Police in Boise, neighboring Idaho cities need bilingual officers. Is that need being met?
Margie Gonzalez had an idea.
Contacted by the Parma Police Department to ask about potential resources for communicating with non-English speakers, the executive director of the Idaho Commission on Hispanic Affairs figured the time had come to teach more officers throughout the Treasure Valley how to speak Spanish.
Parma has zero bilingual officers, for instance, but 36% of its population is Hispanic/Latino. This is not an uncommon ratio in the rural communities surrounding Boise, Meridian and Nampa, places that have seen their Latino populations grow along with those of smaller towns. Gonzalez knew that the demand for bilingual officers would only increase, so the idea of a class took hold.
“Margie Gonzalez reached out to me and asked if this was something we could offer here in Caldwell because of the proximity of the police departments that were requesting that kind of course, like Parma, Homedale, Wilder, Caldwell, Fruitland,” said Kimberly Tomkinson, director of the Caldwell center of Treasure Valley Community College.
Announcements were sent to all Treasure Valley law enforcement agencies, according to Gonzalez, with a course starting in early January. But Tomkinson had received contact from only eight officers a week before the start date, short of the minimum 15 required for the class. That delayed its starting date, and it remains to be seen whether the class will fill.
This was not the first attempt at a Spanish-language course for officers, which Gonzalez described as “a Band-Aid approach” to larger problems — problems that are not going away.
“I can’t tell you how many times I hear on the radio guys calling for a Spanish speaker — sometimes other languages,” said Boise Police Department detective Joel Teuber. “And sometimes you have to call for an interpreter or an officer that speaks Spanish, and sometimes you’re lucky if you have one working on the whole shift.”
‘Disconnect’ between Hispanic population, police
Kathy Griesmeyer, public policy strategist for ACLU Idaho, and Gonzalez both said it’s common to hear community concerns about language barriers and a lack of “cultural competency” with police forces, particularly the smaller ones.
“There is a disconnect between the Hispanic community and the law enforcement. Because of funding, there are some of the police departments within the state, that are more rural, that have officers that have no training or little training when it comes to cultural competency,” Gonzalez said, referring to the ability to understand, communicate and interact effectively across cultures.
The Treasure Valley’s larger cities have bilingual officers and employees, although they don’t come close to matching the percentage of the population that’s Spanish-speaking.
The Caldwell Police Department has nine bilingual employees, including seven sworn officers, out of a staff of 85. But the Canyon County city has a population that’s now 37.3% Hispanic/Latino.
Curt Schankle, a captain with the Nampa Police Department, said 13 of its 190 employees are bilingual, including both sworn officers and civilians. That’s just 6.8% of the workforce, while Nampa’s Latino population is 23.7%.
The Boise Police Department has roughly 10 bilingual officers, according to Ed Moreno, Hispanic liaison for BPD. It has a workforce of about 400, and Spanish-speaking employees make up just 2.5% of the department. The city’s population is right around 9% Latino/Hispanic.
These numbers can lead to simple traffic stops and interactions that become rife with confusion over documents, details and commands, according to Gonzalez. In addition, these barriers can pose a risk when individuals call police or need to report crimes.
The use of informal translators — children, caretakers, neighbors or friends — is common for departments, according to both Schankle and Teuber.
“Depending on the case, we might ask a family member to help us communicate. It happens regularly if it’s a theft report or something nonviolent,” Schankle said.
Since the bilingual officers are spread out across dispatch, patrol and other departments in Nampa, Schankle says the wait time for someone who is fluent could be anywhere from 2 minutes to 20 minutes or longer.
And some situations are not conducive to delays.
“It can be a safety issue, to be quite honest with you, not being able to communicate if you need help or if you are worried about something else,” Boise’s Moreno said.
Police, interpreters, other languages and other resources
Jessica Knarr of the Boise Police Department cited instances of dispatch officers not understanding individuals who call 911, which led to training in asking what language a caller comfortably speaks.
Knarr is the refugee liaison for BPD and manages the interpreter list used by the department and surrounding agencies for all languages. Boise, Garden City and Meridian all pull from that list, which has about 40 interpreters, including those who speak Arabic or Kiswahili (Swahili), a language common to eastern Africa. The interpreters also work with the Nampa and Caldwell departments on occasion, Knarr said.
Because of a shortfall of bilingual officers, a popular resource for almost all departments is LanguageLine, an interpreter and translation service.
Moreno and Knarr both said they think of it as a last resort, but it’s preferable to informal interpreters who might have ulterior motives or not understand language that’s specific to law enforcement.
“For languages like Spanish it’s usually fine, but for African languages, it is more difficult due to dialects. It’s not all the same,” Knarr said. “There is a stark contrast between LanguageLine and an in-person interpreter.”
Based off of invoices requested by the Idaho Statesman, bigger local agencies spent more than $20,000 in 2019 on LanguageLine services (excluding the month of December). The breakdown is as follows:
- Ada County Sheriff’s Office was billed $14,017.52 for 333 calls. This includes BPD for the first five months of the year and the Meridian Police Department for 11 months.
- BPD spent $1,216.93 between May and November for 61 calls.
- Canyon County Sheriff’s Office spent $6,989.97 for 327 calls.
- Nampa spent $3,026.30 for 103 calls.
- Caldwell spent no money on Language Line.
Caldwell Police Chief Frank Wyant said his department does not use the service or other resources because of the nine bilingual employees on staff. For minor cases, informal interpreters could be used, he said. Overall, he said having a small percentage of Spanish-speaking officers has not been problematic.
Knarr, however, said the few bilingual officers on police forces can feel the burden of being requested frequently. She and others said BPD patrol officers don’t use LanguageLine or outside interpreters unless it’s absolutely necessary.
“The few Spanish speakers that we have that are fluent, they get abused a little bit,” said Teuber, the Boise detective. “There are times when they get called constantly. Their job could virtually be just doing translations for hours and interviews, when they have their own caseload that they have to handle.”
Moreno explained that differences in dialect can be an additional challenge, even if there is a Spanish-speaking officer.
“A barrier is that there are not enough of us. That’s the significant barrier. And as I mentioned, maybe five of us are native speakers, and as a native speaker, when you get there and you interpret, as opposed to someone who just learned Spanish, there is a difference,” Moreno said. “Interpreters need to understand what they mean, not just what they are saying.”
Limited options and solutions
Starting in January 2019, the Boise Police Department offered a 10-week Spanish-language course open to all city employees. The course was offered two days a week and covered mostly conversational Spanish.
“So it’s super convenient for officers and civilian employees to be able to just attend. If they were working, they allow guys to go and cut out for that hour, but either way it was paid for by the police department,” Teuber said.
The course was supposed to be followed up by a second round that was more pertinent to law enforcement, but that never happened.
“The first was greetings, like ‘Hi, how are you?’ ... being able to engage with someone and say hello. And the second 10-week course was supposed to be how to keep a situation safe,” Teuber said. “How to give commands so there is no miscommunication. Stay in the car, get out of the car, hands up, sit down, stand up, you’re under arrest, suspect descriptions, what did the guy look like, which way did he run.
“We never got to the second part.”
Moreno said there were multiple reasons the other class never came about, including shift changes and budgeting. For Teuber, that was disappointing, because that second course was arguably more important.
“In my mind, for cops, that’s what we should be teaching first. Because you don’t want a miscommunication that leads to something bad,” he said.
Schankle said he knows that Nampa police officers have taken advantage of similar courses, but he didn’t have numbers. Wyant said he always puts out a notice to his department of such classes.
There also have been shorter, more intensive courses offered to law enforcement agencies, but those can be problematic.
“They bring in this instructor from a private company from out of state who gives an intense one-week or two-week course,” Teuber said. “And it is geared more towards basic commands, but then there is no follow-up and it just kind of falls off, and guys forget it.”
Moreno said measuring the success of limited-time introductory classes is difficult.
“If you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it,” he said.
But Knarr argued that such courses are still worthwhile. She teaches a refugee awareness course and implicit-bias refreshers for the Boise Police Department. Everyone in law enforcement in the state of Idaho also has to take a cultural diversity course, she said.
“It gets people a little more comfortable with interacting with people who don’t speak English. We are trained observers,” Knarr said. “We read people’s body language all the time, but we forget that a little bit when we don’t want to be adults who don’t know something.”
Growth and language moving forward
A recognition of the higher demand for multilingual law enforcement officers is what led to the idea of a course at Treasure Valley Community College.
“The education piece has to go both ways. We are working on helping teach constituents what their role and their responsibility is in living in the U.S., and now we are hoping law enforcement does their piece,” Gonzalez said.
But at the end of the day, Moreno and Teuber said, native speakers are the best asset departments can have. The trick is getting those officers on your force.
“Anytime we can hire officers that come with speaking two or three languages, we are better off, no matter what the dialect is,” Teuber said. “Especially this being a refugee city, we are going to run into all sorts of dialects, and you don’t have time to wait for an interpreter to get things done or to help a victim.”
The Nampa Police Department offers a 2% raise and 5 additional points on the entry exam for bilingual officers as an incentive. Boise, Meridian and the Ada County Sheriff’s Office do not provide incentives.
Moreno and Gonzalez said other departments worry that Boise is recruiting their Spanish speakers, but that’s not the case.
“It’s just the issue of the lack of bilingual and bicultural officers, and that’s been going on for a while,” Gonzalez said.
Additional measures include recruiting bilingual students at events such as the Hispanic Youth Leadership Summit, which now has a career track for people interested in law enforcement.
“I think that anybody that is in law enforcement has to be able to communicate at the level of the civilian that they are talking to and trying to communicate with. And we have opportunities to assist in that effort, then it promotes the well being of our community,” said Tomkinson, the TVCC administrator.
Gonzalez said she and Tomkinson will be working until they can get the classes rolling.
“We know it is not a fix-all, but we need something. ... That is where these classes come into play,” Gonzalez said. “It is a need we cannot force police departments or anyone to take advantage of. We do our part, and now it’s up to the departments to identify who they can send or who is interested, and get them registered.”
