By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
EAST HARLEM — After arriving in New York from Mexico seven years ago, Gabriela assumed that crime was something she’d have to endure.
Drug dealers had set up shop in her East Harlem apartment building, making her afraid to walk with her two young children. But Gabriela, a 28-year-old undocumented immigrant, thought that if she called the police, the bad guys would come after her, and the cops would get her deported.
“I was scared of talking to the police,” she recalled through an interpreter. “I was illegal, and I didn’t know if they’d retaliate against us.”
But her daughter was enrolled in East Harlem Head Start, run by the Children’s Aid Society, which had just started a project to heal the distrust between police and the neighborhood’s undocumented immigrants. Gabriela signed up, and was among the first group of parents to visit the local precinct station house, attend training workshops with rookie cops and listen to police commanders talk about the city’s “don’t ask” policy.
She learned that police weren’t allowed to ask law-abiding people about their immigration status. In fact, the police wanted her help reporting crimes.
“I never knew what my rights were, and so I couldn’t believe what they were saying,” Gabriela said.
Three years later, the project is considered a model for a citywide effort to improve public safety in heavily immigrant neighborhoods, even while the nation debates a new Arizona law that gives local police power to detain immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally.
“We need people to come forward,” said Deputy Inspector William Pla, Commander of the NYPD’s 23rd Precinct, which covers East Harlem. “We need them to not be scared of the system, and not be scared of the police department.”
It was a natural place for the experiment to catch hold. East Harlem has long been one of New York’s most heavily immigrant neighborhoods. Italians settled there, Puerto Ricans followed, and, most recently came Mexicans, whose numbers more than tripled in the 1990s. Today, about a quarter of East Harlem’s population is foreign born. Many are undocumented.
New York’s “don’t ask” policy has been in place for many years. But many immigrants come from countries where police were unresponsive or corrupt. They hear about roundups and detention of immigrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
So, officials and advocates say, when these immigrants become victims of crime, they tend not to report it to authorities.
“We had families scared into silence,” said Moria Cappio, East Harlem Head Start’s education director.
Her group started its project after hearing stories from the families it served: husbands getting mugged on their way home from work, mothers and children afraid to walk past the drug dealers in their apartment buildings, landlords withholding repairs. All too scared to speak up.
In a gesture of goodwill, East Harlem Head Start asked a couple of police officers from the 23rd Precinct to read to children. When they walked in, mothers grabbed their kids, and the little ones started crying.
Since then, dozens of families have taken the Head Start workshops, which focus on immigrants' rights, obtaining American citizenship and understanding how to interact with local government. They were cited as a model project in a 2009 report on immigrants' rights by State Sen. Jose Serrano.
Now, The Children’s Aid Society wants to standardize the program so it could be copied elsewhere. “We want others to adopt it,” Cappio said.
Gabriela has moved with her husband and children to a safer apartment building, and has had no reason to call the cops. But she says she would have no reservations about doing it. And she’s telling her friends in the neighborhood “to speak up if they feel the need to.”
Because it’s difficult to measure a reduction in unreported crimes, authorities look at the program’s popularity as a way to gauge their success.
“Word’s got to spread,” Pla said. “Someone goes to a workshop, tells friends and families, and we have some success stories. It’s not going to happen overnight. This might take years to overcome.”
