O.C. Agencies Reach Out to Immigrants : Law enforcement: Officials target Mexican and Vietnamese communities in concerted effort to elicit trust and cooperation.

Orange County’s law enforcement officials are forming an unprecedented alliance to tackle an age-old problem--the lack of trust between immigrants and police.

Through a federally funded outreach project spearheaded by Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas, prosecutors, police and parole officers will unite for the first time to aggressively campaign for improved relationships with the county’s two largest immigrant communities, Vietnamese and Mexican.

Unlike community policing strategies, which assign officers to saturate particular neighborhoods, and smaller-scale outreach efforts by some police departments, the new effort will take a countywide approach. The needs of immigrants who are either reluctant to turn to the justice system for help, or who simply do not know how, have long been ignored, officials and activists agree.

“It’s a fresh look at an old problem,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Michelle Clesceri, the program’s director. “The police, prosecutors and probation officers need to see the Hispanics and Vietnamese communities as people and they need to see us as people. It takes a lot of effort to build a level of trust where the common enemy becomes the criminal.”

Despite long-standing acknowledgment of friction between immigrant communities and police in Orange County and beyond--such as angry clashes between Haitians and police in New York City--efforts to bridge the divide have been scattered.

The district attorney’s office in Los Angeles County offers many outreach programs but none specifically designed to build trust in the Latino and Asian American communities, said Sandi Gibbons, a public information officer.

Last week state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer met with leaders of the Vietnamese community in Orange County to discuss crime prevention. Lockyer said he has assigned assistants in his office to keep in touch with community leaders, business owners, faith leaders and activists in ethnic communities around the state.

The goal of the Orange County program--funded with a $150,000 federal grant--is to educate immigrants to report crimes, assist police officers and prosecutors in investigations and get help when they are hurt by crime.

“These are problems that we have with everyone, but in the cases of immigrants, there is a cultural barrier as well,” Clesceri said.

The district attorney’s office will launch the program on Saturday at the Mariachi Festival at Irvine Lake Park. Rackauckas and other prosecutors will distribute bilingual pamphlets from a booth. The volunteers hope to gather some information from festival-goers as well.

Participants will be asked to answer a survey about their previous experience with police, what crimes are common in their neighborhoods and if they have ever been crime victims.

“We will put it all in a database and create an advisory board of community leaders to brainstorm on what communities we need to hit,” said Rocio Gonzalez, supervisor of the district attorney’s government and community relations unit.

Program leaders will consider advice from the advisory board in deploying volunteers from law enforcement agencies and the community to solve particular problems--discussing warning signs of child abuse at neighborhood schools, for example.

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According to a U.S. Census report released recently, Orange County’s Asian American population surged 43% and the Hispanic population grew 37% from 1990 to 1998.

Cultural differences are only partly to blame for the lack of communication between immigrants and government officials, said Jose Fernandez, president of Nuestro Pueblo of Santa Ana.

“More so, it’s the lack of basic information, which should be readily available but isn’t,” he said. “I feel it’s incumbent upon these government agencies . . . to include everyone and not keep a tight circle on the people they serve. This is something that has been necessary. I’m very surprised it hasn’t been done before.”

For Vietnamese immigrants, language is often an obstacle when seeking government services or providing help to investigators, said Van Thai Tran, a Westminster-based criminal attorney.

“It’s not just enough [for the district attorney] to be a recipient of all reported crimes,” Tran said. “But it has to be a two-way street in the sense that education and law enforcement and the distribution of that information also helps reduce crimes or the number of victims, which may be vulnerable to crimes.”

Staff writer John Mitchell contributed to this story.