The Dane County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin has agreed to make a series of reforms meant to ensure that residents who speak little or no English can get the services they need.
The agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice resolves a civil rights inquiry that followed ProPublica reporting last year on how the sheriff’s office had mistakenly blamed an immigrant worker for his son’s 2019 death on a dairy farm. The reporting revealed that a language barrier between the worker and a sheriff’s deputy had led to the misunderstanding.
Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding, such as the sheriff’s office in Dane County, cannot discriminate against people because of their country of origin or ability to speak English. The Justice Department said that there was no finding of discrimination against the sheriff’s office and that it “fully cooperated” with the inquiry.
As part of the agreement, which was signed over the past week, Dane County says it will finalize a language access policy that includes staff training, quality controls and outreach initiatives, and will undergo a period of departmental monitoring. The new policy — which has been in progress for months — will set standards on when deputies can use children, bystanders and tools such as Google Translate to communicate with non-English speakers. It also creates a process to ensure that, after an emergency situation is over, deputies can confirm the accuracy of information that was gathered via unqualified interpreters.
José María Rodríguez Uriarte, the father of the dead boy, said he was relieved to learn of the agreement.
“I think this will really put pressure on police to obtain clearer translations when they can’t understand a person,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “A lot of us get into a panic when we’re pulled over by the police or when something happens because of the language issue; we don’t know if officers are truly there to help us or, on the contrary, to harm us. So this is a good thing.”
ProPublica’s reporting had found that a different worker had accidentally killed Rodríguez’s son, a precocious 8-year-old named Jefferson. That worker told ProPublica that it was his first day on the job and that he’d received little training before operating a skid steer, a large piece of equipment used on the farm to scrape up cow manure; he said he wasn’t aware the boy was behind him when he put the machine in reverse.
Deputies never interviewed the man, who like the boy’s father was a recent immigrant from Nicaragua and didn’t speak English. A deputy on the scene who considered herself proficient in Spanish interviewed Rodríguez, but she made a grammatical mistake that led her to misunderstand his account of what actually happened.
In a statement, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said his office is committed to equality and inclusion. “By proactively addressing language barriers, we are fostering a more connected community where everyone can fully participate,” he said. Last week, the department posted a page on its website about its efforts to improve language access and included the material in six languages, including English, Spanish and Hmong.
The agreement is part of a Justice Department initiative intended to help law enforcement agencies overcome language barriers to better serve communities and keep officers safe.
“To serve and protect all communities in the United States, our state and local law enforcement agencies must be able to communicate effectively with crime victims, witnesses, and other members of the public who do not speak fluent English,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
The story of what happened to Jefferson brought unprecedented attention to the plight of the mostly undocumented immigrant workers who milk cows and shovel manure in America’s Dairyland. Local and state officials began calling for reforms. In the months after ProPublica’s investigation was published, county officials allocated $8 million to create new housing for farmworkers and established a countywide coordinator position to help all departments implement language access plans and engage community members with limited English proficiency. Jefferson’s parents also reached a settlement with the farm where he died and its insurance company, neither of which admitted wrongdoing. The case had been scheduled for trial but was resolved weeks after the story was published.
Since his son’s death, Rodríguez has been working on another dairy farm in the area. He said he hopes to return to Nicaragua in December to be reunited with his remaining son, Jefferson’s younger brother, Yefari. The boy is now one year older than Jefferson was when he died.
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ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
