Spanish Plan for Police Brings Angry Retort by Opponents

Groups of city firefighters and police officers will begin taking Spanish classes this summer under a pilot program that has raised the hackles of those who supported a 1988 constitutional amendment making English Arizona’s official language.

Councilwoman Mary Rose Wilcox, who proposed the program last fall, believes that, because an estimated 50,000 members of the growing Latino population in Phoenix speak little or no English, police and firefighters must learn Spanish.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” she said. “Our officers are assisting people they cannot communicate with.”

The pilot project has the backing of city administrators, the police and fire unions and representatives of the Latino community, but others are not happy with it.

“I don’t mean to be mean about it, but this is the United States of America and our language is English,” said William Liljegren, a local retiree whose grandparents were Swedish immigrants. “I would hate to move to China and have to learn Chinese, but I would if I had to. I wouldn’t expect them to learn English in order to communicate with me.”

Liljegren and others believe that public money would be better spent teaching English to those who cannot speak the language.

Robert Park, the head of a group that successfully sponsored an initiative making English Arizona’s official language, said the program “flies in the face” of the 1988 constitutional amendment. The law, which failed one court test and is on appeal, prohibits government entities from making any law or policy requiring use of any language other than English.

Originally proposed as a requirement for all police officers and firefighters, the Spanish project will start small. The pilot program will include 16 hours of classes and the distribution of pocket guides for 70 of the Police Department’s 2,000 officers and 210 of the Fire Department’s 1,100 firefighters.

Students in the initial classes will be police officers who walk beats downtown and at housing projects, and personnel at five of the city’s 40 fire stations.

Wilcox hopes the pilot program will be expanded to include other officers and employees of other city departments. She said “sheer numbers” drove her to suggest the plan.

The 1990 census found that 20% of the city’ 943,403 residents are Latino, an increase from 14.8% in 1980. Latinos now number nearly 200,000 and make up the largest minority in a city whose history of Spanish influence is not as great as most other big cities in the Southwest. Only 26% of Phoenicians are non-Caucasian.

Although Park and officials at the national U.S. English organization are not opposed to police and fire personnel learning Spanish, they oppose a mandatory program. A preferable plan, they said, would make the courses optional with bonus pay for those who are bilingual--a practice followed in police departments in some of Phoenix’s neighboring cities and in Houston.

(The Los Angeles Police Department has a combination program, in which Spanish is mandatory in the academy and in-service courses and 5% pay raises are given to those who pass an oral fluency test.)

Other drawbacks to the Phoenix plan, opponents say, are the difficulty of learning the language in a few classes and the inequity created for other minorities who speak no English.

Deputy City Manager Pat Manion--who with other city administrators has been taking Spanish classes--said the proposal is the best available. Citizens who speak other languages are served with the help of an AT&T; telephone interpretation line.

Manion said the current practice of employing Spanish-speaking 911 operators and paying translation-time overtime to the 5% to 10% of the police and fire forces who speak Spanish is not enough.

“We simply have to deal with these people every day and they are citizens like everybody else,” he said. “While it may be a good idea for these people to learn English, the fact is that may be years away and we have to deal with them today.”