See how Tulsa police officers use secondary languages to solve crimes

TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa police officers are using secondary languages to better communicate with the growing diversity in our city.

The Tulsa Police Department says it’s important that officers know how to speak other languages, not just because it helps them relate to the public, but also because it’s helping them solve some of the city’s most serious crimes.

FOX23 told you in January when detective Elaina Estrada used sign language with a hearing-impaired witness to help get a suspected shooter, Jessie Williams, in custody.

“That witness was instrumental and having an officer who was able to do sign language was able to help us solve this crime so quickly,” Tulsa Police Sgt. Rusty Brown said on the scene at the Meadows Apartments near 31st and Garnett.

The hearing-impaired witness had been in a car that police say Williams shot at multiple times. The witness wasn’t injured, but the driver was shot more than once.

“When that call came out, they asked for an officer who knew sign language and the radio was silent,” Detective Estrada told FOX23 in a February interview.

Estrada was fluent in sign language, but that was a decade ago. Still, she took on the task.

“It was nerve-wracking,” Estrada said.

“I knew she was in a state of stress after being a victim of a shooting. I explained to her I don’t know sign all that well. I sign slow, and if I don’t know something I can fingerspell. We just went back and forth like that, and we just got a rapport together.”

Another officer on the force, Edel Rangel is fluent in Spanish.

He grew up in Bixby, but his parents are from Mexico and came to the United States about 45 years ago.

Officer Rangel says he uses Spanish in his job almost daily.

“I have spent most of my career out in east Tulsa, and it’s predominantly Hispanic out there,” he said.

“For a lot of them, Spanish is their first language.”

He mostly helps translate for victims who want to file reports, but he has also worked on significant criminal investigations.

In 2015 FOX23 covered a series of taco truck robberies in east Tulsa. Rangel was able to get information from the victims, who were Hispanic.

“I was able to help robbery detectives translate and identify the suspect,” Rangel said.

“It was really huge because the suspect, if I remember correctly, robbed about six taco trucks.”

That defendant, Jeremiah Million, was convicted and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

FOX23 gathered some numbers, and according to the U.S. Census, there are more than 80 different languages known to be spoken in Oklahoma. In Tulsa, roughly one in five residents speak a language other than English at home.

Public information officer Andre Ball says those numbers prove why it’s important to have officers who can relate to every ethnic group in our city.

“Somebody just speaking to them one person to the other,” Ball says.

“They understand that they have people that are just like [them],” he said.

“I think this was the push I needed to get back into it and get fluent in it again,” Detective Estrada told FOX23 about sign language, “because you just never know what situation is going to happen next and who needs your help.”

Beyond Spanish and sign language, the department also has officers who currently speak Chinese, Vietnamese and Hmong.

They are working on expanding that list to include other languages as well.

The department offers incentive pay for officers fluent in secondary languages.

To learn more, or if you are interested in becoming an officer, click here.

Cox Media Group