By Harold Reutter
harold.reutter@theindependent.com

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Independent/Barrett Stinson One aspect of community outreach that the Grand Island Police Department will continue to employ to engage students in a positive way is the use of school resource officers at local schools. School resource officer Rick Ressel (second from left) listens to Andrew Tobin (second from right) describe what he would do if a friend of his was going to join a gang during a group decision-making exercise in Rob Micekšs fifth-grade classroom at Howard Elementary School. Skylee Jones (left) and Cecilia Rojas (right) work on their answers, as members of another group work in the background. Independent/Barrett Stinson School resource officer Rick Ressel listens to a comment by a fifth-grade student at Howard Elementary School during a decision making exercise. Building a good relationship with the community's immigrant population can begin with the children in school. Click Thumbnails to View

"It's a positive challenge," Lamken said, noting that Grand Island is a growing and prosperous com- munity.

Grand Island's challenge is keeping the community growing and prosperous and safe, Lamken said. Part of Grand Island's growth has been because of new immigrants.

Lamken said the responsibility for keeping Grand Island growing, prosperous and safe lies not only with the 75 people in the Grand Island Police Department but with the community as a whole.

"We have all we can do," Lamken said.

Grand Islanders must do their part by being civically engaged, which includes a willingness to tell police if they are victims of a crime or a witness to a crime.

People are sometimes reluctant to become involved in those situations, Lamken said.

But the problem may be even more acute for Grand Island's new immigrant community, the chief said.

Lamken noted that Sudanese and Somali immigrants are Grand Island's newest arrivals, after many years of having more Latino immigrants settle here.

He said depending on which country they come from and which part of which country immigrants may have far different experiences with the police than people who were raised in this country.

"In some places, the police might have been corrupt," Lamken said. "In other places, there might be no police or law enforcement."

He said that has caused him and others in the Police Department to "have a concern that crimes aren't being reported all the time."

Lamken said he can recall only one documented case of an immigrant being reluctant to report a crime to Grand Island police.

It involved a woman who was a repeated victim but refused to report anything until one of her friends persuaded her to go in and talk to the police.

Everyone has a stake

Lamken was asked how the nonimmigrant community should feel about such situations.

"What's in it for me?" Lamken asked, posing a hypothetical question.

He said all Grand Island residents have a stake in having every resident immigrant and nonimmigrant alike reporting crimes. If a crime goes unreported, that means the perpetrator is still at large and free to commit another crime.

And the victim of that perpetrator's next crime might not be an immigrant, Lamken said.

Lamken shared his concerns with city officials during the Grand Island City Council retreat earlier this year after talking with some of the officers in his department.

Sgt. Dale Hilderbrand is like Lamken in that he "really couldn't say" how many, if any, immigrants are afraid to communicate with the Police Department.

He did say he believes the department needs to communicate with immigrants, letting them know how they should go about reporting a crime and who they need to contact.

"It's what we call community policing," Hilderbrand said.

An immigrant's voice

Odalys Perez, executive director of the Grand Island Multicultural Coalition, said she doesn't know whether new immigrants in Grand Island are reluctant to report crimes to police.

But Maria Lopez, who works as a minority recruiter for Central Community College in Grand Island, feels that some immigrants do hesitate to come into contact with police.

Lopez said she deals with immigrants as part of her job at CCC, as a volunteer for the Prime Time reading program at the Grand Island Public Library and as a teacher of citizenship classes on behalf of the Multicultural Coalition.

She said some immigrants are afraid to report crimes, especially if they're undocumented. Even immigrants who are documented may feel uncomfortable talking to the police, if only because of the language barrier, Lopez said.

She used her own situation as an example. Lopez said she has lived in the United States for 16 years and has been a U.S. citizen for two years.

But when she first came to this country, Lopez said, she was undocumented and was afraid to have any contact with police. Even when she became a permanent resident and was living in the United States legally, Lopez said, she was hesitant about coming into contact with police because of the language barrier.

Now, as a U.S. citizen who has lived in Grand Island for many years, she has full confidence in the local police force.

Lamken said the entire community has a stake in the police having a good relationship with the immigrant community. If unreported crimes were limited to the immigrant community, he said, that would be bad for the city. Everybody has heard stories about inner-city areas in large cities where people simply don't trust the police.

That leads to neighborhoods with high crime rates and a police force that is less effective than it should be, Lamken said. He does not want that to happen in Grand Island because it would be bad for the whole community.

Starting with the kids

At this point, Lamken is not proposing any specific plan of action.

He meets regularly with the Multicultural Coalition. Lamken said he believes his department has a good relationship with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Grand Island and gets along well with Fourth Street businesses, which have many immigrant owners.

The chief said school resource officers provide a bridge to young people in the community, regardless of whether those young people were born in this country or are immigrants. Lamken said it's important for all young people to trust police officers.

Rick Ressel, who serves as a school resource officer at Walnut Middle School and also teaches classes at elementary schools, said the school setting makes it easier for officers to form positive relationships with students.

"It's one facet of community policing," he said. "It involves an outreach to the community, and it also allows the community to be involved with us.

"A lot of times, police officers have contact with the public in a high-stress situation," Ressel said. "Seeing students and parents in school allows us to interact on a more positive level."

In addition, Lamken has stressed that his officers should make sure that everybody they come into contact with knows that their problems are being taken seriously.

Local residents can do their part by making immigrants feel welcome.

"I've had immigrants who are legal citizens of the United States say they sometimes don't feel welcome," Lamken said.

When that happens, one response might be apathy, he said. A person might not contact police because he or she has the attitude of, "Why get involved?"

The feeling of apathy can go even further, developing into anger, which is even worse, Lamken said.

The chief said he does not plan a specific outreach program, such as soliciting invitations from immigrant church groups to speak. But if any church group or any other immigrant group asks him or a police representative to talk about the importance of having a good relationship with the Police Department, Lamken would be willing to do so.