Police and Non-English Speakers

The Los Angeles Police Department owes some answers to the family of Dong-Sik Chong. An incident involving the 81-year-old Korean immigrant raises disturbing questions about the LAPD’s treatment of non-English-speaking residents. His plight prompted a multiethnic coalition of community groups to demand a full accounting from the Police Commission. The records should be made public.

When Chong set out from his new home in Koreatown a few days after Christmas on his daily walk, he made a simple mistake. The onetime farmer, who speaks no English and is hard of hearing, mistook a house for the one he shares with his daughter and began banging on the gate. Police swooped in and took him away. At 3 a.m., the old man said, he was turned out of a police station house with no explanation or assistance. As he was trying to find his way home, he was beaten and robbed and ended up in a hospital.

Police Chief Willie L. Williams said a preliminary report indicated that Northeast Division officers thought Chong was drunk and sent him to a homeless center. The police came to this conclusion without trying to communicate with the old man? The LAPD does have Korean-speaking officers.

The LAPD should make better use of the many ethnic community resources that exist in Los Angeles. Be it Korean or Spanish or Farsi, there’s no reason why translation help should ever be far away. The sooner the LAPD gets to the bottom of the Chong incident, the sooner it can be prepared for cases with similar circumstances.