The law lags on language landscape

As our Spanish-speaking population grows dramatically law enforcement agencies grapple with bilingualism.

[Times photo: Janel Schroeder-Norton] Pasco sheriff's Cpl. Will Gibson heads off a confrontation between Spanish-speaking families outside Dade City, but with limited Spanish skills, help is enlisted to communicate.

DADE CITY - The white Ford stops on the dirt road next to Pasco sheriff's Cpl. Will Gibson.

The Ford's window slides down. A crucifix dangles from the rearview mirror; a boy cries in the back seat. And his family promises a fight.

A school bus feud has spiraled out of control.

"Where is the kid at now?" Gibson asks the driver in English. "Donde?"

Gibson quickly finds himself in a familiar predicament for law enforcement officers in the Tampa Bay area. While the Spanish-speaking population soars, most police officers speak only English.

Gibson, a community policing deputy, acts fast to head off a brawl. Children are enlisting brothers; brothers are telling fathers.

The family in the white Ford points to Marion Avenue. Gibson, a sandy blond, barrel-chested deputy, cuts a path up the road in this farmworking community outside Dade City.

Right behind him marches Abel Salazar, eyes flashing anger. His son has been threatened.

"Could y'all wait right there for me?" Gibson calls to Salazar and his sons. Salazar stops but looks confused.

"Un momento," Gibson tries again. Salazar retreats to Gibson's squad car.

One family knows enough English to talk to Gibson. But Salazar does not. Gibson's limited Spanish isn't enough. Margarita Romo, who runs an agency for farmworkers, walks across the street to help. After about a half hour, the dispute is settled.

"If I have a barrier, I'll call a person more bilingual or a child or a community leader," says Gibson, whose wife is Puerto Rican. "And if all else fails, I'll call my wife on the phone."

Some law enforcement officers say their departments are not doing enough to prepare them to deal with residents who speak only Spanish. They encounter Spanish speakers in everything from traffic stops to domestic violence calls to neighborhood disputes, like the one faced by Gibson.

While some departments in the area offer Spanish classes, many rely on AT&T translating operators. The Clearwater Police Department is the only area agency to provide incentive pay to bilingual officers, even though most acknowledge that recruiting Spanish-speaking Hispanic officers remains difficult.

"Something is going to happen," says Rafael Arbelo, who teaches Spanish to law enforcement officers. "And then they are going to say, "We need to do something about this."'

Steve Sikalos steps to the center of a classroom.

"Who's my hombre?" the Hernando County sheriff's deputy asks as the class begins a skit on domestic violence in Spanish.

More than a dozen officers from Pasco and Hernando counties and Tampa have gathered for a 10-day Spanish course at the Pasco-Hernando Community College training center in Dade City. Arbelo, a former detention deputy for the Polk County Sheriff's Office, runs through spirited lessons. He covers swear words and threats; directions; key nouns such as drogas (drugs) and ayuda (help); and how to ask someone to hand over a driver's license.

"Someone is bleeding or attacked, and you're the only one there for 15 to 20 minutes ... and you can't communicate with them," he tells his students.

"It's an eternity."

Arbelo has taught this course at Polk Community College since 1988. The PHCC advisory council, which includes college staff and Pasco County Sheriff Bob White, asked for this class.

Daniel Griffith, the college's director of law enforcement and corrections programs, says more officers would take the class if the state permitted them to get paid to study Spanish.

Statewide, officers, deputies and jail guards can make up to $130 extra each month for taking courses such as stress awareness, radar operations, traffic homicides, sex crimes and middle management, says Michael Crews, bureau chief of standards for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

But not for Spanish.

The reason, he says, is that no one has asked. He says anyone could petition the Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission, whose members are appointed by the governor.

"I can't say what (the commission) would do," says Crews, who serves as a staff member, "but I would think (Spanish classes) would have a backing because of the growth in the Hispanic population. It could benefit the officers."

The need for Spanish-speaking officers is not just in farmworking areas.

Pasco Deputy Pete Federico, who works street crimes, sees about two calls a week in retiree-heavy west Pasco where a Spanish translator is needed.

"A lot of times, I'm it," he says during a break in the PHCC class, describing his basic Spanish translating skills. "I would hate to have to testify in a homicide."

Tampa police narcotics officers Wade Turner and Jason Tkach made the 40-mile trip to take the class, too. Nothing like this is offered close to home, they say.

Sometimes they have to stand by as suspects talk into a phone to a Spanish-speaking dispatcher.

"For me to go in there to buy dope in a Spanish-speaking house," Turner says shaking his head, "they won't sell to me."

Sometimes bilingual deputies are too busy to help.

"There is no incentive for someone to come down and answer my calls and do my report," Tkach says.

Brenda Canino-Fumero, the Tampa police Hispanic liaison since last November, has spent years fighting to get incentive pay for bilingual employees.

During her 17 years on the streets, she and other bilingual officers have been called all over Tampa to help.

"We become overwhelmed, and they wonder why we are harping on it," Canino-Fumero says. There are times when she would "have to leave a scene where you leave a kid beaten up to go translate. You can only stretch me so far."

Knowing conversational Spanish isn't always enough, she says. Dialects and slang differ between Latin American countries.

"We have Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Peruvians," she says. "We have the Cubans, obviously. We have the Colombians (all along) Armenia Avenue."

She has attended funerals and visited corner groceries in east Tampa. The level of trust she gained can't be replaced by an AT&T translating operator.

"That is especially important," she says, "in the rape of a child and the death of a family member. ..."

Hillsborough sheriff's spokeswoman Debbie Carter calls the agency's 74 Spanish-speaking patrol deputies "adequate in the community we live in."

Hillsborough sheriff's Deputy Vinny Millan disagrees.

"We need to catch up to the community," he says. "We haven't even caught up yet."

But the department is trying, he adds. He conducts programs to work with refugees and immigrants. A sheriff's officer recently held a job fair in Wimauma to recruit Hispanics into the department. Pasco sends deputies to recruit at historically minority colleges.

The task looms large, Millan and others say, especially in recruiting Hispanic women.

"They are going to be pulled by other agencies to make twice as much," he says.

Plus, cultural demands to care for the family weigh on women, he says.

The next best bet, instructor Arbelo says, is to teach current employees Spanish.

Despite being home to the area's largest share of Hispanic residents, Tampa and Hillsborough County do not offer a Spanish class for law enforcement. They rely on their bilingual officers while working to recruit more.

"Right now, we're doing all the training in terrorism," says Hillsborough Sgt. Tony Kolka in the training section. "Maybe once this blows over we can look at other areas."

Seven officers from the St. Petersburg Police Department sat through Survival Spanish for Law Enforcement at St. Petersburg College in August. Spokesman George Kajtsa says the department does not keep track of how many Spanish speakers it has, but more than 100 officers speak some second language.

Sometimes, St. Petersburg officers call the AT&T translating service or ask a member of the community for help. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office also relies on the AT&T translating phone bank. No in-house Spanish training exists for employees, and the department does not count how many deputies speak Spanish, said spokesman Tim Goodman.

"I think it's a good suggestion that we do start preparing for that training," he says.

As families from Hidalgo, Mexico, moved to Clearwater in droves throughout the 1990s looking for work in construction and restaurants, many of the new arrivals were suspicious of police. They often feared being deported or encountering corrupt officers, and they wouldn't help solve or report crimes.

But last year, the Clearwater Police Department's Operation Apoyo Hispano was recognized as a model program in a report issued by the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the National Latino Peace Officers Association.

It has joined with the YWCA of Tampa Bay to open a Hispanic Outreach Program center near the Police Department's headquarters in downtown Clearwater. The center provides child care services; language training classes for Mexicans to learn English and city employees and police officers to learn Spanish; and offices for the Mexican consulate and the government of Hidalgo.

The center's bilingual program provides Spanish-speaking interpreters with police training who are on call at all times.

Just three of 171 Clearwater patrol officers are fluent in Spanish, says department spokesman Wayne Shelor, who acknowledges the department still faces considerable challenges. But he says the Clearwater Police Department is the only large area police agency that offers up to $100 a month extra for bilingual officers.

"We are aware of the changing complexion of America."

- Times staff writer Matthew Waite and researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report.

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