FOUND IN TRANSLATION — Effective policing requires the trust and cooperation of the entire community, including the Hispanic community. That’s a challenge for an Anne Arundel County Police Department that has eight Spanish-speaking officers; it often confronts not just a language barrier but attitudes formed in Latin American countries where the police may be so little trusted that even crime victims avoid calling them.
How do you deal with this problem? Perhaps one graduate of the Anne Arundel County Citizens Police Academy at a time.
As we reported Sunday, native Peruvian Willians Castillo and four other members of the county’s Hispanic community — from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — completed the 16-week program in December, with the help of a police interpreter. Castillo, who heard about strained encounters with the police from his driver education students in Annapolis, had recruited participants through his church and his job.
“We want our community to be free of danger, but in order to do so we need to get involved,” he said.
Castillo and his fellow graduates — and the county police department — deserve credit for trying to forge badly needed links.
BASIC HELP — We’re an affluent county in an affluent state in one of the most affluent nations to ever exist on the planet, and yet there are still some who can only dream of having a roof over their heads. According to data released by the county government last week, Anne Arundel has roughly 370 chronically homeless — an estimated 88 unsheltered and another 280 living in shelters or transitional housing programs.
County Executive Steve Schuh last week announced that the county has been awarded $2.4 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the nationally competitive Continuum of Care program. The money will support 14 ongoing county projects, which, Schuh said, will provide 175 units of affordable housing to homeless individuals and families.
Studies and experience alike have shown that providing housing for the homeless is a practical way to stave off medical problems and other difficulties that cost far more in the long run — not to mention that it’s the humane thing to do.
SCUM REMOVAL — Some state legislators are returning to a perennial cause: getting rid of official lyrics to the state song that blast Abraham Lincoln as a menacing despot and his followers as “Northern scum.”
Don’t ask us to explain why this hasn’t been done long before now, particularly when alternate lyrics have been drafted that would let the song keep its familiar tune, which it shares with “O, Tannenbaum.” The original words by James Ryder Randall, a fervent Confederate sympathizer, certainly belong in the history books. But as an expression of Maryland in 2018 they are an anachronistic embarrassment.