December 17, 2020
Advisory Letter to Tacoma Police Department on Language Access
In December of 2020, our group sent the following letter to 21CP Solutions, a consulting company hired to make recommendations to Tacoma Police Department to provide guidance for making language access a cornerstone to community policing.
We are writing to echo the demands made by the Commission of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (CIRA) and offer further guidance to the police department for creating a comprehensive language access plan to ensure that Tacoma Police Department is in compliance with Title VI. We hope that 21CP will include these in your report.
The Designing Language Access Group is a coalition of experts in translation, interpretation, language access, community engagement, and design who are working to improve language access for immigrant, refugee, and heritage language speaking communities in the Puget Sound. This group is comprised of local community leaders, civil servants, non-profit professionals, interpreters, translators, language access industry leaders, and scholars from the University of Washington Tacoma and University of Florida. This group represents broad expertise across social work, healthcare, non-profit services, language teaching and literacy, urban design, technology design, policy, human resources, communications, and community relations.
We would like to echo the demands made by CIRA of the Tacoma Police Department (TPD) that fulfill its duty to uphold the civil rights under Title VI of communities who speak other languages:
- TPD should use professional interpreters every time
- Children should never be used as interpreters
- Adult family members should not be used as interpreters in place of professional translation services
- Providing information in multiple languages is not enough to fully establish communication between police and communities who speak other languages
- TPD needs to hire bilingual victim advocates
To ensure that language access is prioritized and systematized, TPD needs a comprehensive language access plan, in accordance with guidance from the Department of Justice. A comprehensive and transparent language access plan should outlines policies, procedures and approaches that TPD will follow that is shared with the community and must be held accountable for following this plan. In addition to the demands above by the , the language access plan should include:
o Procedures for officer interaction with immigrant and refugee communities
o A comprehensive and inclusive approach to providing communication to communities who speak other languages. This approach must prioritize both written translation and oral translation. This includes the design of web and phone services in multiple languages. This must be integrated throughout the police department and be available at every point that a community member interacts with officers and TPD
o Hiring, training and assessing bilingual staff and officers to make sure that these members are truly bilingual. Note: Bilingual staff and officers are not a replacement for professional services.
o Ongoing comprehensive data collection about language communities in the area and use of these services
o Annual and comprehensive and transparent assessment of how TPD is following its language access plan and communicating their compliance with immigrant and refugee communities in their preferred language
In summary, TPD needs a comprehensive and systematic integration of language access throughout or they are in violation of Title VI and will continue the pattern of anti-immigrant approaches to policing and will continue the damage being done by TPD to immigrant and refugee communities. As CIRA emphasizes, all people of Tacoma need to be treated with respect, and language access is a cornerstone to respect, dignity, and human rights of the residents of Tacoma.