COUNTYWIDE : Report Focuses on Police-Asians Gap

Police agencies can help bridge the language and cultural gap with Orange County’s burgeoning Southeast Asian community by hiring more bilingual officers, establishing substations in ethnic communities and strengthening police community relations programs, a new county Human Relations Commission report says.

The 23-page report, “New Perspectives: Police/Southeast Asian Relations in Orange County,” highlights a commission conference held last September, which found that fear or mistrust of police among Southeast Asians has hampered police investigations. As crime witnesses, the report said, Southeast Asians are reluctant to step forward because of negative experiences with police in their homelands.

As a result, Southeast Asians continue to be victimized by hate crimes, gangs, extortion and residential burglaries, or “home invasions,” according to the report. Many of the attacks are by other Southeast Asians, the report states. The report recommended that police develop and strengthen community relations programs, especially with “gatekeepers,” or key members of the Southeast Asian community, who could include “fortunetellers, herbalists, monks, eldest in clan” and others.

Police leadership must encourage officers to think beyond “traditional law enforcement methods” and emphasize developing human relations and cultural awareness, the report says.

Such nontraditional approaches were praised by many law enforcement officials as a way of gaining the trust of influential members of the Southeast Asian community.

“It takes time. But I tried to talk to everyone I could when I was at the (Little Saigon) substation,” said Westminster Police Lt. Larry Woessner. “Eventually you do start to identify the influential businessmen in the community. It works.”

Woessner and other law enforcement officials also said that programs for Southeast Asians heighten cultural awareness among police officers.

“The key is that many of these (recommendations) have got to be on-going efforts. With any immigrant group we’re not familiar with, we have to go out and make ourselves familiar with (them) and help them, too. I guess the bottom line is it’s hard to hold people accountable when they don’t know what’s accountable,” Woessner said.

The report was published at a “critical time” for cities in Orange County and elsewhere in Southern California, because their Southeast Asian populations are expected to mushroom. More than 1,000 Southeast Asians arrive monthly in Orange County, the report states.

Orange County has the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. The county has about 100,000 Vietnamese, 8,000 Cambodians and 3,000 Laotians, the report says. Southeast Asians live in the county’s core cities of Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Westminster, where the Vietnamese business district known as Little Saigon is located.

Although the county has seen tremendous growth of Southeast Asian residents since the fall of Saigon nearly 16 years ago, there are still few Vietnamese police officers in the county.

There is only one Vietnamese officer in the Westminster department, although there are several Vietnamese police cadets assigned to the Little Saigon police substation. The Garden Grove and Santa Ana police departments each have two Vietnamese officers.