When an elderly woman was fatally struck by a car in the heart of Chinatown in September, then-Supervisor David Chiu arrived to a disturbing scene.

Not only had 78-year-old Pui Fong Yim Lee been killed by a hit-and-run driver, but police were having trouble gathering any information from witnesses because no officers spoke Cantonese, the language of most neighborhood residents.

“There weren’t any bilingual officers on scene,” Chiu said late last year, months after the Sept. 22 incident, adding that staffers from his office rushed to find people who could translate for the Cantonese-speaking witnesses.

Despite those efforts, Chiu said, “there were many witnesses that walked away.”

The absence of bilingual officers extends far beyond Chinatown and remains an issue for the entire city, advocates say, despite the Police Department’s efforts to recruit and certify more bilingual cops. What’s more, union seniority rules prevent the department from assigning the handful of bilingual officers it has to the appropriate stations, making incidents like the Chinatown hit-and-run more common than not. More.

See: The Examiner

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