In college, they teach conversational Spanish. In travel books, they offer “tourist Spanish.” In metro Atlanta’s police stations and courthouses, it’s “survival Spanish.”

Survival Spanish is a crash course gaining popularity throughout metro Atlanta’s law enforcement departments. In metro Atlanta you can hear the men and women in blue picking up the language in a hurry.

“If you’d have gotten here 10 years ago, you wouldn’t have had a ‘Spanish Week,’ ” said Brody Staud, Cobb County’s public information officer. “But it’s something that all recruits go through now.”

Bilingual police officers are at a premium in areas where large numbers of Hispanics are settling in metro Atlanta, but local law enforcement agencies aren’t able to hire them fast enough to keep up with the growing Spanish-speaking population.

In Gwinnett County, just 15 years ago, the Hispanic population was about 9,000. Now that number has climbed to about 90,000.

Communication problems have followed that influx of newcomers to the county.

“If you’ve got a crime and the victim and the officers are just shrugging their shoulders at each other, that’s not a good thing,” said Stan Hall, director of the victim/witness program in the Gwinnett County district attorney’s office.

Enter the county’s volunteer interpreter program. Through the district attorney’s office, the program pairs people who speak Spanish and other languages with police officers on patrols.

“We do a brief explanation of how our judicial system works and then we put these people in police cars,” Hall said. “Then, if we get in a situation where we can’t speak the language, we have someone on the scene instead of someone we have to call.”

About 40 volunteers in Gwinnett speak about 15 languages, including Spanish, Russian, Bosnian, Korean and several Chinese dialects.

In addition, the county maintains a law enforcement language line where consultants are paid to interpret when needed. In 1998, Gwinnett spent $23,000 for the service. In 2004, the bill reached $151,000, police said.

Cultural differences

But it’s not just speaking the language that has metro Atlanta law enforcement agencies scrambling to get a handle on the needs of their new residents.

Cultural differences can cover everything from one immigrant’s imported distrust of authority figures to another’s bristling when touched on the back of the head.

Even different attitudes toward gender roles emerge as officers patrol diversifying neighborhoods.

“As a female officer, you might meet people with a different idea of what women should be,” said Gwinnett Police Sgt. Sandra Pryor, a 15-year veteran of the force.

Pryor is charged with spreading diversity training around Gwinnett. On a recent day she delivered a two-hour class in cultural diversity to nearly half of the 47 people working for the city of Lilburn. She offered her students an example of the difference between having a prejudice — which she says is something we all have to some degree — and acting on it.

Not long ago, she said, she was assisting the Immigration and Naturalization Service in a search for undocumented residents along Brook Hollow Parkway near Norcross. Her directions were to stop people who looked like Mexicans, but that seemed too close to racial profiling for her taste.

“I stopped everybody,” she said. “When we act on prejudice, we engage in discrimination.”

Hall, in the district attorney’s office, said the agency’s language program outreach also is creating a better working relationship between law enforcement and people who are suspicious of officers arriving in a squad car.

“It’s helped to build a bridge,” he said. “A lot of people come from countries where they had reason to fear the authorities.”