Police Struggle to Adequately Serve, Relate to Community : Cultures: Orange County’s large Southeast Asian population needs more bicultural, bilingual officers. A college progam seeks to provide more of them.

Tuesday, 4:30 p.m. Time to check into Mission Control. Officer Binh Nguyen walked into the sonic maelstrom of the video arcade at the Rancho Brookhurst shopping mall. Electronic gunfire surrounded him and animated explosions cast an incandescent hue across his uniform.

Vietnamese children wearing shorts and baseball caps turned backwards, catcher-style, were oblivious to him as they pumped quarter after quarter into the gullets of “Moonwalker,” “Toki,” “Back to the Future,” “Radical” and “Elvira.”

“They’re practicing to get me,” Nguyen quipped as the youths sighted down the barrels of laser guns and fired missiles into marauding aliens.

The routine check turned up no members of the Pomona Boys, the 4Ts, the Natoma Boys, or other Southeast Asian street gangs known to occasionally hang out at the city’s video arcades.

At 23, Nguyen is one of a handful of Vietnamese police officers in Orange County--a hard-to-get asset in the ongoing attempt to provide adequate law enforcement in the nation’s largest Southeast Asian community.

Today, there are about eight Vietnamese law enforcement and community service officers in Orange County--three in Garden Grove, one in Westminster, one in Santa Ana and three in the district attorney’s office.

But more are on the way. Project Aero at the Criminal Justice Training Center at Golden West College in Huntington Beach has enrolled about 30 Southeast Asians in its minority recruiting program for local law enforcement agencies. Program Director Art Delgado said about five will probably become sworn officers.

Nguyen became interested in police work after graduating from high school and went through the standard career path--cadet programs, junior college and the sheriff’s academy. At his graduation ceremony, Garden Grove Police Chief John Robertson pinned Nguyen’s badge on for him.

Nguyen is now assigned to Team 2, a group of patrol officers responsible for a section of the city bordered by Beach Boulevard, West Street, Katella Avenue and McFadden Boulevard. Whites, Latinos and Vietnamese live in the area, which has a mix of homes and retail businesses.

In the field, Nguyen sometimes encounters the typical problems police associate with Southeast Asian witnesses and victims. They are reluctant to provide information to him, and they don’t want their names mentioned or printed in his police reports because they fear retaliation by suspects.

“I try to allay their fears by simply telling them that I am there to help,” Nguyen said. “The hardest part is trying to educate them, but the message is getting through. Now they recognize the Vietnamese officers and they seem to trust us instead of someone who is American.”

Although the Vietnamese do not always look upon law enforcement as an honorable career, Nguyen said he had strong support from his family when he decided to become a police officer. His uncle was a policeman in Vietnam, and his father, whom he has not seen since leaving Vietnam in 1975, was in the military.

While Nguyen’s family backed his career choice, Orange County district attorney’s investigator Van Nguyen (no relation) encountered some opposition from her relatives when she enrolled in the sheriff’s reserve officer academy more than seven years ago.

“They’d tell me, ‘It’s dangerous. You’ll get a lot of people to dislike you. You shouldn’t do that type of thing. It’s not something a woman should do.’ ” Van Nguyen said. “But it was my decision.”

Van Nguyen, who left Vietnam in 1973 to go to school in the United States, wanted to become a teacher--an honored profession in Vietnam--until law enforcement piqued her interest while she was working as a family support officer for the Orange County district attorney’s office. Family support officers enforce orders for child support payments.

She became a reserve police officer in Anaheim in 1983 and a welfare fraud investigator for the district attorney’s office in 1985. She now handles cases related to the county’s refugee population.

“When the language barrier comes down, the Vietnamese are so much more at ease. The bulk of their problems is caused by language. Once they have us, they feel they can talk,” Van Nguyen said.

Most of the resistance to her job now comes from incredulous male suspects who are Vietnamese. Influenced by the traditional roles of men and women in Vietnam, some refuse to believe that a woman can be in a place of such authority, she says.

During interrogations, she says, they question whether she really is the investigator and wonder whether she has the right to ask certain questions. Others have thought she was not an officer because she wore civilian clothes.

In those situations, she takes out her badge and tries to explain. When that doesn’t work, she summons a uniformed patrol officer in from the street to rid the suspect of any doubt.

“Many times I have had problems just asking for their identification card,” Van Nguyen said. “When I come to their door, they say, ‘Go away or I’ll call the police. You don’t have the right to ask me those questions.’ It is hard for a Vietnamese woman to be in law enforcement.”

The other problem, she says, is that people from her homeland cannot understand why she, as a Vietnamese, would want to arrest them. Some plead with her to look the other way. She says that at least one, who was prosecuted for bribery, offered her $1,000.

“They ask ‘Why are you doing this to us? We are Vietnamese, too. So why don’t you help us.’ This is really difficult to deal with,” Van Nguyen said. “We just say that we are doing our job and that we have to treat people equally.”

High-ranking police administrators say it is hard to find qualified Southeast Asians like Van Nguyen with the English language skills necessary to write accurate crime reports and provide testimony that holds up in criminal prosecutions.

Police departments try to get prospective recruits interested while they are in high school, enrolling them in cadet or explorer programs, which expose them to police work and let the department assess their potential.

Southeast Asians who make it through the programs and the academy say they are perhaps better equipped than other officers to handle calls in the Southeast Asian community because they are bilingual and understand the culture.

“I have been a refugee. I’ve been in their shoes,” said Santa Ana Officer Di Au. “I understand that there has to be some hesitancy before opening up in a situation you don’t understand.”

Au, 40, left Vietnam in 1979 aboard a 100-foot fishing boat crammed with almost 700 people. It sailed to Hong Kong, where Au spent six months in a refugee camp before gaining entry to the United States. He said he had to pay five taels (small bars of Vietnamese gold) to the communist government before he could leave his homeland.

Au, who was a combat interpreter for U.S. Special Forces units during the war, said he was always interested in police work, even as a child, when he read stories about French and American detectives.

His family, he says, approves of his career, but he has heard that some Vietnamese have opposed their relatives’ or children’s becoming police officers.

“There are lots of qualified Vietnamese out there,” Au said, “and we need to get them interested. How to attract them is a tough question.”