Officer Hopes He’s Inspiration for Others

When Futi Semanu joined the Santa Ana Ana Police Department in 1975, he was the only Samoan police officer in all of Orange County.

Now, 17 years later, Semanu lives among a local Samoan population that has grown to more than 28,000. Yet he remains the county’s only Samoan officer--a distinction he’s eager to part with.

“This is a good profession and a good job,” Semanu said. “The Samoans need to get into more of the professional fields to help their people and help them understand the system.”

Semanu, 43, said he hopes that his job as corporal of Santa Ana’s West End Police Substation, where he is second in command, will show other Samoans “that you can be anything.”

“When people see a Samoan, they think that he must be a football player or a bouncer. So, I’m trying to recruit Samoan kids. There are a lot of good kids out there.”

Semanu, who was born in Samoa, grew up in a military family in Oahu, Hawaii, before moving to Orange County while he was still in high school.

“It was a rude awakening,” Semanu said of his family’s move to Fountain Valley in 1964, where they were among the first Samoan families to settle in the area.

“In Hawaii, we lived among a melting pot of nationalities, and we didn’t know any difference until we got here,” he said. “The first week of school, we didn’t know the slang, so when a guy turned to me and said, ‘What do you want, wetback?’ I didn’t know I was being insulted.”

After joining the football team at La Quinta High School, he made friends, but the way he had been received initially left an imprint.

“I was being made aware that there is another side to people that I didn’t see on the island,” he said.

The early lessons have served him well.

In March, Semanu was honored by the Orange County Human Relations Commission for his work to improve police relations with the city’s Asian and Pacific Islander communities, which have grown dramatically in recent years.

“After 10 years of beat work and undercover work, what I’m doing now has really been a turning point for me,” Semanu said. “We go out into the community, and we ask what we can do for them.”

Semanu works out of a large substation on Harbor Boulevard and McFadden Street, which he says is more accessible and less intimidating to locals than the police headquarters at the Civic Center.

“If we don’t go out and communicate with these people, then we are never going to get anything back from them,” Semanu said. “We encourage them to call and to make reports. Asian people would never report crimes; they would just tell their friends and neighbors but not the police because their image of police was negative. We’re trying to change that by letting them know that we’re here to help them.”

Semanu also has created a coalition of Asian business owners working to help local Asian families who may be in trouble.

“They’ve always wanted to do something like this but didn’t know how to approach it,” he said.