boyfriend was threatening her with a knife.

When he got to the house, the man had driven off and the woman was sitting in front of the house, sobbing.

Correa had to reassure the woman he would not report her to immigration authorities if she made a complaint against her boyfriend. She said her boyfriend told her that police would send her back to El Salvador.

Later, Correa's partners caught up with the man and arrested him for burglary.

That call showed another common thread in the Hispanic community, Correa said; many undocumented immigrants won't report crimes because they're afraid they'll be sent back where they came from.

The Colombian cop said his department is eager to reach out to the Hispanic community, and the new programs are evidence of that.

"A lot of these (Hispanic) people, they come here to work, but they don't have knowledge of the system, the don't read the paper, they have no way to communicate.

"(But) all they need is somebody to talk to them and give them some information ... and their whole attitude changes towards police."

The reverse is also true, he said -- the new programs help police to learn about Hispanics, and he has given two cultural awareness workshops to fellow officers in the last two years.

Subjects covered have included "how important it is to talk to elders, how if people speak loudly, it doesn't mean they're arguing, or if they talk up close, it doesn't mean they're aggressive."

Still, sometimes it comes back to an inability to bridge language gaps.

On occasion, he said, his fellow officers "get frustrated. They want to help but can't."

Timothy Pratt can be reached at (702)259-8828 or timothy@lasvegassun.com.