In Valley, Koreatown: A Command Performance for Diversity

If a two-year-old community-policing program in the San Fernando Valley is any measure, minority supervisors do make a difference.

Lt. Rich Meraz, a Latino who grew up in Boyle Heights, became the day watch commander at the Foothill station about a year ago, with responsibility for supervising 49 officers and deciding which calls receive priority.

At Spanish-speaking Masses and community-awareness seminars he attended, Meraz said he won residents’ confidence, in part because he assured them he had the authority to hold his officers accountable for their actions.

He said he could not make such assurances if he were a patrolman.

Meraz also told residents that they, too, will have to be accountable for their behavior toward one another and toward the police. “That’s a partnership that works,” he said.

Community leaders said his presence has made his officers more responsive to Latinos and has encouraged Spanish-speaking immigrants, many of whom were suspicious of authorities, to work with the police.

“It has been tremendously valuable to have a Chicano on that day shift,” said Irene Tovar, the citizen liaison between the Latino community and the department’s Foothill Division, where police estimate 60% of the approximately 300,000 residents are Latino.

“We’ve received a kind of service that in the past we haven’t seen in the barrios,” Tovar said.

In Koreatown, residents hold similar views about Lt. Paul Kim, a Korean-American and the highest-ranking person of Asian ancestry in the Los Angeles Police Department.

Kim, who speaks Korean, said he sometimes spends as many as 30 hours a week of his own time visiting churches and talking to community groups.

“If we have a white guy or a black guy who can (speak Korean), that’s fine. But the chances are we don’t,” said Kim, one of only two Asians among the 215 lieutenants in the department, according to Police Department data.

A Police Department spokesman said there are no statistics on how many officers speak foreign languages.

Kim has alleviated fears among Korean immigrants, many of whom equate the police with repressive security forces in their native country, said Charles Park, a Koreatown businessman.

Without more officers like Kim, Park said, “There’s very little incentive to report crimes and see the police force as reliable.”