After reading the CART transcript of the Rochester Police Department discussion forum with the Rochester Deaf Community that was held at Rochester School for the Deaf on May 21st. It looks like that the RPD are trying to meet the needs of deaf community’s request to have better accessible communication between the police officers and the deaf citizens after several communication problems that plagued the past couple years.

My Opinion – It’s not surprising to know that Rochester, NY is one of the largest deaf populations in the world and yet the City of Rochester still overlooked those deaf accessibly needs for the public for years. Washington D.C. has more deaf-friendly environments than Rochester itself.

The Deaf Rochester citizens have expressed concerns about how the police officers reacted to the deaf citizens when they are unable to hear the police’s commands to stop or to pull over or to calm down when under emotional situations. The RPD’s strong view of protecting themselves and the community are to make sure that the police have the control of the situations, not the citizens.

My Opinion – I agreed with RPD’s philosophy about protecting themselves and the citizens by allowing them to handle it as they are trained to do so.

I have sensed that the feelings and the moods coming from reading the transcript telling me that the deaf community only wanted to have a better capable police officers who can able to sign fluently to handle stressful situation instead of retorting to paper/pen, or using children to act as interpreter, or use someone who knows little signing as a communication methods which they strongly disagreed the most. The RPD stated that they would use any resources at hand to communicate the non-English speaking person, even using the children as well. It is similar to the concepts of having children to interpret for their Spanish-speaking parents. The RPD states that they will use their best judgments on deciding whether to use the children or not to help them to interpret. They assure that they will try not to use children that are young like 7, 8, or 9 years old in this situation.

My Opinion – It understandable that we all wanted to have the universal interpreters in each police cars to handle Spanish, Chinese, Italian, sign languages, but again, RPD are fully aware of what kind of large cultural communities that they are working in the City of Rochester or Monroe County. Using children to act as interpreters presents sticky situations because who wants to put a child in awkward position and expect the child to try to translate all the words coming from their parents? Some children are not fluent in their parent’s languages and they cannot be depended on as interpreter for the RPD. I believe the parents do have the rights to refuse to allow their child to act as interpreter for the best interest of the child’s well-being.

Some of them spoke up fears about police officers using paper/pen as evidence instead of communication tool between them. But the RPD assures them that “If you’re talking about conversation, either as a information, a traffic stop, or you’re a victim or a witness, that type of a thing, those papers are not necessarily kept.” When the police read or show the deaf citizen the Miranda warning, the Miranda Rights, then the written documents between the citizen and the police will be used as evidences.

My Opinion – It’s reasonable to resort to paper/pen communication methods but how and when will you know if during the discussion over the paper/pen, the officer has decided to arrest you and they will used those discussion papers as evidence instead of communication tool? How much patient will the officers have to deal with limited written English language that a deaf person has wrote? Will the officer able to rewrite their statements to make it easier to understand? That concerns to some deaf citizens at the forum.

One person in the forum spoke up about having deaf people to use the universal signs to allow the police/fire officers to know that he/she are deaf or hearing impaired. RPD has acknowledged about those signs and do encourage their officers to be aware of those signs.

My Opinion – Why should deaf citizens be required to follow the universal signs for being deaf? All the law enforcement departments in USA do not know the universal signs for being deaf. In fact there are many different signing words for being “deaf” so, which one is consider a universal sign? There are no enforced laws that require a deaf person to identify their disabilities to anyone except for their driver license. Using the “Deaf” card to ID themselves as a deaf person can be helpful to the police but what about being in situation where you do not have the card with you?

My Overall Opinion – It appears that Rochester Police Department has not yet opened the door for possible opportunities for any capable well-fit deaf man/woman to try to apply for the law enforcement positions. There are many deaf Criminal Justice graduates coming from RIT and this is the opportunity for RPD to recruit them right here in Rochester! I understand that RPD has told the forum that they have 12 capable officers out of 700 who can able to sign decently, but those officers cannot be at every place where they encounter a deaf person that need to use sign language as their only mode of communication. It would be great to have RPD to retain some deaf officers that can be good role models to the deaf communities and will hopefully improve the relationships between Deaf Rochester citizens and the Rochester Police Department. Those deaf officers can in turn able to train the hearing officers about how to handle deaf citizens in Rochester area without having to retain someone from RIT to train them.