By ROBERT F. WORTH, The New York Times
A few weeks ago, Officer Jessica Trimoglie found herself on a dark street corner in Queens, face to face with a weeping Hispanic woman who spoke no English. It was an all-too-common problem for the city’s police: something was wrong, possibly a domestic violence complaint, but the language barrier made it impossible to know what.
So Officer Trimoglie pulled out a small black cellphone and pressed a button on it. Within seconds, a translator in California could be heard clearly through the phone’s speaker, interpreting the woman’s complaint, which turned out to be about sexual harassment. Officer Trimoglie told the woman how to get an order of protection, and directed her to a local organization where Spanish speakers would help.
The police officer’s cellphone - which links her to 24-hour translation service in 150 languages - is part of a new effort aimed at one of the city’s most intractable criminal justice problems: domestic violence among immigrants. The violence often goes unreported or unresolved, the police and prosecutors say, because victims cannot communicate with the police or fear reprisals by their own relatives, since many come from cultures where domestic abuse is tolerated by law or custom.
On March 18, phones with access to Language Line Services, a translation company, were distributed to patrol officers in the 115th Precinct, which covers Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst and Corona - perhaps the most linguistically and culturally diverse area in the city, with foreign languages spoken in 83 percent of the precinct’s homes.
“We interviewed victims who had contact with the police, and the No. 1 issue is always language,” said Yolanda B. Jimenez, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence, which secured a $300,000 grant from the federal government for the project. “This will allow victims to tell police officers what happened at 2 a.m., in Urdu.”
In its first month, the language line was used three dozen times for nine languages: Bengali, Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, Sinhalese, Farsi, Spanish and Hindi.
The officers who have used it call it a tremendously useful tool. The city’s 911 operators have had access to translation services since 1972, but patrol officers have not had such access until now.
“Often with immigrant families, the husband is the only one who speaks English,” said Officer Trimoglie, who has used the phone four times. “If she calls 911, by the time we get there he’s in control of everything and we only get his side of the story. This phone gives everybody equal ground so we can see what’s really going on.”
The phone has also been helpful in talking to potential witnesses, who often melt away when officers have to wait for a translator, Officer Trimoglie said.
In potential domestic violence cases, the officers begin by saying they are there to help, officers said. They then explain that under city law they cannot inquire about the immigration status of a crime victim or witness.
This fact - the result of an executive order signed by law last year by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg - is crucial, because fear of deportation discourages many immigrants from calling in the first place, said Hilary Seo, a lawyer with Sanctuary for Families, which offers legal assistance to victims of domestic violence and is the city’s partner on the language line project.
“Over half the women we work with say men in their families have threatened to report them to immigration agencies and get them deported,” Ms. Seo said.
Prosecutors are enthusiastic about the language line, too, because even when victims are willing to call the police, the absence of a translator can play havoc with evidence. Sometimes even after making a complaint, immigrants can be persuaded (or intimidated) to recant, said Scott E. Kessler, the domestic violence bureau chief in the Queens district attorney’s office. But, he said, with the language line, transcripts of their initial statements can be used as corroborating affidavits even if they have backed down.
“This will help in a number of ways,” Mr. Kessler said. “The more information we can gather, the safer we can make the victim, and the easier it is to determine charges.”
The language line is the latest in a series of innovations in dealing with domestic violence by the New York City police and prosecutors. Two years ago, the city began using digital photographs in such cases for the first time. They also began digitizing 911 tapes so that they could be e-mailed within hours to prosecutors, who used to wait months to receive them.
A case last July brought new urgency to the language-gap issue. A Korean man poured gasoline on his girlfriend and set her on fire as she dropped her 10-year-old son off at a day camp in Flushing, Queens, leaving her so badly burned that she died shortly afterward. As in many such crimes, neighbors said they had overheard bitter fights in the months leading up to the incident.
Obviously, the language line is no use to victims who are too frightened even to call the police in the first place. There are plenty of those. In 70 percent of all family-related homicides, there was no known prior contact with the police, Ms. Jimenez said. In most of those cases, many of which involve immigrants, the conflict that led to the killing began with small-scale domestic incidents, she added.
But city officials hope to change that by spreading word about the program and how it works. City officials are holding community forums to inform people about the language line and other services in areas with large immigrant populations, the first of which will take place tonight in Jackson Heights.
The city is monitoring the way the program is used to see whether it could be expanded to other precincts, Ms. Jimenez said.
One factor, of course, will be cost. Although the current program is being paid for by the Justice Department, the city might have to pay to continue it past the pilot phase. Language Line Services, the California-based company that provides the translation service, charges $1.50 to $2.00 per minute for high-volume users, including most police departments, said Dale Hansman, a company spokesman.
On any given day, Language Line Services employs up to 2,000 translators, some of them working at home, some in a vast call center. The company was born out of an urban police officer’s frustration. Before he founded Language Line Services in 1983, Jeff Munks was a patrol officer in San Jose, Mr. Hansman said.
One night, Officer Munks was called to a house where he found a man shouting frantically in an Asian language and waving his arms. Not knowing whether the man was hostile, Officer Munks drew his gun and pinned the man. Only later did he discover that the man, a Vietnamese immigrant, was trying to tell him that his son was having trouble breathing.