Officer breaking down Burmese barrier

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - Fort Wayne Police Officer John Greenlee's been on the force for 15 years. As part of a series on different careers, a teacher at Anthis Career Center asked him to speak to a class about what it takes to be a police officer. Nearly two dozen teenagers, mostly Burmese, are in the class to learn English, and to the students' surprise, Greenlee started his visit Wednesday by speaking Burmese.

"Dang! He can speak Burmese? That's awesome," Rosy Moe, a 15-year-old in the class, said. "Most police officers can't speak another language. I was very impressed with that."

Greenlee decided to take a four-week course through Trine University on his own. The department doesn't require officers to learn the language. He took the initiative to break down the language barriers after years of showing up a police scenes and not being able to communicate.

"It was very frustrating," Greenlee said. "Communication is one of the best things we have as police officers."

He can already speak some Spanish, but that language learning didn't really help much.

"Burmese is totally different," he said. "It's a very slow road."

Maureen Reidenbach is an English as a Second Language teacher at Anthis. While she teaches Burmese kids English, she's also trying to learn their language.

"Burmese is hard to learn," she said. "When I first saw the alphabet, it looks like a row of zeroes that someone had taken a cleaver and chopped up the zeroes and spread them in a line. The language is very different from English."

Greenlee is far from fluent, but the few words and phrases he does know help put people at ease.

"They light up and think all right, but then once I light that fuse, the Burmese bomb does and they start rattling off Burmese. I'm like 'Woah!' I can't keep up so I have to stop them and go one word at a time," he said.

Often times, kids at a police scene are bilingual and help serve as translators for police. Greenlee's ability to have limited small talk with them can help break the ice.

"It helps them open up and they speak better English than I speak Burmese," he said.

Greenlee works the overnight shift from 10 p.m. to 6 p.m. in Fort Wayne's northwest quadrant. He estimates he responds to a call where he'll encounter people who speak Burmese at least once a week. His most-used Burmese phrase?

"Music is too loud. I've used that half a dozen times," he laughed.

The 2010 census reported Fort Wayne's Burmese population to be nearly 4,000. But, Nyein Chan, the supervisor of the refugee resettlement program at Catholic Charities, said it's larger than that now.

Chan has helped serve as a translator for police in the past and said he's encouraged to hear about Greenlee's efforts to learn his language. But, he hopes the department will recruit officers who are already bilingual.

Chief Rusty York said that is one of the department's goals.

"The ideal situation is to get people who are fluent," York said. "It would be a significant help to investigations and it's important to have that part of the community represented in law enforcement. It helps with the level of trust from the community."

The department isn't requiring officers to learn Burmese. York added it's difficult to even get officers who are fluent in Spanish, let alone a language generally not offered in the public school system. Still, York said there are several Burmese candidates applying to the department right now in its current recruitment class.

Part of recruiting Burmese officers starts when they are young.

"We want to groom some students to become police officers because they are interested in that," Reidenbach said.

That's why career days like the one Greenlee attended on Wednesday are important.

"These kids are hitting the ground running. They know English and were born in Burma. If we can recruit the kids when they are 16, 17 years old, which is when I learned law enforcement is something I wanted to get into, it will be great for us. Then in five to six years we'll have some great kids, young adults able to take on the role of police officer," Greenlee said.

That theory seems to be working.

"I wish I could be like him and become a police officer one day," Thet Thet Lin, a 16-year-old girl said.

She and Ei Ei Maw, an 18-year-old classmate, were both impressed with Greenlee's Burmese.

"It was really exciting. I want to be a police officer too. I speak more than two or three languages, like five," Maw said.

If Maw and Lin do keep that dream alive and don a badge in a few years, they'd help the department on two fronts: they're fluent in Burmese and female.

"We need not just Burmese officers, but African American and Hispanic men and women," he said. "To serve a community you need to look like it."

Watch the videos in this story to hear Greenlee talk more about the Burmese he's learned.