Latino With ‘Cop Eyes’ Helps Immigrants See Rights Clearly

In a movie several years ago, Al Pacino played a homicide detective who delivers a fierce monologue about how cops see a world that most people do not see. “Cops’ eyes,” he called it.

Officer George Aguilar has cops’ eyes. And what he sees is the shadow world where poor Latin American immigrants live.

“Necesito ayuda,” Emma Rodriguez says, taking a seat across from Aguilar in a tiny office at the Guadalupe Center in Canoga Park.

I need help.

Aguilar nods--a self-described “middle-aged cop,” a 10-year veteran who looks younger than the 34 he is. Severely combed black hair runs back from his round face. A military tattoo shows beneath a dark uniform sleeve.

He holds court twice a week in the cinder-block room with the metallic Last Supper bas-relief on the wall. Aguilar is the staff of Project Amigo, a 6-year-old Los Angeles Police Department program under which Spanish speakers can ask questions and report crimes without venturing into a police station. A neutral zone designed to erase barriers of language, culture and fear of officialdom.

They need help. They speak to Aguilar in the language of his parents, of his San Fernando childhood, the language he had to work to regain after years of disuse.

Rodriguez says she got a job in December cutting hems in a semi-clandestine garment operation in Chatsworth that sounds like a sweatshop. The boss, an American woman, promised the legal minimum wage. But after more than a month, Rodriguez had not been paid anything. Some Salvadoran women insisted on payment and received checks that bounced. Finally, Rodriguez gave up and left.

“And now they tell me she’s hired new people,” Rodriguez, a dark, solemn mother of four, says disgustedly. Glittering silver laces accent her high-top gym shoes. “They say she does this all the time.”

Aguilar speaks Spanish as fast as he does English. He compensates for lapses of grammar and vocabulary with mental agility.

The police cannot intercede on Rodriguez’s behalf in a labor dispute, he says. He can refer her to the state Division of Labor Standards in Van Nuys. And he can call the employer to verify the phone number and the complaint, which sometimes does the trick.

Sure enough, the employer displays a sudden new interest in settling accounts.

“You have to understand her point of view,” Aguilar says into the phone. “She’s out of work. She needs the money.”

Rodriguez thanks Aguilar profusely, promising to let him know what happens.

Project Amigo doesn’t involve a lot of “crushing crime,” Aguilar says. But it educates immigrants in their rights and responsibilities in this country, in what the government and police can and cannot do. Learning how to prevent an overdue traffic ticket from turning into a warrant and a nightmare, for example, can be truly valuable.

The assignment also has taught Aguilar about the parasitic legion of scam artists, unscrupulous employers and street thugs who prey on immigrants. Particularly choice targets are the day laborers who wait for work along thoroughfares in the morning and who find shelter in shacks and warehouses at night.

“These guys make five dollars an hour,” he says. “They don’t believe in banks. . . . Sometimes they’ve got two, three hundred dollars in their pockets.”

Once some wanna-be gang members poured lighter fluid on a day laborer and set him afire. Other men have been bushwhacked by El Rojo, a “six-foot Mexican with red hair.” El Rojo claims he was in the Mexican police; he belongs to the small percentage of the men who hang out drinking at the hiring corners and are not interested in work, Aguilar says.

“Mostly he’s a drunk. But when he’s sober, he’s always robbing these guys. He clubs them while they’re sleeping, knocks ‘em out and takes their money.”

The last visitor of the afternoon is Alberto Huerta, 55. He is bowlegged and walks with years of work on his back.

Huerta has been coming back and forth across the border since the time of the contrataciones, the program begun in World War II that recruited cheap “bracero” labor in Mexico for years afterward. In the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt is a sheet of paper, which he removes and unfolds.

“I have it all written down here,” he says. “The man owes me for nine days of work.”

A fellow Mexican hired Huerta off the street to lay stones in a patio at a construction site in Calabasas. The boss paid for the first week. Then one morning he simply did not show up.

A daily occurrence, Aguilar says.

“They just go to another corner,” he says. “If the workers didn’t get a license plate or a name or an address, there’s nothing they can do.”

Huerta, however, is determined. On the paper he has scrawled a chart of his days on the job: The repeated word “ Trabaje “--”I worked”--forms a long column down the page. Aguilar explains how to contact the state Division of Labor Standards in Van Nuys and tells Huerta to get back to him next week.

“Write it down, write it down,” Huerta drawls. “Otherwise I get it mixed up.”

“OK,” Aguilar says. “Where are you from, senor?”

“Durango.”

Aguilar grins at the man with the work boots, blue cap and sun-darkened hands, who sits with an attitude of infinite expectation.

“My mother was from Durango,” the policeman says.