Melting-pot cities try new police tactics

By the time Officer Thong Nguyen arrived at the Vietnamese restaurant where three immigrants were shot to death by the owner last month, most of the witnesses had fled. Their bowls of noodle soup were still steaming, their spring rolls half eaten.

Officer Nguyen wasn't surprised. In Vietnam, bystanders don't stick around at a crime scene, for fear of being implicated. So he called a local Vietnamese radio station and asked if he could interrupt programming with a plea, in Vietnamese, that witnesses return to the restaurant.

"I told them they were not in trouble, and that it is very important for us to talk to them to help solve the crime," says Nguyen, himself a Vietnamese refugee. His gambit worked: Five witnesses turned up.

Nguyen's brand of bilingual and culturally attuned police work is a window on the difficulties of solving and preventing crime in immigrant communities – many of which are now seeing spikes in crime.

Last year, the nation's major crime rate rose 2 percent. But crime in many cities with burgeoning immigrant communities far outstripped the national rate. In Los Angeles, crime rose 5 percent; in the San Francisco Bay area, 9 percent. Here in Houston, where the Texas twang is giving way to Vietnamese singsong and Mexican corridos, overall crime rose 8 percent, with murders up 16 percent.

Nationally, experts attribute the rising crime rate to a sagging economy, a teen population spike, a surge of parolees back on the streets, and, since 9/11, spread-thin law-enforcement agencies.

But in places like Houston, experts say, the crime hike may have more to do with the fast-growing immigrant population.

"Cities with large numbers of immigrants are more likely to be magnets for crime," says Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University in Houston. "A massive number of new people coming into a city feeling very lost and vulnerable, along with a massive downturn in the economy: That's a pretty powerful combination likely to generate more crime."

Houston's demographic shift tells the story.

For the past two decades, all the growth in the nation's fourth largest city has been through immigration.

The 2000 census shows that in the past decade Houston's Hispanic population increased by 75 percent; 37 percent of the city's total population is now Hispanic. Over the same period, the city's Asian population grew by 76 percent.

A recent study also found that Texas has one of the fastest- growing Middle Eastern populations in the country – third after New York and California – and that most new arrivals settle in Houston.

This kind of rapid and diverse growth has meant major challenges for the Houston Police Department. Not only are there cultural barriers to convincing victims to report wrongdoing and serve as witnesses, there's the challenge of finding police officers who can speak the necessary languages. And there's the dilemma of how to protect illegal immigrants from being singled out by criminals as easy victims.

Since 1979, there's been a flood of new Asian immigrants to Houston; the city's Chinatown, a sprawling stretch of air-conditioned strip malls, has spread to accommodate the new businesses they bring.

Nga Le is one of those entrepreneurs. Just a few doors down from her bookstore, the sidewalk outside the bullet-riddled restaurant, site of the recent triple murder, is covered with burned incense – a Buddhist tradition when someone dies. But Ms. Le is more concerned with the shortage of Vietnamese-speaking officers in her community.

Officer Nguyen agrees. One of fewer than 70 Vietnamese police in Houston, he hosts a weekly radio program on Saigon Radio to explain to callers how the US criminal-justice system works, and their rights under the law.

He gets questions like: "Why won't the police accept money when they stop me for a traffic violation?" or "How do I know the police won't arrest me if I report a crime?"

"In Vietnam, citizens have very little trust of the government ... so many of them don't want to deal with police," says Nguyen, whose parents were disappointed when he first told them he wanted to be a Houston police officer.

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