Latino Police Proudly Protect and Serve

Is Frank del Olmo living in 2001 (“Latinos Who Think It’s Better Now Should Read Salazar,” Commentary, Aug. 26)? His view that police officers “treat Latino barrios as territory to be occupied” rings true of earlier times, but today? It’s hard to imagine the Los Angeles Police Department or the Santa Ana Police Department, both with at least 30% Latino officers (not a few former students of mine), engaging in that kind of police treatment.

Mexican Americans heading or having headed departments of Southwestern and California cities--Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, San Antonio and Sacramento come to mind--are no longer a novelty.

Would East L.A.-raised Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca or border-raised San Diego Police Chief David Bejarano tolerate their officers acting as occupiers of the barrios? (San Diego’s model of community policing, in fact, is so outstanding it is being emulated nationally.)

Despite racial profiling, Latino immigrants whose faces dominate East L.A. and South-Central are strongly pro-police partly because of the Latino officers. (My Mexican-immigrant father was always pushing me to be un policia for the law and order the uniform powerfully symbolized.) Remember the parents rallying in support of the scandal-maligned Rampart Division?

My wife and my then 9-year-old and 4-year-old daughters and I were protesters at the August 1970 moratorium (against the Vietnam War) and witnessed the riot that broke out at the East L.A. park as the wave of sheriffs moved in wielding their batons.

Joseph Platt

Professor Emeritus

Department of Chicano Studies

Cal State Fullerton