{"id":12516,"date":"2010-12-03T11:48:12","date_gmt":"2010-12-03T16:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/?p=12516"},"modified":"2010-12-03T12:29:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-03T17:29:00","slug":"deaf-austinites-say-police-cant-seem-to-listen-to-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2010\/12\/03\/deaf-austinites-say-police-cant-seem-to-listen-to-reason\/","title":{"rendered":"Deaf Austinites say police can’t seem to listen to reason"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tone Deaf<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deaf Austinites say police can’t seem to listen to reason<\/strong><\/p>\n

Note: To view pictures and videos, please click website link below.<\/em><\/p>\n

BY JORDAN SMITH<\/p>\n

Esther Valdez is deaf.<\/p>\n

That explains some, but not all, of what happened to her on June 16, 2009.
\nIn the simplest terms, the 24-year-old found herself in trouble with the
\nAustin Police Department \u2013 booked into jail for resisting arrest, a charge
\npunishable by up to a year in jail \u2013 because she could not hear Officer
\nSteven Willis yelling at her to stop as she walked along a North Austin
\nsidewalk with her girlfriend, Ceci Bermudez.<\/p>\n

It was just before 6pm on a hot June evening when trouble found Valdez, who
\nhas been deaf since birth; she can detect some sounds with the help of a
\nhearing aid, but its battery was not working on June 16. Valdez and
\nBermudez, who is hearing, were walking to the grocery store from their
\napartment. Rush hour traffic buzzed by in both directions along Metric
\nBoulevard as they walked south along the sidewalk, but the two women barely
\nnoticed because they were engaged in an intense, personal conversation
\ncarried on in sign language.<\/p>\n

Their intensity apparently caught Willis’ attention as he rolled up on the
\nwomen in his patrol car. According to his report of the incident, he first
\nsaw the pair roughly a half-hour earlier, as he drove to get gas. “I
\nobserved that the two were walking but it seemed that they were having a
\nheated discussion as I observed them emoting with their hands while speaking
\nto one another,” he wrote. As he drove back in the opposite direction along
\nthat same route, Willis again saw the two women. But now, he wrote in his
\nreport, the two were actually fighting: “This time I observed that they were
\nphysically struggling with one another,” he wrote. “I saw them both pulling
\nand grabbing at each other’s arms. I saw that they had gone from talking to
\na physical disturbance.”<\/p>\n

According to Willis, the women spotted him when he made a U-turn in his car
\nto come up behind them. They immediately stopped fighting and just “stood
\nthere facing each other,” he wrote. When he got out of his car and headed
\ntoward them, they “began walking away from me at a fast pace.” He yelled for
\nthem to stop, but they didn’t; Willis had to run, he wrote, to catch up with
\nthem and “had to grab Valdez by her arm in order to get them to stop.”
\nAlthough he notes that Bermudez “immediately” told him that Valdez is
\n“hearing impaired,” that apparently did not affect how he proceeded. “I saw
\nthat Valdez had a hearing aid,” he wrote, “and could in fact carry on a
\nconversation with me.”<\/p>\n

Willis also decided that what he’d seen of their conversation had nothing to
\ndo with Valdez’s inability to hear. “Bermudez and Valdez were not using sign
\nwhen I saw them arguing and were not using sign to communicate with me,” he
\nwrote. How he arrived at that conclusion isn’t clear.<\/p>\n

Willis’ report lays out the basics of the rest of the encounter, as he
\nperceived it. Bermudez was hearing, he noted, so there was no reason that
\nshe didn’t stop walking when told; Valdez supposedly told him not to touch
\nher and that the pair didn’t have to stop if they didn’t want to. Willis
\nasked the couple what was happening, and they told him they were just
\ntalking and walking. He told them he saw them “grabbing” each other, which
\nBermudez denied. While he was talking with Bermudez, Valdez began texting
\nher mother on her cell phone; Willis took the phone, put it down, and
\ncontinued talking to Bermudez. Valdez picked up her phone and started
\nwalking away; Willis yelled at her to stop, but she kept walking. He told
\nher to put her hands behind her back so he could cuff her; she didn’t comply
\nand tried to pull away from him. He wrestled Valdez to the sidewalk.
\nAccording to Willis, Bermudez began “pulling at my hands and arms” to get
\nhim off Valdez. Eventually a second officer, Teressa Graves, arrived on the
\nscene, and the officers arrested both Valdez and Bermudez and sequestered
\nthem in separate police cars, eventually taking both to the Downtown jail.<\/p>\n

On its face, the encounter might appear mundane, even routine: Cop stops to
\ncheck welfare of couple; couple is belligerent; cop tries to subdue them,
\nand they fight; couple goes to jail.<\/p>\n

Ineffective Communication<\/p>\n

The main difficulty with calling this encounter “routine,” however, is that
\nValdez had no idea what was happening. She didn’t understand why Willis
\npursued her and Bermudez in the first place, she didn’t understand why she
\nwasn’t free to text her mother or to walk away from him while he was talking
\nwith Bermudez, and she didn’t understand why Willis was grabbing at her and
\ntrying to cuff her.<\/p>\n

And not once during what became a three-hour encounter with APD did any one
\nof the officers at the scene \u2013 in all there were three, including a
\nsupervisor (an EMS crew was also called to check out Valdez, who was scraped
\nand limping after being forced to the ground by Willis) \u2013 attempt to
\ncommunicate with Valdez in any meaningful way. Instead, as the police video
\nreflects, they merely raised their voices and repeated the same commands
\nmultiple times \u2013 as if speaking louder would somehow cure Valdez’s deafness.
\nIt seems that because Valdez, who attended mainstream public schools, has
\nlearned to “vocalize” fairly well, the officers completely disregarded her
\ndisability. In fact, when Willis cuffed Valdez, he did so with her hands
\nbehind her back, which effectively ended any opportunity for her to
\ncommunicate with him by signing or writing notes.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Valdez’s experience is not unique among Austin’s sizable deaf
\npopulation \u2013 nor is it particularly unique among the nation’s estimated 1
\nmillion deaf people. (According to Gallaudet University, the nation’s
\npremier educational institution for the deaf, there are also roughly 8
\nmillion Americans who are hard of hearing.) Advocates in Austin and
\nelsewhere describe an ongoing problem of communication between deaf people
\nand the police, even though the Americans With Disabilities Act makes it
\nclear that police have a duty to provide effective communication to people
\nwith disabilities in the populations they serve.<\/p>\n

“The general standard in dealing with deaf\/[hard of hearing] individuals for
\nAPD, as well as other [police departments], is that they must provide
\neffective communication pursuant to Title II of the [ADA],” Faye Kuo, an
\nattorney who has handled numerous ADA-related lawsuits and who is also deaf,
\ntold the Chronicle. “Effective communication is not always easy to define in
\ngeneral, since what might be effective for one person may not be effective
\nfor another. So effectiveness is determined on a case-by-case basis.”<\/p>\n

Austin has become a major city for deaf residents, in no small part because
\nof the reputation of the Texas School for the Deaf and the social service
\nand employment opportunities connected to the world-class educational
\nfacility on South Congress Avenue. Stacy Landry, program manager for the
\nTravis County Services for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, estimates that
\nAustin is home to roughly 50,000-60,000 deaf people. Nevertheless, problems
\nwith police remain commonplace and even expected by deaf people. “That’s
\nnothing new to the deaf community,” says Paul Rutowski, president of the
\nTexas Association of the Deaf. “Police think every deaf person has some
\nlevel of speech skills. That’s not true.”<\/p>\n

Yet the APD has a written policy that outlines specifically what officers
\nare supposed to do during encounters with deaf residents. The problem, say
\nmany folks active in the deaf community, is that no one seems to be
\nfollowing that policy \u2013 and, by extension, the requirements of the ADA.
\nLandry says she’s worked with APD to try to ensure that officers have the
\ntraining necessary to deal well with deaf residents, so she knows APD has a
\npolicy \u2013 though she’s never known the specifics, she says. “I don’t care
\nwhat the policy is,” she says, “because it’s pretty clear that nobody there
\nknows what the policy is.”<\/p>\n

And if the police aren’t following their own policy, it follows that it is
\nonly a question of when another encounter between police and a deaf resident
\nwill take a negative turn, says attorney Alexandra Gauthier, who was
\nappointed to handle Valdez’s case. It took more than a year for the charge
\nagainst her to be dismissed \u2013 that finally happened in late August, “in the
\ninterest of justice,” according to the official dismissal form. In the
\naftermath, however, Valdez has acquired a fear of police; she says the June
\n2009 incident with Willis, Graves, and their supervisor, Sgt. Alfred Trejo,
\nwas “the first time I’d ever talked to a cop.”<\/p>\n

Policy and Discretion<\/p>\n

The APD policy covering what officers are required to do when involved in
\nsituations with residents who are deaf or hard-of-hearing \u2013 in effect since
\nearly 2000 \u2013 is fairly straightforward. In most traffic situations, for
\nexample, the policy says that interpreters are rarely necessary. If a
\nhearing person would get a citation without needing to be questioned, then
\n“a person with a hearing impairment in the same situation does not need to
\nbe provided an interpreter,” reads the policy, unless, of course, the
\nofficer is “unable to convey the nature of the infraction.” In that case,
\nthe officer can decide whether to call an interpreter or “issue a warning
\nrather than a citation.”<\/p>\n

As an interaction between police and deaf citizens becomes more complex,
\nit’s increasingly likely that an interpreter is required. If an arrest is
\nimminent, police should call for an interpreter \u2013 available 24 hours a day,
\nwithin 30 minutes, under a contract the department holds with the nonprofit
\ncompany Communication Service for the Deaf \u2013 “if the officer is unable to
\nconvey the nature of the criminal charges.” If police need to interview a
\nperson to determine if there is probable cause that a law has been violated,
\nthe policy continues, “an interpreter must be provided if written
\ncommunication is ineffective.” If an officer cannot “wait until an
\ninterpreter arrives,” they’re told that for minor offenses they should
\n“postpone the interview and arrest until able to return to the scene with an
\ninterpreter.” For serious offenses, the policy instructs officers to
\n“contact a supervisor,” who will decide whether the officer should wait for
\nan interpreter. Finally, according to the policy, an interpreter “must be
\nprovided” before any police interrogation.<\/p>\n

Although the policy has been in place for a decade, local advocates say
\nthere are plenty of examples where it was simply ignored. The most notorious
\nis the Catfish Parlour incident, which took place June 30, 2000 \u2013 two months
\nafter the policy took effect. It involved a deaf-blind man, Richard Bell,
\nand his deaf wife, Joan. After a dispute with the manager over the lack of a
\nbraille menu, the manager knocked Richard down and then called police. When
\nAPD Officer Daniel Arizpe arrived, he did not provide an interpreter even
\nafter Joan repeatedly asked for one; instead, Arizpe used only his voice to
\ncommunicate that he intended to arrest Richard. Richard didn’t know what was
\nhappening \u2013 or even that Arizpe was a cop \u2013 and when Arizpe tried to arrest
\nhim, he bit the officer’s arm.<\/p>\n

No charges were ever filed against the Bells, and, two years later, the city
\nsettled a federal lawsuit brought under the ADA on their behalf by the Texas
\nCivil Rights Project. The city agreed to ensure that every APD officer
\nreceives at least four hours of training on dealing with individuals with
\ndisabilities, including the deaf and blind. (By contrast, the state’s
\npolice-licensing agency, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer
\nStandards and Education, does not require any specific training that covers
\nthe deaf or hard of hearing.)<\/p>\n

According to Officer Jane Pacifico, who handles APD’s cadet training related
\nto the hearing impaired, new officers are given eight hours of training on
\ndealing with deaf and hard-of-hearing residents (double what was called for
\nunder the Bell settlement), taught by employees of the Travis County
\nServices for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Moreover, says Lt. Darryl Jamail,
\ntraining supervisor, cadets are taught about all APD policies, including
\nthat which covers the provision of interpreter services. “All of the
\nofficers in the department are bound by policy,” he says.<\/p>\n

No policy can cover every possible situation that might arise, so the policy
\ncovering interpreters for the hearing impaired is written to provide
\nflexibility, outlining basic requirements and providing a guide to when and
\nhow officers may use discretion. In certain kinds of incidents, notes
\nPacifico, there might be no immediate need to call for an interpreter. Take,
\nfor example, a shoplifting case, she says, where there are witnesses and the
\nperson is caught with the merchandise. In that situation, it is likely that
\nthe suspect understands why he or she is being arrested, and it might be
\nmost practical to arrest the person and take him Downtown, where he’ll be
\nprovided with an interpreter after booking.<\/p>\n

“Looking through the policy,” says Jamail, “it is clear that a lot is left
\nup to the officer’s discretion.”<\/p>\n

Language and Culture<\/p>\n

On paper the policy looks reasonable \u2013 but serious communication problems
\npersist for deaf residents dealing with police. Amber D. Farrelly Elliott,
\nan Austin defense attorney, has testified in court as an expert on American
\nSign Language and deaf culture. She took her first class in ASL at 9 years
\nold and has been studying the language for 25 years. “I fell in love with it
\n… and with deaf people and deaf culture,” she says. After graduating from
\nlaw school last year, Elliott quickly made it onto the defense appointment
\nlist for Travis County’s misdemeanor courts, in large part because of her
\nability to communicate effectively with deaf clients. In just more than a
\nyear, she’s been appointed or hired to represent roughly 50 deaf clients.
\nAnd of those, she says, all but a very few have eventually had the charges
\nagainst them dismissed by county prosecutors, because the majority of the
\ncharges filed by police have been “based on misunderstanding or
\nmiscommunications,” she says, “one of those two issues. And it’s either
\ngoing to go back to language or to culture. Those are the main issues when
\ndealing with deaf clients.”<\/p>\n

In Valdez’s case, a complete lack of both communication and understanding
\nled to her arrest, says Elliott, who was brought into the case by Valdez’s
\nappointed attorney, Gauthier. Gauthier says that when she first met Valdez,
\nshe was still frightened and confused by what had happened. “It was very
\nclear that Esther didn’t understand what was going on or why she was in
\ntrouble, but she was very, very afraid,” Gauthier recently recalled. “With
\nthe arrest, with everything \u2013 every time she came to court she thought she
\nwas going to be arrested for something. It even took me a while to explain
\nthat I was her attorney.” With Elliott assisting, the communication was
\neasier \u2013 and it wasn’t long before both lawyers better understood why Valdez
\nseemed so traumatized.<\/p>\n

“The officer created the arrest situation by his behavior,” Gauthier said
\nbluntly. Indeed, although the written reports filed by Willis and by his
\nsupervisor, Trejo, appear fairly straightforward, they do not comport with
\nthe incident as captured on Willis’ and Graves’ in-car video cameras, the
\nlawyers say. “When I watched the tape, I was appalled \u2013 I literally cried
\nthe first time I watched it,” says Elliott. (Selections from the in-car
\nvideos are posted at the end of this story.)<\/p>\n

Incomprehension, Escalation<\/p>\n

The video of Valdez’s arrest is indeed difficult to watch. On the tape
\nWillis runs toward Valdez and Bermudez, who are walking along the sidewalk,
\nwhile yelling at the couple to stop. “I saw you putting hands on each
\nother,” he tells them. “We did nothing!” Bermudez protests.<\/p>\n

Things go rapidly downhill. Bermudez tells Willis that Valdez is deaf, but
\nhe is unimpressed. “She can comprehend what I am trying to tell her,” but is
\nwillfully ignoring him, he tells Bermudez. With Willis’ attention on
\nBermudez, Valdez starts to walk away; Willis yells at Valdez’s back for her
\nto stop. “Hey! Hey!” he says and turns to grab her. “Put your hands behind
\nyour back!” he yells. He pushes her to the ground; she begins crying. “I’m
\ndeaf! I’m deaf!” she says. “Put your hands behind your back, now!” he
\nresponds, as she struggles to get free from underneath him. Although Willis
\nlater tells Trejo that Bermudez jumped on him and tried to pull him off
\nValdez, that is not how it appears on tape, although Bermudez does move in
\nclose to Willis as she pleads with him to get off Valdez. “Leave her alone!”
\nBermudez says.<\/p>\n

When Graves arrives on the scene some six minutes into the encounter,
\nValdez, who is weeping, tries to tell her what happened. “He attacked me!”
\nshe yells several times. By this time Valdez is inconsolable; crying and
\nwailing. But neither officer takes any visible steps to de-escalate the
\nsituation or to try to communicate with Valdez about what is happening.
\n“Stand up! Stand up!” Willis yells at her. A minute later, with Valdez on
\nher feet, still weeping and now limping, the officers take her to the back
\nof Willis’ patrol car \u2013 she wails as Willis yells at her to “get in the
\ncar!”<\/p>\n

Valdez is in the car but still crying when Trejo arrives a minute later;
\ninstead of trying to facilitate communication, however, Trejo escalates the
\nencounter by pulling out a pepper-spray canister and holding it ready to
\nspray in Valdez’s face. “Listen up!” he yells at her. “Don’t move; don’t do
\nanything, or you’re going to get some of this!” Not surprisingly, Valdez
\ntakes the action as a threat and begins crying even louder.<\/p>\n

While Valdez is in the back of the car, still weeping, Willis gives Trejo
\nand Graves his version of what happened. “I know [that she’s deaf], but she
\nunderstands a lot; she can hear you,” he says. “She understands enough.”
\nValdez, naturally, disputes this. “I did not understand what was going on or
\nwhat the police were saying,” she told me through an interpreter.<\/p>\n

A National Problem<\/p>\n

To Gauthier and Elliott, the recorded episode is disturbing at best.
\n“Esther’s ability to communicate with anybody did not exist; no one took the
\ntime to make sure Esther could communicate with anybody,” Gauthier says.
\n“And calming her down by opening up the back of the police cruiser and
\nsticking a pepper-spray canister in her face? Again, not an effective way to
\ncommunicate with her. The lack of understanding of the need to communicate
\nwith her through an interpreter is unbelievable,” she continued. “There was
\nno attempt for the three hours that they were with her to communicate with
\nher.” APD officials declined to comment on the specifics of Valdez’s case.
\nContacted last week, Chief Art Acevedo said that he would review the Valdez
\narrest report and video and take “corrective action” if necessary.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, says Elliott, Valdez’s experience is far from unique \u2013 the
\nproblem of communication between police and deaf people is a national issue
\nthat often bursts into headlines. In 2006, a nationally known deaf educator
\nand historian, Saint Paul College instructor Doug Bahl, was pulled over for
\na routine traffic stop in St. Paul, Minn.; he told the officer that he was
\ndeaf and asked to communicate in writing. The cop, “for whatever reason …
\ndecided that he would not use a pen and paper to communicate, and it just
\nsort of escalated,” says Rick Macpherson, Bahl’s attorney. The officer
\nreached into the car and sprayed Bahl with pepper spray then pulled him out
\nof the car and “beats and kicks him,” Macpherson said. The officer arrested
\nBahl, who now could neither hear nor see; Bahl was eventually transported to
\nthe hospital. The officer’s only explanation for his actions, Macpherson
\nsaid, was that he’d never been trained on how to communicate with the deaf.
\nWord of what happened to Bahl “went around the country … very quickly,”
\nMacpherson said.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, video of a violent encounter between two deaf brothers
\nand several security guards outside a store in Los Angeles amassed more than
\n300,000 views on YouTube in the first 24 hours after it was posted, says
\nTexas Association of the Deaf President Rutowski. That video “was really
\nawful,” he says. On the video, security guards attack one brother whom they
\nsuspect of shoplifting, holding him on the ground while his brother
\nfrantically tries to explain that they have a receipt for their purchases.
\nDozens of people are milling around the outside of the store watching and
\nrecording the episode, but no one intervenes. “It was a big deal on the
\nnational news,” says Rutowski, but “that’s nothing new to the deaf
\ncommunity.”<\/p>\n

Nothing Has Changed<\/p>\n

Of all the deaf clients Elliott has represented, she can’t recall a single
\ncase in which police have actually requested a sign-language interpreter to
\ncome to the scene. “I think that’s pretty telling,” she says. “It says a
\ncouple of things to me: that the officers who are called to whatever scene
\nit is are unaware of their own policy to get an interpreter, or that they
\ndon’t care what the situation is. Perhaps there’s the idea that we’ll just
\narrest them now and let the court figure it out \u2013 I hate to say that.” But,
\nshe adds, the “beautiful thing about Austin and our very large deaf
\ncommunity is that we have the infrastructure set up, in place already, for
\nthe officers to get an interpreter to the scene, day or night, 24 hours a
\nday.” Travis County courts do not keep statistics on how many deaf
\ndefendants enter the criminal justice system, but Landry says that in 2009,
\nthe county provided 11,000 hours of interpretation services for all purposes
\n\u2013 including for the courts and jail.<\/p>\n

A comparable number is not available for the city, which contracts such
\nservices on a departmental basis. But for a sense of scale, according to
\nAPD, the department has contacted their contractor, Communication Service
\nfor the Deaf, to request an interpreter just 53 times this year. Many of
\nthose calls were for interrogations, says department spokesman Cpl. Scott
\nPerry. (Under Texas law, in order to be admissible in court, all statements
\nfrom deaf suspects made during a custodial interrogation must be facilitated
\nby a certified interpreter.) However, he said, the number of calls for
\ninterpreters made to CSD doesn’t reflect the number of times that police
\ncommunicate with deaf residents. The APD has three officers who know sign
\nlanguage \u2013 and who are paid a bilingual stipend for their skills \u2013 and
\npatrol officers often will opt to call one of those officers to a scene
\ninstead of calling for a licensed CSD interpreter.<\/p>\n

But calling for an officer \u2013 none of whom are actually certified or licensed
\ninterpreters \u2013 is not sufficient to ensure effective communication, says
\nElliott, particularly when legal concepts must be explained, when a crime is
\nbeing investigated, or when an arrest is possible. Indeed, says Debra
\nPatkin, a staff attorney with the National Association of the Deaf, the
\nfailure to call a real interpreter to help on-scene is a problem nationwide.
\n“People all over the country contact us and are frustrated because many
\n[police] refuse to get interpreters,” Patkin said through an interpreter.
\n“Communication is vital; it is important to have a smooth process,
\nespecially if there is the possibility of an arrest. It is better to have an
\ninterpreter there, and could also save everyone some time. It is an
\nall-around benefit.”<\/p>\n

Elliott has in fact had clients who have tried to communicate with APD
\nofficers whom the department has “certified” as bilingual \u2013 as a rule, she
\nsays, those interactions have not been helpful. In a recent case, a client,
\n“Dan” (he asked that we not use his real name), was pulled over on suspicion
\nof drunken driving. He repeatedly wrote in notes to the officer that he
\n“requires an interpreter.” Instead, the officer called to the scene a fellow
\nofficer who he said knew sign language. In a recent interview through an
\ninterpreter, Dan said he could not understand anything the officer was
\nsaying \u2013 he didn’t seem to know any ASL and even had a hard time with basic
\nfinger spelling. Eventually, Dan went back to writing notes with the officer
\nwho had pulled him over. “We just wrote back and forth after we realized
\nthat bad-finger-spelling cop wasn’t doing very well,” he said. And although
\nDan said he continued to request an interpreter, none was provided. “The
\nlast time I wrote in big letters: ‘PLEASE, I WANT AN INTERPRETER,'” he said.
\nBut the cop “persisted” in questioning him without one, and “I gave up
\nwriting, because he’s not giving me an interpreter.” Dan was eventually
\ntaken to jail and charged with drunken driving. Two months later, the charge
\nwas officially dismissed “in the interest of justice.”<\/p>\n

More disturbing was the response of officers involved in another DWI case
\nElliott is handling. In video from that stop, after the police have wrestled
\nthe deaf man to the ground, dislodging his hearing aid, two officers can be
\nheard off-camera discussing the man’s request for a sign-language
\ninterpreter: “He’s under the impression that he has the right to an
\ninterpreter,” the first officer says, according to a transcript provided by
\nElliott.<\/p>\n

“When did that law come out?” the second officer asks.<\/p>\n

“It didn’t,” the first replies.<\/p>\n

Further complicating matters is that written communication isn’t always
\neffective or a good substitute for qualified interpretation, say deaf
\nadvocates. Writing notes is not a communication panacea, in part because
\nmany deaf people, and in particular those who are prelingually deaf, are not
\nfluent in English. A common misconception is that being deaf doesn’t
\npreclude knowledge of English \u2013 but, quite often, that is exactly what it
\nmeans, says Wess Smith, sign language and assessment coordinator for the
\nTexas School for the Deaf. Smith is a certified court interpreter (the
\nhighest level of certification for ASL speakers) and performs communication
\nassessments of many state, county, and municipal agencies \u2013 including APD.
\nSmith, who is hearing, has been signing for more than 20 years; if he lost
\nhis hearing today, he says, he could write and read effectively because he’s
\nhad a lifetime of English language acquisition and listening. But for
\nindividuals born deaf, English is quite difficult to learn.<\/p>\n

“When a child’s hearing loss is prelingual (born deaf or hard-of-hearing, or
\nthe onset of hearing loss occurs before two to five years of age), his
\ndeafness has a profound and lifelong effect on his ability to acquire and
\nunderstand English or any other oral language,” psychologist McCay Vernon
\nand University of Wisconsin law professor Michele LaVigne wrote in the
\nWisconsin Law Review. “Deaf children raised in … English-speaking
\nhouseholds have, by age five, an average English language vocabulary of
\nunder 500 words, and little understanding of English syntax. These children
\nenter school with a severely limited sense of English, and they never catch
\nup,” the authors continue. By contrast, the average hearing child entering
\nkindergarten has a vocabulary of roughly 14,000 words. The disparity may be
\nshocking, but it is nonetheless logical. “Written English, despite the fact
\nthat we can see it, is in reality nothing more than a symbolization of the
\nsounds of the spoken language,” the authors write. “The process of reading
\nrequires that those symbols be decoded.”<\/p>\n

Elliott and fellow defense attorney Leigh Gonnet \u2013 who has been trying for
\ntwo years to have a case similar to Dan’s dismissed \u2013 say that another
\nproblem with note-writing is that police routinely fail to turn over those
\nnotes as evidence. That’s troubling, says Elliott, because the notes can
\nshow how much the clients actually understood about what was happening
\nduring their encounters with police. Notes should be turned over as
\nevidence, the lawyers say. “But I never, never see that writing,” Elliott
\nsays. “That’s a huge problem, because that’s going to be your proof [of
\nwhether] that person understood or not: What are you telling my client? What
\nare they understanding?” APD training Officer Pacifico says department
\npolicy does not require that notes be submitted into evidence. Instead, that
\nis left to the officer to decide, “depending on the situation and the type
\nof call you have and if an officer remembers to do that,” she said. “It is
\nnot required of them.”<\/p>\n

Smith says that he’s become increasingly frustrated by the communication
\nproblems that plague the relationship between deaf Austinites and police. In
\none particular incident, he says, police were called to the Texas School for
\nthe Deaf to handle a situation between an adult student and his mother. TSD
\nrequires a certified interpreter to handle all communications between
\nstudents and school security guards or outside agency police, so Smith was
\npaged to handle the interpretation. When he met the student and the APD
\nofficer, he said the officer dismissed him, saying that he would handle the
\ncommunication because he’d been “certified” in ASL by Wess Smith. Apparently
\nthe man did not recognize Smith, who’d conducted his language assessment for
\nAPD. “And he dismisses me. … I said, ‘Okay, first of all, let me introduce
\nmyself: I’m Wess Smith.'” He said the officer still tried to dismiss his
\nservices. “He should’ve been thrilled to have it. But it was more about him
\nthan about the situation,” he said. “Where does that mentality come from?
\nThat you’re more important than the situation?”<\/p>\n

Since that episode, Smith says, he’s been wary of performing assessments for
\nAPD officers. He tries to make clear in each assessment how strong the
\nofficer’s skills are and what their level of proficiency is. In an
\nassessment example he provided to the Chronicle (with the officer’s identity
\nredacted), Smith noted that the officer’s skill level was that of
\n“survival”: The officer can communicate basic concepts at a
\n“slow-to-moderate rate” and “with many sign vocabulary errors.” Among the
\nsigning errors the officer in question made, the assessment notes, were
\nsigning “jail” instead of “wait,” and “fuck you” instead of “OK.” Whether
\nAPD decides that an officer is proficient enough to receive bilingual pay is
\nstrictly up to the city, says Smith; it is not up to Smith or TSD. “Every
\nreport gets this disclaimer: This is a communication assessment. This is not
\nan interpreting assessment.”<\/p>\n

There’s a difference between communication and interpretation. Knowing some
\nASL, which is a foreign language with its own unique structure, or how to
\ncompetently finger-spell English words are important skills. But “there is a
\ndifference between having the skills to communicate and having the skills to
\ninterpret for a legal setting,” says Smith. “If you get into a little
\nfender-bender and you have an officer who can sign, how great it is that you
\nhave a police officer who can communicate!” he says. “But there is a time
\nwhen they have to stop” \u2013 when officers need to realize that they’ve reached
\nthe limit of their communication abilities and need to call in a
\nprofessional for help. “And I don’t think they know when to stop.”<\/p>\n

According to Smith and Landry, all of these issues have been brought
\ndirectly to the attention of APD Chief Art Acevedo, generally after there’s
\nbeen some sort of an incident \u2013 like the situation with Smith at TSD. Still,
\nnothing has changed. “I don’t know, [Acevedo] walked away with all these
\nplans. He said, ‘I’m going to do this and that,'” recalls Landry. But “it
\ndoesn’t look like anything has happened out of it.”<\/p>\n

Acevedo said that he has indeed met with deaf advocates and has toured the
\nTSD facility but did not comment on the substance of those meetings. He says
\nthat he’s aware of the unique needs of Austin’s large deaf community but
\nthat he can only take action to correct problems within the department if
\nthe community brings them to his attention each and every time they happen.
\n“If we don’t get the constant feedback,” he says, problems can’t be
\naddressed. “The eyes and ears of the Police Department are the community we
\nserve.” He agreed that yelling at a deaf person (as happened in Valdez’s
\ncase) is not an effective communication strategy. “That’s not going to
\naccomplish anything,” he said. “I can’t fix [the problems] if people don’t
\ncome forward \u2013 and we need people to come forward. That is the key,” he
\nsaid. “They need to trust the system and put the system on notice so that we
\ncan fix it.”<\/p>\n

Valdez would really like to see things change. Until last June she’d never
\nbeen in trouble before, never even had to speak to a cop before. Now, she’s
\nafraid of police, she says. That is unfortunate, say Elliott and Gauthier,
\nwho would like to see police take more seriously their legal duty to provide
\neffective and equal communication for persons with disabilities such as
\ndeafness. “I think the best way to handle problems that have come up with
\nthe police is already there: Have everyone comply with the ADA. It’s already
\nthere. The APD should be aware that they already have a policy in place,”
\nsays Gauthier. “We hope that what happened with Esther won’t happen again
\nand that her story will help them be more aware in the future.”<\/p>\n

Source:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.austinchronicle.com\/gyrobase\/Issue\/story?oid=oid:1121824<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tone Deaf Deaf Austinites say police can’t seem to listen to reason Note: To view pictures and videos, please click website link below. BY JORDAN SMITH Esther Valdez is deaf. That explains some, but not all, of what happened to…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[114,384,6084,4621,23,21,6085,7330,87,4031,35,6080,1095,24,7332,1412,4544,117,3556,7326,1574,7328,630,238,1085,871,7329,191,7331,7333,17,853,604,80,7324,7325,7327],"class_list":["post-12516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deaf-news","tag-ada","tag-advocates","tag-apd","tag-article","tag-asl","tag-austin","tag-austin-police-department","tag-ceci-bermudez","tag-children","tag-communication-service-for-the-deaf","tag-community","tag-courts","tag-csd","tag-deaf","tag-esther-valdez","tag-hard-of-hearing","tag-jail","tag-law","tag-lawyer","tag-leigh-gonnet","tag-mccay-vernon","tag-michele-lavigne","tag-national-association-of-the-deaf","tag-officers","tag-paul-rutowski","tag-police","tag-rick-macpherson","tag-sign-language","tag-steven-willis","tag-teressa-graves","tag-texas","tag-texas-association-of-the-deaf","tag-texas-school-for-the-deaf","tag-tsd","tag-valdez","tag-wess-smith","tag-written-english"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p752R-3fS","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":19476,"url":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2012\/08\/02\/city-settles-suit-with-deaf-citizen\/","url_meta":{"origin":12516,"position":0},"title":"City Settles Suit With Deaf Citizen","author":"Grant Laird Jr","date":"August 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"City Settles Suit With Deaf Citizen Jail and several courtrooms will get videophones BY JORDAN SMITH AUGUST 3, 2012 For the second time in a decade, the city of Austin has settled a federal civil rights suit, reaffirming its agreement to provide training for Austin Police officers on how to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/category\/deaf-news\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":19475,"url":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2012\/08\/02\/city-settles-suit-brought-by-deaf-resident\/","url_meta":{"origin":12516,"position":1},"title":"City settles suit brought by deaf resident","author":"Grant Laird Jr","date":"August 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Not So Tone Deaf? 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