The communication barrier creates problems for all parties involved, from the dispatcher deciphering a 911 call to the officer trying to put together an accurate police report to the concerned resident trying to communicate a problem with little to no knowledge of the English language.
Over recent years, Waterloo Police have dealt with a slew of languages including Bosnian, Spanish, Serbian, Croatian, Burmese, French and Vietnamese.
In 2006, Burmese refugees began settling in Waterloo for the employment opportunities at Tyson's meat plant, and the community has been growing ever since.
Dispatchers at the Black Hawk Consolidated Communications Center receive about a half-dozen calls a day in foreign languages.
But resources for interpretation are slim, a Courier investigation shows.
And as refugees from Burma continue to move to the area at a steady pace, bringing with them five vastly different languages, it has quickly become a complex problem to solve.
Nearly 1,500 Burmese refugees have planted roots in the Waterloo area, according to local estimates. That population is expected to reach 2,000 in the next year. In summer months, about two to four households migrate to the area each week.
Stephen Schmitz, who resettles new refugees through Catholic Charities in Cedar Rapids, estimates that more than half of these incoming refugees are illiterate.
“It’s a huge burden,” said Waterloo Police Capt. Joe Leibold. “We just don’t have the resources available to speak every language known to man.”
A total of 14 different dialects are being used by Burmese refugees in this area. Often responders can tell someone is Burmese but are not able to determine which dialect they're speaking.
“For a mother to feel powerless to explain what’s going on with her child is a scary, scary thing,” said Ann Grove, case manager and site supervisor with the Cedar Valley Refugee Newcomer Services.
Interpreters can help, but law enforcement officials say they are hard to come by. Waterloo police have just two people they can call on to translate Burmese refugee languages.
One of them is Ivan Soe Myint, who recently began interpreting for the department. Soe Myint said he gets calls all the time to interpret on scene, often in the early morning hours.
But even interpreters don't know every dialect and are still developing their own knowledge of English.
“Sometimes we need an interpreter for the interpreter,” Leibold said.
Black Hawk CCC has one dispatcher who is fluent in Spanish but no one who can speak Bosnian or languages of Burma.
Missing Details
Grove remembers one scenario from years ago in which a male client from Burma arrived at the police station after being assaulted.
“It was not handled adequately,” she recalled.
A report of the crime was filed, but according to her, it lacked key information because officers didn’t have the language capacity to do it properly.
In the case of an emergency, details can make all the difference.
For example, when dispatchers field a domestic abuse call, they are trained to seek answers to questions: where is the subject located, are there any weapons involved and is the attacker there currently.
Judy Flores, director of Black Hawk CCC, said details are important with every call. They are intended to keep officers safe and help the paramedics know what equipment to bring in.
Usually, even those who can’t speak English are able to say “police” and “help,” she said.
But when that’s all the detail dispatchers can prep responders with, it’s problematic.
“Any time you don’t get the details, you’re kind of going blind into something,” Flores said.
In that case, the emergency response process happens somewhat backwards. Responders arrive first, then attempt to grasp what the problem is.
That can be an issue for ambulance crews who rely on people to communicate any internal pain. Specifics like whether someone is experiencing a throbbing pain versus a dull, steady pain are lost.
Therefore paramedics struggle to determine internal problems like chest pain on a subject who has no obvious injuries and whose vitals are fine.
“It’s difficult to relay on to the hospital what we’re actually bringing in,” said Pat Treloar, chief of fire services for Waterloo.
In many cases, children actually help to fill in those blanks. Young people tend to spend more time around other English speakers and adapt to a new language quicker.
“Right, wrong or indifferent, we use the kids to translate in those situations,” Leibold said.
Another resource for getting adequate information is Language Line, a popular over-the-phone interpretation service that gives users access to more than 200 languages. But at about $4 per minute, the service gets pricey fast, and it does not provide all of the dialects spoken by Waterloo’s refugees.
The Black Hawk County sheriff's office and Black Hawk CCC have a contract with the service, but dispatchers rarely use it because of its steep cost. Waterloo police are currently working to get a contract.
Recruitment Struggle
Refugees-turned-police officers can be a strong asset for language barrier support. Leibold sees this as a good solution because it helps to “bridge the gap.”
But getting foreign officers on board is a struggle.
When the last language barrier popped up in the late '90s with the influx of Bosnian refugees, emergency responders struggled with many of the same issues. It wasn't until 2007 that the first Bosnian officer arrived on staff with Waterloo police.
Leibold said that is because the police training is extensive, lasting five years. Not to mention that in order to enter the program, foreign applicants must pass English proficiency exams.
“It’s not just learning the language to do our job, you’ve also got to learn American culture,” Leibold said.
Currently the Waterloo police have one officer fluent in Bosnian and one officer fluent in Spanish. Those officers' interpretation abilities are in high demand within the department.
Hawkeye Community College has several bilingual Bosnian students in its police science program currently, but no Burmese are enrolled.
Building New Trust
Many times, the first hoop for refugees to jump through in an emergency is simply reaching out to law enforcement — an extremely daunting task to refugees who come from areas of widespread corruption.
“It’s scary for families to trust that the American systems will not be corrupt, that they will do their best to help them out,” Grove said.
Waterloo police have to assure refugees that they won’t enter their home unless there is an emergency or they have a search warrant.
Some scenarios reveal a cultural divide.
Once a Burmese parent tried to have her 19-year-old daughter's boyfriend arrested because she did not approve of the two living together.
In Burma, that parent would have bribed the police to complete the arrest. But here in Waterloo, officers are left explaining that they can’t do anything about it.
Program Support
One local group is doing its part to better the language barrier situation: the Cedar Valley Refugee Newcomer Services. CVRNS, housed in First United Methodist Church, was created in May after the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants closed its Waterloo office.
Training sessions between police, dispatchers and refugees have helped to communicate emergency response issues and train refugees to be able to say their address and the words intruder, ambulance and fire.
The organization hopes to hold another session in the fall.
But resources are slim with just two employees and a survival budget goal they are only halfway toward reaching with grants and contributions.
“The city of Waterloo really needs to put money in the budget for interpretation,” Grove said. “We hope that would be done by the city, by the county, that would be a huge help.”
In the meantime, Grove hopes cue cards with translation and pictures could help emergency communication. She has been working with Waterloo paramedics for eight months to get the cards into ambulances.
But it has turned out to be a tedious task with the 14 different dialects and widespread refugee illiteracy.
"I’d say we could be better equipped, but we’ve managed to this point," fire chief Treloar said.
©2014 Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier (Waterloo, Iowa). Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
