Spanish Skills Help Officer in Wheaton

As Latino Community Expands, Montgomery Police Aim to Increase Fluency

July 10, 2008
By Dan Morse

This is one in an occasional series on Montgomery County's six police districts. Today's report looks at crime in the 4th District, which is bordered roughly by Silver Spring to the south, White Oak and Burtonsville to the east, Rockville to the west and Howard County to the north.

As one of only two Spanish-speaking police officers in his squad, Andy Ramirez must translate in a variety of situations in the heavily Latino community of Wheaton: Criminal investigations. Traffic stops. Domestic arguments.

And sometimes, as in a Friday night last month when he listened to a babbling, shirtless man seated on a sidewalk surrounded by police officers, he delivers the kind of dark humor that gets cops of all backgrounds through their shifts.

"He said he wants beer, cocaine and weed," Ramirez told his colleagues. "He said he's been like this since the 10th of May."

All kidding aside, Ramirez's language skills are something the Montgomery County Police Department needs more of. Of the 150 officers, detectives and commanders assigned to the department's 4th District, about 17, or 11 percent, have moderate or better Spanish skills.

The Wheaton-Kensington area has the highest concentration of Hispanic residents of Montgomery's 21 government planning areas. Central Wheaton is at least 34 percent Hispanic, with 22 percent of residents in the area reporting that they speak English less than "very well," according to the Montgomery County Planning Department and the Wheaton Public Safety Audit Task Force. That puts officers who aren't fluent in a bind.

"It's frustrating for the officers. I'm sure it's frustrating for people trying to talk to us," said Sgt. Eric Stancliff, Ramirez's supervisor, who is studying Spanish and gets help from Ramirez at their district headquarters near Georgia Avenue and Randolph Road.

Montgomery police are recruiting Spanish speakers. The department offers up to $4,000 a year extra for such fluency. Fifty-four officers, line supervisors and detectives, about 5 percent of the Montgomery force, are certified to speak and understand Spanish, a department spokesman said.

Language barriers are not the only challenges in the 4th District, and officers there have plenty of contact with lawbreakers across the ethnic spectrum. Last year, the district had five homicides and 243 robberies, totals that were the second-highest of Montgomery's six districts and slightly above the figures for 2006. Assaults and rapes were down, and the 4th District covers 89 square miles, making its crime rate relatively low compared with those in some parts of the Washington area.

In earlier periods this year, robberies and car break-ins increased in the police district. But police locked up several suspects, including a 22-year-old caught toting money and a pry bar in a stolen Winnie the Pooh backpack, whom they suspect are linked to a rash of such incidents. The crimes have subsequently gone down.

"It tends to go in cycles," said Lt. Jacques H. Croom, a deputy commander. "Right now we have a handle on it."

One nonviolent but steady problem, public drunkenness, particularly in the Wheaton area, continues to challenge police, as evidenced by Ramirez's translation of the seated man's request for more beer.

The man was talking about climbing to the top of a nearby clock tower and jumping off. Ramirez and a colleague escorted him by ambulance to the Holy Cross Hospital emergency room, where he was lashed to a bed and rolled into a private room, all while laughing.

The officers said had they left him on the sidewalk, he could have walked in front of a car or been robbed.

"If the person isn't dealt with, the police are going to deal with him later in their shift," said Dudley Warner, who overseas the Public Inebriate Initiative in the Silver Spring-Takoma Park area. Some Wheaton leaders want to extend Warner's program into Wheaton. That would mean at least one alcohol specialist would comb the streets, finding drunks and getting them to a hospital or into treatment. Warner said that in the Silver Spring-Takoma Park area, his program has gotten about 80 people into a sobriety center in Rockville over the past 12 months.

Still, he said of public drunks: "It's about as difficult a group of people to work with as you're apt to find."

Wheaton civic boosters said those visiting central Wheaton do not come across drunks often, but when they do, it spoils the image of an otherwise agreeable restaurant district, which the boosters are trying to market as the "Little Adams Morgan" of Montgomery.

"If you see it one time, you tell your friends, and your friends tell their friends," said Natalie Cantor, director of the Wheaton Urban District.

For now, getting drunks off the streets is a job that falls largely to such officers as Ramirez, 24, who patrols the southern part of the 4th District alone is his squad car. Two photographs of his 16-month-old son are attached to the roof, near the sun visor.

Several hours into his evening shift June 27, before the real drinking hours had started, Ramirez and his colleagues were called to the Macy's store at the Westfield Wheaton mall for a reported shoplifting. Its particulars stunned even Rich Luther, a police officer for nearly 20 years.

Two teenagers were shown on store security cameras stealing clothes and enlisting two family members, ages 8 and 9, to hide the loot. Luther, shaking his head as the Macy's security officer told him the story, retrieved the 8-year-old from a back office, sat him down and talked to him, eventually finding common ground on the subject of football.

"You want to play for the Washington Redskins?" Luther asked.

"Yeah," said the boy, who had to straighten his legs fully for his feet to reach the floor.

"That means you've got to be good," Luther said.

Ramirez tried a different approach, telling the quartet that if they kept stealing, they would end up imprisoned in the District, where the four lived, instead of in the relatively nicer confines of the Montgomery jail.

"We've been there plenty of times to pick people up," Ramirez said. "It's definitely worse."

A short time later, he was called into the mall, where a teenager in one group had bumped shoulders with a female shopper in another group.

After a scuffle, the teenager, while holding an ice pack to her forehead, said that a member of the other group had threatened to beat her with a 5 1/2 -foot tall metal sign outside a Forever 21 store.

As officers tried to sort out what had happened, Ramirez spoke in Spanish to the teen's parents, who had been elsewhere in the mall and who said they did not want to press charges. Members of the other group, who police determined to be the aggressors, were cited for trespassing and asked to leave.

Given that Ramirez is asked to translate so frequently, he estimated that 85 percent of his conversations during a shift are in Spanish.

He grew up in the Gaithersburg area, learning Spanish from his Salvadoran mother and Mexican father. On the job, when talking to Salvadoran natives, if he mentions his mother, they ask where she is from.

When he tells them she is from San Salvador, Ramirez said, "it helps break the ice."

Source: The Washington Post