Language and Law Enforcement: UWM grad teaches Chinese to Houston Police Department

Carsten Brown, an officer with the Houston Police Department, was driving his squad car one evening in 2018 and was flagged down by an elderly Chinese woman on the side of the road. She spoke no English and had been stranded at an intersection by her frustrated cab driver, who couldn’t understand her directions.

In halting, broken Mandarin, and with the help of a remote “language line” available to officers who encounter language barriers on the job, Officer Brown pieced together the woman’s story and was able to deliver her safely to her retirement home.

Brown is not a native Chinese speaker, but he and his fellow officers are learning how to speak basic Mandarin Chinese to serve the sizeable population of Mandarinspeakers living in Houston. Their first teacher was Li-Ya Mar, a 2016 UWM graduate who earned her PhD in Linguistics.

“[Officer Brown] told me that the fact that he actually knew some of these simple phrases and words in Mandarin really helped this lady to trust him and allowed him to take her back to her home,” she says as she finishes relating her student’s story.

Mar is from Taiwan. She attended college in her native country, but found herself at UWM for graduate school, enticed by the prospect of working with well-known educators in the field of second language acquistion. During her time at UWM, Mar also served as a teaching assistant and a lecturer in Chinese in the Foreign Language and Literature Department.

After graduation, she and her husband traveled to Houston for her husband’s job. Mar reached out to the local universities to offer her services in teaching Chinese – and found some unexpected students.

“University of St. Thomas in downtown Houston connected me to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Houston,” Mar explained. “The Houston Police and the office were trying to establish a language course to help the community and to help the officers communicate better with the community.”

Li-Ya Mar smiles with her mentor, now-professor emeritus Fred Eckman, at her graduation from UWM in 2016. Mar used her degree to help build a Mandarin language course for the Houston Police Department. Photo courtesy of Li-Ya Mar.

Houston is a sprawling city, and it’s home to a large – and growing – number of Chinese speakers. The city’s Chinatown on the west side boasts street signs written primarily in Chinese with English in a smaller font below. The Houston PD recognized they needed to expand their officers’ language skills, including, but not limited to, Chinese. They asked Mar to develop their new Mandarin language course.

Though Mar had taught classes at UWM, she always had supporting materials to work with. Now she had to design a 20-week curriculum without so much as a textbook.

“So, I reached out to the Houston Police continuing education unit,” she said. “They gave me some documents – protocols about traffic stops, when to draw weapons, and stuff like that. They gave me a lot of freedom to teach whatever I thought was culturally relevant to enhance the communication between the Chinese-speaking communities and police officers.”

Then she began to build classes around those interactions.

Even though classes wrapped up a few months ago and Mar is now located in Dallas, her curriculum will continue to be used to teach the Houston PD new language skills.

“I covered traffic stops – anything related to traffic. Hostile situations. That includes weapons or drawing guns, or ‘do you have any drugs,’” Mar said. “I taught all the words for weapons very early. I wanted them to know how to say, ‘Drop your gun’ or ‘Do you have a gun.’ I always emphasize that they do not need to know the entire phrase; they just need to know the keywords, such as the verb ‘have’ and then the object, whatever weapon or drug or information, and attach the question particle in Mandarin.”

She’s not looking for perfection. As long as officers have a basic understanding of the verbs and their objects, they can make themselves understood. Other essential phrases include everything from greetings to directions to explaining airport procedures.

The Houston Police Department is grateful for the help.

“Policing communities requires a partnership between the police officers on the street and the citizens they are charged with protecting and serving. As in any partnership, communication is paramount,” said Officer Joel Miller of the Houston Police Department. “The Department, therefore, has been privileged in receiving Dr. Li-Ya Mar’s assistance with training our officers to speak the Mandarin language.”

The program has been a success, and received coverage from both the Houston Chronicle and Houston Public Media. Officers have been able to use their newfound language skills in several incidents across the city from traffic stops to, yes, delivering elderly women to their homes.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science