Wanted by Police: More Minority Officers

Costa Mesa wanted him. Santa Ana did too. Inglewood thought it had made an offer he couldn’t refuse.

But in the end, Samuel Gutierrez chose the Placentia Police Department, a relatively small agency that boasts the only Latino police chief in the county.

“I don’t want to sound too cocky,” said the 32-year-old Peruvian native who recently graduated from the Golden West College Police Academy. “But I did have a choice. I liked Placentia the best.”

With minority populations in Orange County growing at an unprecedented rate, many local police departments are seeing a pressing need to fill their ranks with Latinos, Asian-Americans, women, and, to a lesser extent, Afro-Americans.

The community pressure to increase minority representation within police forces that are still overwhelmingly composed of Anglo men has made the bilingual minority officer a special prize for recruiters.

Police officials and criminal justice experts say that not only do minority officers fill an important role in cutting through language barriers, but they also are indispensable in understanding the local culture. Women also bring special qualities, officials said.

“They are definitely a commodity,” said Placentia Police Chief Manuel Ortega. “If you are bilingual and a minority, you can just about name your price.”

Criminal justice experts say the push to take a close look at minority candidates comes not a moment too soon.

With budget restraints and an overall increase in crime, bilingual minorities save police departments both time and money by cutting response and report-taking time and saving the costs of translators and interpreters.

“From an economic standpoint, it makes more sense” said Art Delgado, director of Project AERO, a 2-year-old program that prepares minorities for entry into the Golden West academy. “It’s more efficient to have minority officers.”

Hubert Williams, director of the Washington-based watchdog group Police Foundation, agreed. “We are becoming more a multiethnic society. The law enforcement community needs to develop the skill and expertise needed to do a better job. It’s a real challenge for them.”

Despite a widespread realization that minority officers are good for law enforcement, their representation lags far behind the overall growth of minority communities, according to a recent Times Orange County survey.

“Are police departments discriminating on the basis of sex and color?” asked UCI criminal justice professor Arnold Binder. “I don’t know. But I can say emphatically that there is underrepresentation. And that’s not good for law enforcement.”

The Times study, conducted in October, shows that:

* In Orange, where Latinos now make up about 23% of the population, there are only 13 Latino officers, or just over 8%.

* Though one in four Placentia residents is Latino, there are only seven Latino officers, including Ortega. There are 53 sworn officers in the department.

* Santa Ana’s department boasts the highest percentage of Latino officers--about one in four sworn officers. But the city is 66% Latino, according to the most recent Census figures.

* In Westminster, despite an ongoing effort by police there to increase the number of minority officers who are qualified to serve the large Vietnamese community, there remains only one Vietnamese-American sworn officer.

“God, I wish we could get more,” said Westminster Police Chief James Cook. “It’s the hardest group to recruit.”

Indeed, recruitment for Latinos and Asians in recent years has proved more troublesome than anyone could have imagined, police and educators said. Community leaders and police officials trying to close the gap have found a general distrust of the police among minority groups.

Many Vietnamese and Korean immigrants, for instance, often talk persuade their children not to enter police work, believing it is not a respectable career, said Tuong Nguyen, executive director of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc.

“They have a hesitation,” Nguyen said. “They have something against the police by tradition.”

In addition, many Latino and Asian-Americans see the rising violence in their neighborhoods, and fear that police work will result in the death of a son or daughter. They also bring from their native countries negative experiences, where police can be corrupt or abusive, educators and police said.

Of those minority applicants who do express a desire to join law enforcement, many of them encounter language problems which make the entrance examinations a major hurdle.

Several local police chiefs said that those applicants who pass all the tests form a pool of potential police officers who are hired almost as soon as they complete their training.

Even so, with hiring freezes in effect in most Orange County police agencies, the vast majority of those who graduate from local police academies are picked up by larger departments in other counties, educators said.

“It’s a difficult task at best,” said Anaheim Police Chief Joseph Molloy. “There are only so many quality people to go around.”

In addition, the pool of qualified candidates appears to be shrinking.

As educational and career opportunities increase for minorities, fewer are entering law enforcement, opting for “loftier goals” instead, said Orange County Undersheriff Raul Ramos, Orange County’s highest-ranking Latino law enforcement officer.

“I’d love to hire more minorities, but there seems to be an enlightenment in the minority communities that police work is not the greatest thing to get into,” he said. “They are becoming lawyers and computer programmers and teachers. I say hurray for that. But it doesn’t help us.”

In Orange County, there are no outstanding court orders and no state guidelines or quotas for departments to follow in hiring minorities, according to David Puglia, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office.

“It’s pretty much up to the (city) councils or local governments to strongly encourage programs or mandate them,” he said.

Community concern over the lack of minority representation, coupled with the realization that hiring ethnic minorities and women increases police efficiency, has driven some departments to actively recruit minorities, either through community contacts, advertisements in Spanish and Asian language media, or Golden West College’s Project AERO.

Westminster’s Chief Cook said that the department has hired a handful of young interns who can act as Vietnamese interpreters. The experience, he said, will help them hone their English writing skills while familiarizing them with police work.

Hopefully, they will go on to the academy and eventually return to the department as sworn officers.

And in Santa Ana, where the county’s large Latino community has long campaigned for better representation on the police force, police officials have committed themselves to hiring only bilinguals “for the next couple of years,” said Police Lt. George Saadeh, a native of Honduras who came to the United States when he was 15.

Project AERO’S Delgado said that he, too, has been scouring neighborhoods, looking for potential candidates whom he can bring into the training program.

He predicted that when Orange County police departments lift their hiring freezes, a wave of highly trained minority officers will hit the streets.

“It’s coming,” said Delgado, a former Costa Mesa police officer. “It’s going to really open up. They (minorities) add so much to the police department. It just makes so much sense and police administrators and (city) councils realize that.”

HIRING COMPETITION: A city-by-city breakdown on police force minorities. B3