By Linda Doherty, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 April 2001

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/30/national/national2.html

Police blame outdated and uninformed perceptions among ethnic communities for the lack of officers from non-English speaking backgrounds.

There are more police with physical disabilities (291) in NSW than there are police from non-English-speaking backgrounds and more than 12 times the number of officers who address gay and lesbian matters compared with ethnic issues.

Police have launched an advertising campaign to address the low recruitment rates in ethnic communities as the number of officers from non-English-speaking backgrounds continues to fall and police struggle to meet a 1996 government target. Police Service annual reports show the number of such officers has fallen from 280 to 268 between 1998 and last year. NSW has 13,500 police.

A government target for 20 per cent of recruits to be from ethnic communities remains static at about 10 per cent, the same level as in 1996.

The Police Service in its 1995-96 annual report said it would "train over 150 ethnic community liaison officers", but there are only 11 such civilian officers in Sydney and none in other parts of the State.

Cabramatta, in Sydney's south-west, has no police who speak the dominant languages of Chinese or Vietnamese, although it has three liaison officers. The others are in the City of Sydney, Burwood, Marrickville, Fairfield, Blacktown and Campsie, and the program is supposed to be expanded to 36 officers over the next three years.

The Police Service spokesman on ethnic issues, Assistant Commissioner Bruce Johnston, said a recruitment drive, which started last week with Chinese and Vietnamese advertisements, would target ethnic parents who often did not approve of policing as a career. They held safety fears, might distrust police and were unaware that height and weight restrictions no longer applied.

The second campaign, from May 6 in the mainstream media, is aimed at 16- to 34-year-olds who might worry about people's expectations of ethnic police and feared being asked to do favours.

"People judge police by the ones they know," Mr Johnston said. "One of the problems we have is there are very few police in the ethnic community, so we are being judged by other perceptions."

But the Fairfield Vietnamese-speaking councillor, Mr Thang Ngo, said police were not serious about ethnic recruiting because the last big advertising campaign was in 1997.

"The biggest thing police say about ethnic communities is there is a wall of silence. They shouldn't blame the communities if they can't communicate with them," he said.

The Opposition spokesman on police, Mr Andrew Tink, said the Police Service was failing "on the most elementary level" to encourage civilians to become liaison officers and to increase the number of sworn officers who spoke languages other than English. "The Government has failed woefully to increase the capacity of the Police Service to understand these communities," he said.

In 1997, the Police Commissioner, Mr Peter Ryan, announcing "a new police initiative", said officers who spoke a second language would wear identifier badges. The concept, however, is still being considered.

A spokeswoman for the Police Minister, Mr Whelan, said recruitment of ethnic police was a difficult and complex national problem. There was no cap or funding restriction that would account for the low number of liaison officers.

"The minister supports anything that can increase the numbers, but you can't force people to apply," she said.