Breaking Down Cultural Barriers : Police and Asian Community Learn Each Other’s Customs

Shortly after the influx of Southeast Asian refugees to Orange County in 1975, schoolteachers began to notice some Vietnamese and Cambodian children with minor burn marks on their bodies.

The teachers reported the incidents to police, who investigated and then arrested several parents. It wasn’t until after the arrests began piling up that police realized that the burn marks were the result of “coining,” a time-honored practice in the Indochinese community by which colds and other minor ailments are treated.

Coining involves the use of mentholated oil that is applied to the area of pain, followed by heated coins that frequently leave a temporary burn. The practice doesn’t hurt, said Mai Cong, a county mental health specialist who is also president of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., and often helps a cold by inducing the patient to sweat.

“As an American, when you see a young kid, 3 or 4 years old, with these marks on their bodies, what do you think?” Santa Ana Police Officer Futi Semanu asked. “But it’s not child abuse. It’s just their custom.”

Since learning that coining is a legitimate tradition, police in the county are trained to recognize the practice and no longer make arrests, said Semanu.

The misunderstanding symbolized just one of many cultural barriers that law enforcement authorities have encountered--and overcome--in their attempts to educate immigrants and police officers about each other.

Eleven years after the fall of Saigon, cross-cultural education has become a staple of police training in several cities.

Up to 100,000 Indochinese live and work in Orange County, most of them in Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Westminster. They are such a large group in Santa Ana, said Semanu, that “we need to learn their customs to prevent some instances from getting out of hand.”

Semanu, who is Samoan, oversees Santa Ana’s efforts to improve and maintain good relations with the Asian populace of Santa Ana, which he called “Orange County’s melting pot.”

Two years ago, Santa Ana stepped up its program, initiating classes at the various community centers in basic police information, forming a cultural advisory committee within the department and incorporating two-day training sessions for new officers on the various customs of the city’s many subcultures--including Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, Mexican, Samoan, Tongan, Cuban and Portuguese.

Teaching Cultural Differences

The police committee, which Semanu chairs, is intended to help officers cope with cultural traditions that may be worlds away from their own. “You take an upper-middle-class white male that’s been raised in an upper-middle-class environment and you train that individual in the academy and bring him into a ghetto area, or a very low-income minority area like we have down on the southwest side of town, say Raitt or McFadden, this kid just has not had that exposure,” he said.

The training involves in-house lectures by experts, either seasoned police officers or experts in the refugee field. Nampet Panichpant-M, director of the county’s International Refugee Health Maintenance program, has conducted many sessions for Santa Ana and stresses that the approach is vital to helping Indochinese integrate into American society.

Orange County, she said, “is becoming an international community, and it’s going through what I feel are growing pains. Tension can either go negative or positive. I think that, as long as we’re alive and kicking, we need to to try to foster some understanding.”

Panichpant-M outlines many cultural phenomena--in addition to coining--for new police officers. One thing frequently misunderstood are tattoos sported by Laotian men that police have mistaken for gang symbols.

Instead, the tattoos were intended as spiritual “protection” against knife or bullet wounds when the men fought in the jungles against the North Vietnamese, she said.

A deadly and mysterious ailment known only as “sudden unexplained nocturnal death” was also misunderstood at first, she said. The affliction has caused the death of an estimated 100 Hmong and Cambodian men in the United States, striking at night, when the victims experience breathing difficulty and die within minutes.

Cause of Deaths Unknown

Despite research by refugee groups and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, no cause has been isolated. Possible explanations range from exposure to chemical warfare to the shock associated with frightening nightmares.

When men began to die in California, coroners could find no cause of death after autopsies, and police frequently initiated homicide investigations. Although researchers aren’t close to understanding the deaths, investigators now recognize such cases, Panichpant-M said.

In Garden Grove, police recently opened up a storefront office in the Bolsa Mini-mall, a shopping center with Indochinese businesses. The office, said Police Chief Frank Kessler, gives police a toehold in the community and provides businessmen and residents easy access to the department.

Westminster police spokesman Larry Woessner said the city is hoping to open up a similar storefront operation on Bolsa Avenue soon, an area that he called “probably the largest Indochinese shopping area outside of Ho Chi Minh City,” the present Vietnamese government’s name for Saigon.

He noted that a rash of residential robberies recently, including one in which a mother of 14 was shot to death in Santa Ana two weeks ago, are caused to some degree by the Indochinese’s distrust of banks; families often keep their assets hidden in their homes.

Through pamphlets and flyers, Westminster police hope to encourage residents to make use of checking accounts to cut down on the problem.

One of the major roadblocks in combatting crimes such as extortion and gangs, he said, is the lack of crime reports. “Part of the problem is that they’re afraid of what will happen to them if they do report anything,” he said.

Slowness to Be Expected

The slow development of police-community rapport should not surprise anyone, said mental health specialist Cong, who has been a refugee twice, fleeing North Vietnam in 1954 and South Vietnam in 1975.

“For all immigrants, when they come to a new environment, the distrust is there for all their surroundings,” she said. “They only need to learn about the new structure, the new system that we are all going to deal with on a daily basis. I’m sure that if you came to Vietnam or Cambodia, you would want to learn how the police there work and what is considered breaking the law or not.”

That unfamiliarity with the new system can eventually lead to a distrust of authorities, said Tuong Nguyen, executive director of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc.

“For example, if they have been the victim of something, they ask the police to help them,” he said. “The police may catch the suspect and they see him arrested in the morning, then they see him wandering around on the street in the afternoon. From our experience, they may think that the police are corrupted, when in fact we have the system here where the suspect can be out on bail. We try to educate them about these things.”

Through the classroom instruction offered by Santa Ana officers, Indochinese become more comfortable with police, said Semanu. Although the classes are often very simplistic affairs because many immigrants speak very little English, dividends can be seen in the rising number of calls for assistance, he said.

At a recent class at the Cambodian Family Center on Wakeham Street, Santa Ana Officer Kathy Eskue showed slides of traffic signals and signs and quizzed a class of 12 women, none of them fluent in English.

‘A Little Scared’

Two who could understand the gist of questions posed in English said that, yes, they hope to drive some day. However, admitted Kim Ean Seng, she is “a little scared” at the prospect.

Eskue flashed a “NO U TURN” sign and gestured to a diagram on the chalkboard. “Can you do this?” she said, drawing out a U-turn. “No. Bad. Ticket. Money.” Her students laughed as they all seemed to understand the last word.

Using interpreters, said Eskue, “would just encourage them to learn in their own language.” At the least, she said, the immigrants will “probably have a better attitude about us.”

One way to improve communications, suggested Panichpant-M, might be to install “kiosks” in areas with a large immigrant population--like freeway call boxes connected directly to the police department from such areas as Minnie Street in Santa Ana and Bolsa Avenue and Garden Grove Boulevard in Garden Grove and Westminster.

Semanu stressed that the process is a slow one, that 11 years is a short time for a transplanted people to come to grips with a new country.

“In the Southeast Asian community, there are a lot of customs that we still don’t understand,” he said. “I’m learning them on a daily basis. While we’re teaching our troops here that awareness factor, we’re out in the community through the (English as a second language) programs, trying to teach them the way we work. While we have to work by the law, we can use some discretion by understanding their customs.”

Cong said: “We are all human beings. Some people didn’t understand us at first but I think they are learning. And we are learning too. . . . We’ve made a lot of friends here, and I believe that, if we all work hard enough, we can overcome those problems. It takes time.”