Breaking Down Barriers in New York’s Chinatown

Two paintings vie for attention at opposite ends of Deputy Inspector Thomas Chan’s Chinatown office: a friendly Norman Rockwell policeman chatting with a young boy and a traditional Chinese floral print.

Chan is familiar with the contrast: American police officers on one side, Chinese custom on the other. After 16 months as the first Chinese American police commander in the city with the nation’s largest Asian community, Chan is nudging the sides together.

Language diversity, cultural customs, social mores--the intricate nuances that kept Chinatown an enigma to generations of police commanders--all hold keys to Chan’s access.

He played ball on this corner, ran around with friends in that alley. He feels toward its citizens the affection of family, and some of them are.

“I pretty much have a home-court advantage,” says Chan, 37, the son of Cantonese immigrants. “Chinatown is not always easy to figure out. I don’t think I have an inside track on all the solutions to all the problems, but I can see more about the mentality of the community.”

For many of the 125 years since Chinese first settled a two-block area on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Chinatown was insular, sharing little with law enforcement except mutual distrust. Older residents tell stories about police extortion, about officers doing nothing while crimes were committed.

Today, residents of a changing Chinatown--brimming with second-generation natives and new immigrants--have higher expectations.

“I think there’s a perception of the Chinese community as quiet and uncomplaining--especially about police issues,” said Good Jean Lau, who runs the bilingual program at Chinatown’s P.S. No. 1. “But that’s changing with the younger generation.”

Many citizens watch Chan and say that here, finally, is someone on their side rather than an adversary to be avoided.

“This sums it up: We see him when there’s nothing wrong,” says Lillian Moy, the senior program director at Chinatown’s YMCA.

Chinatown’s cramped, angled streets conceal little from Chan, whether he is on foot, in a patrol car or on the motor scooter he rides on sunny days.

“He gets on that scooter and he goes around Chinatown, dropping in on places, making sure things are OK,” Moy says. “He doesn’t sit in his office and wait for things to happen.”

While outlining big plans, Chan is equally enthusiastic about rectifying small situations that have long nettled residents.

Some examples: The city’s Crimestoppers program, a tip network for reporting crimes and suspects, had no Asian officer until this spring. Now the precinct staffs a hotline with volunteers who speak many Chinese dialects, not just the common Cantonese. In addition, the complement of officers (25 of 160 in the precinct are Asian) now includes those also fluent in Vietnamese and Fukienese, which many new immigrants speak.

Indeed, Chinese from outlying boroughs now take the subway to the Fifth Precinct in Manhattan if they need the police because they’ve heard its officers speak their tongues. The U.S. attorney’s office also comes calling for help, and many federal and municipal agencies view the precinct as a clearinghouse for Asian resources.

Chan’s officers have started to walk unprecedented “vertical beats” in apartment buildings and have stepped up their uniformed presence on gang corners. New businesses, often plagued by gangs, are given crime-prevention surveys followed by visits from the Asian Gang Intelligence Unit.

The outreach approach appears to be effective.

Chan’s pride sits on his desk: a black binder containing figures that tell him citizen complaints about police have decreased by more than 70% in the past year and the number of robberies has been halved.

“On one hand, we’re reaching out to people. On the other, we’re getting tough,” he says.

The road is not all smooth. Some business owners fall silent when asked about the police. Some community leaders won’t discuss them at all.

Last spring two Asian American officers who worked in Chinatown were indicted on charges of passing information about police operations to gangs. The accusations sullied the police image though the officers were not technically part of Chan’s precinct.

“Those indictments were an embarrassment for all Asian law enforcement officers,” said Detective Walkin Chin, president of the Asian Jade Society, a fraternal organization for Asian American officers. But Chan, he said, has “broken a lot of barriers for us.”

It took time.

The traditional Chinese distrust of outside authority goes back to the days of the Qing Dynasty, China’s last, which fell in a 1911 revolution. “Tongs,” community groups that are the backbone of Chinatown and often linked to organized crime, were created in southern China to oppose the Qing, which was led by ethnic Manchus from the north. The Tongs helped Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen build power bases in both China and New York.

Before 1965, tight U.S. exclusion laws ensured that immigrants came from the same parts of China and spoke the same dialects. Fearful of outsiders, they often turned to Tongs to settle disputes. Police were out of the loop.

“China has never been a nation of laws. It’s whoever decides what’s right at the time,” says Betty Lee Sung, a retired history professor and expert on the Asian experience in New York.

“There’s been a tremendous distrust of anything that is authority. The Chinese community has seen the police as oppressors, not protectors,” Sung says. “So the police said, ‘Well, the Chinese govern themselves.’ ”

Language was the biggest barrier. Toisanese was long the traditional dialect in Chinatown, followed in the second half of this century by Cantonese. Now speakers of Fukienese and Mandarin, China’s standard dialect, are abundant. Chan is trying hurriedly to find officers who speak new languages.

Chinatown today is a melange. The precinct, which also includes the shrinking Little Italy, is 61% Asian. Its 44,500 Asians are joined by 14,000 whites, 9,500 Hispanics and 4,500 blacks. Those are 1990 U.S. Census figures and do not include illegal Chinese immigrants, estimated in the tens of thousands.

Chan’s family came to Chinatown in 1936 and lived in his native neighborhood for more than 27 years. His family remains, though he has moved to neighboring Staten Island.

He became a paramedic and studied to be a pharmacist at St. John’s University before joining the force in 1982. He rose through the ranks in various precincts and took command of the Fifth as a captain in May 1994. He was promoted to deputy inspector on Aug. 4.

Chan says he doesn’t plan to leave until some problems are solved. And they are myriad: Fukienese and Vietnamese gangs are more violent than some of their predecessors; illegal immigrants are streaming in; drug activity is increasing.

But citizens are finally part of the legal process.

“Now there is a link,” says Lau, the teacher. “There’s somebody there who understands now.”

Above all, Chan wants to draw more Asian Americans onto the force.

In the 1970s, New York City had fewer than a dozen Asian American officers, and it showed painfully the day one newspaper ran a photo of a white police officer guarding a recently raided gambling den.

Just behind him, a sign in Chinese characters gave an address and proclaimed: “We’ve relocated here.”

Today, about 400 Asian Americans are NYPD officers. Yet when Chan, on a recent visit to his old school, P.S. 1, asked a mostly Asian roomful of children if they had police relatives, five raised their hands. All were black. But the most recent round of police applications included 1,100 Asian Americans. That makes Chan smile.

“In the Asian community, parents may say, ‘I want my child to be a doctor, a lawyer,’ ” he says. “I honestly don’t know if there are too many parents who say, ‘I want my son or daughter to become a police officer.’

“If I can say I’ve changed that a little, if people in the community respect us in some small part because of me, then I’ve done my job.”