Group Makes Pitch for Bilingual 911 Services

Maria Salazar looked out the window of her restaurant July 27 and saw three men with guns and kerchiefs over their faces walk into Evelyn’s Beauty Salon across East 7th Street. She dialed 911. “Three guys go inside! I am sure go in for stoling!” she said in broken English.

The dispatcher didn’t understand. Salazar tried calling 911 again, then in desperation phoned the beauty shop. Her call scared away the robbers, who had been shoving shop owner Evelyn Pleitez’s head down a toilet. Pleitez then phoned 911. Five minutes later, two officers arrived. Neither spoke Spanish.

“If they had come when I called the first time, they would have caught the robbers,” Salazar said recently. “Somebody could have been killed.”

The incident prompted Salazar, an immigrant from El Salvador who has lived in Long Beach for 13 years, to organize a neighborhood organization of whites, blacks, Latinos and Asian residents, as well as business owners, called the 7th Street Business Owners and Area Residents.

On Wednesday, the group gathered in Salazar’s restaurant, Ilopongo, to demand that the city improve services to all of its growing ethnic communities.

“Long Beach is a bilingual city,” area resident Jose Ulloa told the crowd. “We must deal with that reality.”

Ulloa presented city officials with five proposals:

* That the mayor form a task force to look into the 911 system.

That the city hire bilingual operators for 911.

* That the hired operators reflect the city’s ethnic mix.

* That 911 operators ask a standard series of questions immediately, most importantly, “Can you speak English?”

* That the city’s many cable programs describing the use of 911 be broadcast in languages other than just English.

Ulloa said the proposals would help prevent the kind of confusion that marked Salazar’s efforts to get help in July, when the 911 operator thought that Salazar was reporting a shoplifting incident, not a robbery, police said.

In a recording of that conversation, the dispatcher asks Salazar whether the crime she is watching is a robbery or a shoplifting. Salazar now says she did not understand that question.

“People who call 911 are under stress and panicked,” Ulloa said. “They cannot understand technical questions like that, if they do not speak English well.”

Cmdr. Kimball Shelley said “three or four” of the city’s 45 operators for the 911 service are bilingual. The department is trying to hire more, he told Wednesday’s meeting. Recently it advertised for bilingual operators in Spanish-language newspapers across the county.

Shelley, who asked a member of the group who had emigrated from Panama to translate for him, told the organization that non-English-speaking callers to 911 are now plugged into a state translating service in Sacramento. The three-way dialogues, he said, have so far not resulted in delays in service.

Cmdr. Melvin Gallwas said that of the city’s 637 sworn police officers, six have signed up for bilingual pay, which means that they receive a differential because of their language ability.

The department also has an emergency translator service of about 200 volunteers who fill in when needed. Several volunteers for that service said it is rarely used.

In addition, Gallwas said, many secretaries and clerical staff members are bilingual and have been asked to help with non-English-speaking callers.

Ulloa said Mayor Ernie Kell has promised to meet with the organization later this month.

Councilman Evan Anderson Braude, who met with the group last month, said the city needs to step up hiring of bilingual workers citywide.

That includes those who work in his and his colleagues’ offices, he said, so non-English-speaking constituents have somewhere to turn with complaints about city services: “Part of the problem is that on this floor we don’t even have multilingual people.”

However, even supporters of the group’s objectives conceded that there are limits to what the city can do. More than 50 languages are spoken by immigrant children in the city’s schools.

“Obviously, we don’t expect to have a lot of translators who speak Kurdish,” Braude said.