Police Chief Honored for Outreach to Immigrants

The real challenge -- working to persuade crime victims in immigrant communities to come forward -- remains, Rohrer said.

Domestic violence is a major concern, as are robberies, which increased in recent years, he said. Some immigrants still are reluctant to talk to officers.

"They think that our first question is going to be, 'What is your status?' " Rohrer said. But he said that his officers don't care about the answer to that question and don't ask it. "My focus is to make [immigrants] safe. . . . I want them to call us, and think, 'I can trust the police.' "

Criminals sometimes see immigrants as easy targets, Rohrer said.

"People think quite often that Latinos in particular have cash in their pockets. They are kind of easy prey," he said, referring to immigrant workers who carry their weekly earnings in cash rather than go to the bank. Perpetrators think, " 'We'll get easy money, and they're not going to call the police,' " Rohrer said.

To build relationships, Rohrer and his officers have gone to meetings at churches and other places where people feel comfortable, he said. They teach people how to file complaints against police if they think they have been profiled or mistreated. And the department has created small citizen police academies targeting immigrants, in which residents spend a couple of weekends learning what officers do.

When police need information about robberies or about gang recruiting, those who live in immigrant communities are often the best sources, he said.

"The only ones who know who those people are are the people who live in those neighborhoods," Rohrer said.