Crime, Distrust Keep Cambodians Living in Fear : Law enforcement: Despite efforts by police, immigrants in MacArthur Park area are still relunctant to join crime-fighting programs. The problem is heightened by language barriers and cultural misunderstandings.

It’s summertime, school is out, and like a lot of American kids, 9-year-old Vannak wakes up every morning eager to play baseball. But unlike most American kids, Vannak doesn’t play baseball in a park or a schoolyard or even in the street.

Instead, Vannak plays with a plastic bat and ball in his tiny bedroom.

He whacks the ball, ricochets it off walls, measures home runs by where the ball hits a wall that’s only six feet away. He spends all his time in the stiflingly hot $420-per-month apartment he shares with his mother and sister near Walnut Avenue and 14th Street in the MacArthur Park/Whittier School neighborhood of Long Beach.

It is a neighborhood where gang members and drug dealers and prostitutes haunt the streets. It is a neighborhood where gunshots punctuate the night and people are attacked on the street in midday.

“Can’t play outside!” Vannak said. “Cambodians don’t go outside!”

It’s a child’s exaggeration, of course. The 2,000 or so Cambodians who live in the neighborhood between Anaheim Street and Pacific Coast Highway, go outside to work or school or the store. But even daytime excursions are kept to a minimum. And when the sun sets, they lock their doors, draw the shades and hide.

Because of its high crime rate, the MacArthur Park neighborhood is one of six that has been targeted for special help through the city’s Neighborhood Improvement Strategy program. Community watch groups have been organized, anti-graffiti programs launched, neighborhood “block parties” planned to involve residents in community affairs. Also, one officer and two police service assistants have been assigned to the area full time.

“We were sent here because of the high crime in the area,” said Anitra Dempsey, a Long Beach police service assistant assigned to the MacArthur Park area. “It’s a major concern for everybody. Our job is to help the residents fight it.”

But there is another concern. Although city outreach workers report initial success in involving other MacArthur Park area residents, the success rate with Cambodians is almost zero.

Other residents may live in fear of crime. But for Cambodians in the MacArthur Park area, the problem is exacerbated by language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, and by a fear and distrust of government in almost every form, from police officers to firefighters to social workers to community planners.

It’s a situation that has some Long Beach city officials tearing out their hair in frustration.

A recent report by Eileen Figel, a planning department official, described the situation: “Many . . . families, believing they cannot rely on the police for protection, keep their children inside as much as possible and never venture out of their homes after dark. If the crime statistics for this neighborhood have decreased, it is very likely due to the fact that the residents have given up on reporting crime and have taken to barricading themselves inside their homes.”

Figel has spent months going door to door in the MacArthur Park neighborhood, accompanied by a Cambodian interpreter, trying to get residents involved in community improvement programs--or even to open their doors.

“There’s a real fear of government within the Cambodian community,” Figel says. “It’s so hard to break through the barriers, to convince these people to trust you.”

During the riots, 35 Cambodian-owned businesses in Long Beach were destroyed or seriously damaged, she said. “If they see me (a Caucasian) they won’t even open the door. . . . They are really scared. They feel it’s not safe anywhere.”

Worse, says Figel, is the lack of participation in programs that could help fix the problems that create the fear.

A recent meeting of MacArthur Park neighborhood residents with representatives from various city departments--held in the park recreation center--illustrates the problem. Of the 16 people who attended, only one was Cambodian--and he is a part-time translator and outreach worker for the city.

“Several Cambodian residents had expressed an interest” in coming to the meeting, said Long Beach Police Cpl. Mary Jensen, who is assigned full time to the MacArthur Park neighborhood. “And yesterday we went around and reminded them (of the meeting). Unfortunately, none of them showed up.”

Perhaps even more serious, officials and community leaders say, is the reluctance of many Cambodian residents to report crime.

For example, Vannak’s mother, Sophavy (like other Cambodian residents quoted in this story, she didn’t want her last name used), saw a man stealing her 11-year-old daughter, Sovanny’s, bike a couple of months ago. But she didn’t call the police, she said, because “I was afraid he (the thief) would come back.”

When an apartment manager named Noun is bothered by gang members gathering near his building, he doesn’t call police, because, he says, “It won’t do any good.”

When a 25-year-old Cambodian student named Serey sees a gang of toughs standing on his street, he doesn’t call police, either. He stays inside or, he says, if he has to go out, “I go to another street.”

“They don’t trust the system,” said Bryant Ben, resource development director for the Cambodian Business Assn., who with Figel has been going door to door to talk to Cambodian residents. “Many times they won’t report that they have a problem. Sometimes they are afraid the bad guys will take revenge. Sometimes they say, ‘Oh, I can’t speak English, only Cambodian.’

“I tell them, ‘Don’t be afraid, just call 911, speak Cambodian, they have a translator.’ ” Ben said with a shrug. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Cambodians don’t report crime,” says Sam Chittapalo, a reserve officer who heads the Asian affairs section of the Long Beach Police Department’s community relations section. “I have to beg them to report it.”

Not reporting crime often indirectly leads to more crime, Cmdr. Kimball Shelley said.

“When you don’t report crimes, we don’t have the crime stats we use to deploy resources,” he said. Fewer police resources, Shelley said, can mean more crime, which further reduces residents’ confidence in police and leads to even less reporting of crimes, which leads to fewer resources.

The reasons for Cambodians’ reluctance to get involved, to report crime, to do anything besides hide in their homes, members of the community say, are primarily cultural. After all, they say, Cambodians come from a country in which countless people died at by orders of their own government.

“They have to learn that this is America, not Cambodia,” Chittapalo said. “Right now, they are afraid of uniforms, any uniforms, even Fire Department uniforms, and any government people. They will learn, but it’s not easy. It takes time.

“Maybe a long, long time.”