Cultivating Understanding : Crash Course in Mexico Helps LAPD Officers Defuse Neighborhood Tensions

When Fred Miller started his new assignment as a Los Angeles Police Department community relations officer in South-Central Los Angeles, he could not understand how the feud between blacks and Latinos in the 8800 block of Orchard Avenue had become so vitriolic.

Notes from officers who had previously worked the area told Miller that one longtime African American resident had thrown several garden rocks at the newer Latino family next door, injuring a 4-year-old boy and his 63-year-old grandmother.

Months before, the little boy’s grandfather had been accused of trying to run down a black woman up the street with a pickup truck.

Miller, himself an African American, heard plenty from black neighbors. But most of what the Latino residents had to say was in Spanish--and went right past him.

So he went to Mexico.

As part of an experimental LAPD program coordinated with the Mexican Consulate, Miller and 18 other community relations officers from the department’s South Bureau traveled to Guadalajara in December for a 10-day crash course. Their goal: Learning enough Spanish language and culture to bridge the mounting gulf between recent Latino immigrants and longtime residents. In the South Bureau, this friction often comes to a head in traditionally black neighborhoods where Latinos are an emerging majority.

On the streets today, Miller and the other officers say they have been sensitized in small but meaningful ways.

Take street vendors.

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Before his trip, Miller tended to view unlicensed street vendors as “opportunists with no regard for their impact on others.” In Guadalajara, he saw how vendors are viewed as part of the city’s economic fabric, and attended a University of Guadalajara lecture on the lack of job opportunities for the average Mexican.

Once harsh and aggressive about writing tickets for snack carts and sidewalk florists in South-Central (the practice is prohibited in Los Angeles except in city-approved districts), Miller has mellowed.

“Today, I give them a break, instead of a ticket,” he said. “This is how they know how to survive.”

Increasingly adept at Spanish, his travel-worn Spanish/English dictionary always within reach, he says he now explains to vendors how they can run their business with a license.

“Nobody ever told them how the system works here. So they do things they thought were acceptable,” he said.

A woman calls to Miller in Spanish from her idling car outside Manchester Avenue Elementary, where a flock of cars await the bell that announces the end of the school day.

“Listen--we can’t find a place to park,” she says.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Miller responds in a mixture of English and Spanish. “But the people who live on this street need to get to their homes. You have to move.”

Frustrated, the woman drives on.

“At least they understand,” Miller says.

Visiting Mexico helped Miller see more complexities in the world of Orchard Avenue, in people such as Sonia Castaneda, the grandmother who had been involved in the rock-throwing incident.

“No ingles,” Castaneda had told the officer when he called on her before his trip, concluding what sounded to Miller like a diatribe.

“I thought they really were anti-police,” Miller said of the Castanedas and other immigrant families on Orchard. “They seemed to avoid me when I was in the neighborhood and they never went to any of our community meetings. You begin to wonder if they’re hiding something.”

Today it’s a different story.

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Miller knows, for example, that Castaneda came from El Salvador 11 years ago, enduring years of confusion and anxiety here as she and her husband, Antonio, left five children in El Salvador to build roots in the United States as domestic workers. The children are all here now; the oldest is a high school teacher.

“Good things are just starting to happen for us,” said Sonia Castaneda, inside her home filled with family photos. “We work hard to have a life here. We don’t want any problems.”

Says Miller: “These folks want to live in a peaceful community as much as anyone else. I just wasn’t getting their side of the story before.”

The $23,000 Mexican trip was the brainchild of Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker, who heads the South Bureau and pushed the idea for two years.

Kroeker, who is fluent in Spanish, scraped for funds from private sources and coordinated byzantine diplomatic details with the Mexican Consulate and the University of Guadalajara.

“Ethnic communities and the police have grown mistrustful of each other,” said Kroeker, who accompanied the officers to Guadalajara. (Latinos now make up 26% of LAPD officers, compared to 46% white and 15% black.)

Kroeker is hopeful of expanding these kinds of trips if they are proven useful.

“Officers learn enough Spanish in the [Police] Academy to give basic commands” to criminal suspects, he said, but “we also need to be able to say: ‘How’s your family?’ or ‘How’s work?’ ”

Carlos Duran, a University of Guadalajara administrator who helped coordinate the program, said learning other, more subtle forms of address could also be a great advantage to Los Angeles police.

Knowing the difference between the tu (informal) form of address and the usted (formal) can take an officer a long way with Latinos, Duran said.

The Mexican-bound LAPD officers attended three months of weekly language and culture classes coordinated by Duran before they made their trip, learning cultural nuances as well as linguistics.

One example, Duran said, is how Mexicans are accustomed to getting out of their cars as soon as they are pulled over--a potentially explosive practice in view of American law enforcement’s desire that suspects remain in the car.

“Being aware of this could save a lot of problems,” Duran said. “Sometimes, there is tension when there doesn’t need to be.”

Sonia Castaneda agrees. She remembers an incident in 1988 when Antonio Castaneda had just finished pulling his truck out of the driveway on his way to work and an African American neighbor tried to cross the street in front of him.

What resulted was a series of awkward stops and starts during which neither driver nor pedestrian knew what the other intended to do.

Unable to understand one another, both grew frustrated and began shouting. The police were called and an attempted vehicular assault accusation was made but never pursued.

“They think we are against them,” Sonia Castaneda said of her black neighbors. “That we do not want to be united with them. We are not criminals or drug-users.”

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For Officer Javier Nunez, the trip to Mexico was a cultural awakening. Nunez, a Mexican American born here and not proficient in Spanish, went by “Jay” before the trip.

“I used to stick a finger in [Latino immigrants’] faces and say, ‘You better learn to speak English and to do things our way, right away,’ ” he said.

In Guadalajara, his awkward Spanish pleas for assistance to random pedestrians sometimes invited disdain or hostile responses--and reminded him of what it was like to be on the other side.

“Nobody likes to be looked down upon,” he said. “Now, I know it takes some sympathy.”

Though such sentiments are generally lauded by Latino community leaders in Los Angeles, some say the experimental program is misguided.

To build better ties with Latinos here, more police should discover the wonder of Los Angeles’ barrios instead of Mexico’s, said Al Robles, chairman of the Los Angeles Police Commission’s Hispanic Advisory Council.

“There is a marked difference between life in Mexico and life in South-Central or East Los Angeles,” Robles said. “You cannot transpose the unique experiences these different areas offer and say you ‘understand’ Latinos here better.

“You can’t expect the [negative] reputation the LAPD has established in these areas to go away just because some of them went to Mexico,” he said.

The verdict is not in on Orchard Avenue. Tension remains.

Sonia Castaneda and her family, frustrated with the neighborhood’s history of acrimony, now accompany Miller to neighborhood block meetings with their English-speaking neighbors.

“I can get along with them fine,” said Clara Gardner, an African American woman who has lived on Orchard for 13 years. However, she acknowledged that other black residents remain biased against Latinos.

Ana Lobos, Castaneda’s daughter, was recently asked by Miller to head a second block watch group with only Latino members, a position she is still considering.

“I’m scared it will cause more trouble,” she said. “Maybe.”