The New York Times Student Journalism Institute

Outside a Lowe’s home improvement store in Gentilly, Orlando Flores described how he and other Latinos are in constant fear of being mistreated or deported by the New Orleans Police Department. Other day laborers near him nodded in agreement.

“There are some good police officers,” said Flores, a 37-year-old Honduran with a work visa. “But there are also some bad.”

The New Orleans Police Department, which had a tarnished image even before its abuses after Hurricane Katrina were known, is trying to improve its relationship with the small but growing Latino population. Its efforts are focused on reinforcing the role of one man: El Protector.

El Protector is Janssen Valencia, a 44-year-old officer who hopes to counter Latinos’ long-held distrust of the department. But his challenge is earning the faith of a community that believes the NOPD is less interested in protecting them and more interested in checking their immigration status.

The fear is not misplaced. The Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office participates in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Secure Communities program, with a goal of tracking unauthorized immigrants through such biometrics as fingerprinting. The Secure Communities program is expected to be nationwide by 2013, an ICE spokeswoman said, with all law enforcement agencies required to participate.

Separately, the Justice Department found that some NOPD practices violated constitutional and federal law, with Latinos among those affected.

“The department has failed to take meaningful steps to counteract and eradicate bias based on race, ethnicity, and LGBT status in its policing practices,” the March 17 report said, “and has failed to provide critical policing services to language minority communities.”

In January, the police department began “El Protector,” an outreach program started in California and designed to address crime prevention in Spanish-speaking communities often hesitant to contact the police.

“After Hurricane Katrina, I was named the official interpreter for the department,” said Valencia, who was born in New York City and raised in Colombia. “But the Hispanic people wanted more than an interpreter.”

As the police department’s Hispanic liaison in 2008, he made public safety announcements and community appearances. With the implementation of the “more aggressive” El Protector program, Valencia said that his role has evolved to focus more on crime prevention.

The Latino population has become more visible in New Orleans, and has grown from about 3.1 percent of the city’s population in 2000 to about 5.2 percent in 2010, according to Census data. In other cities, El Protector is a program; in New Orleans, it’s Valencia.

“It’s just one officer and there are Latinos all over New Orleans and the metropolitan area,” said Eva Hurst, who works for the Hispanic Apostolate at Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans. “So there’s a lot of ground to cover.”

But Valencia, who has family in New Orleans and moved to the city in 1986, is becoming better known in the community. He still has his public-relations duties as a liaison, speaking about public safety at schools, churches and neighborhood events. He still is the department’s official translator, and had been on call 24 hours a day, he said.

In mid-May, Valencia went to Nashville, Tenn., to see its lauded El Protector program. With two officers running its Latino program, Nashville serves as a model for other law enforcement agencies seeking to overcome language barriers in policing, according to a 2009 report by the Justice Department and the Vera Institute of Justice.

Valencia has two offices, one in East New Orleans in a formerly abandoned building and another in a Mid-City community center.

“That’s a big step, because you’re setting up a subset in their community,” he said. “It’s not part of the police station” and is meant to be a “safe haven,” where people can feel comfortable coming to him, he said.

Valencia appears on two Spanish-language radio programs once a month. He talks about topics in and about the Hispanic community, including crime and domestic violence prevention, on La Fabulosa WFNO-AM 830 and Radio Tropical KGLA-AM 1540. He is encouraged by the number of Latinos who call the radio stations to talk to him.

“When I’m called up to a crime scene to help an officer with interpretation,” he said, “people see my name tag and say, ‘Oh, Officer Valencia. You’re the one from the radio show.’” This makes them more comfortable and cooperative and is a big motivator for him, he said.

But Jacinta Gonzalez of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice is skeptical of how much programs like El Protector can really improve trust between the Hispanic community and the police. “I would say there hasn’t been a radical change in their relationship,” she said.

Workers tell Gonzalez they are racially profiled. She said that unless the NOPD has a written policy against asking for proof of legal status that all officers will abide by, “it will be very hard for people to trust them and reach out to them.”

However, local immigration enforcement could be more severe. While the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office is one of eight state parishes in ICE’s Secure Communities program, none in Louisiana participates in ICE’s 287(g) program, which grants local law enforcement agents certain powers of immigration officers — including accessing federal immigration databases, starting the deportation process and detaining unauthorized immigrant suspects.

“ICE has their duties and objectives and we have ours,” Valencia said. “Ours is public safety.”

Pastor Oscar Ramos said that Valencia has been to First Grace United Methodist Church on Canal Street several times to talk about how to avoid being an easy crime target and how to report crimes.

“In some Latin countries, the police is not a group you trust,” Ramos said. Some immigrants bring this inflexible feeling of distrust and fear with them to the United States, he said, which can lead to the violence that Ramos and Valencia are trying to avoid.

“We were afraid they would start arming themselves to defend themselves,” Ramos said. “It’s a matter of survival.”

“I think that Officer Valencia has been doing a good job of creating a better bridge between the Latino community and the New Orleans Police Department,” Ramos said.

But Gonzalez, of the workers’ center, said she believes that one, two or three officers focused on the Hispanic community would not be able to respond to the needs of Latinos or improve the rapport between them and the police.

Valencia agreed that he could use some help, and said compensation for multilingual officers could help the El Protector program along. Almost half of the 129 municipal law enforcement agencies assessed in the 2009 Vera Institute of Justice report offered officers incentives for being bilingual.

“I think that’s something this office should look into,” Valencia said. “I think there would be more people who would want to do it if there was some kind of benefit they can get out of it.”

Valencia says he is the only officer in the state who is certified in “Command Spanish” for law enforcement. With Command Spanish, Valencia can interrogate suspects and get the information needed for investigations.

He said maybe a dozen other NOPD officers can speak Spanish, but to his knowledge, they have not been officially certified. For example, Valencia translates official documents, which officers who do not read or write Spanish cannot do.

But Valencia can’t be everything to the Latino community. Randy Smith, a 33-year-old Honduran, said that he had contacted the officer after not being paid for a daylong painting job. Valencia told him to go to court to try to get his money, he said, but Smith didn’t think it was worth it and never pursued it.

And while Martin Gutierrez, New Orleans’ Catholic Charities director of neighborhood and community services, said that the relationship between the Latino community and the NOPD is not where it needs to be,  it is better than it was five years ago or before Hurricane Katrina.

“There is always room for improvement,” Gutierrez said, “but I think this is one area that the New Orleans Police Department is doing right.”