Asian Fortune Your source for all things Asian American
By Dottie Tiejun Li
(Washington, D.C.)—The Metropolitan Police Department is reporting progress on finding “workspace” in Chinatown for a still-to-be-hired “Community Outreach Coordinator,” a civilian police force employee who will act as a liaison between MPD and the Chinatown Community. And the process of filling the job is well underway, too, according to Chief Cathy L. Lanier, who told Asian Fortune on Feb. 21, “I know that they had many candidates and they are in the evaluation phase.”
However, a deal for the workstation has not been finalized, Asian Fortune has learned.
After Asian Fortune asked the Chief to provide an update on the stalled effort to replace the vacated Chinatown police substation at 616 H Street, NW, Gallery Place, she instructed her communications office to tell us that MPD has “identified a space at the Chinatown Community Cultural Center that the employee will occupy.” The space is apparently a landing by the second-floor entrance to the Community Center. It is at the top of a staircase which overlooks the now-empty headquarters of MPD’s Asian Liaison Unit on the ground level of Gallery Place.
But Linda Wang, Program Manager of the Community Center offered this guarded response when Asian Fortune asked for details of the deal: “That was brought up as a suggestion during the meeting. However no one pursued it with me. We haven’t heard anything since the last meeting,” she emailed.
Chief Lanier had told attendees at several Chinatown community meetings that MPD checked out “about 30” potential locations for a new Chinatown police office, but that nothing had developed. She said several times she liked the idea of using the Community Center space, and Center officials said they would be open to it if no other space could be arranged. And that’s where things stood until Asian Fortune prodded the Chief for an update.
Steps from the ornate Chinatown Arch, the now-empty ground floor facility had been provided by Gallery Place to the police as a headquarters for the ALU under a dollar-a-year lease since 2004. But as members of the special squad expanded their work citywide, and MPD moved to “community policing,” which keeps officers on the streets and away from desks, the site had been little used in recent years. Still, Chinatown business and community leaders were shocked when the substation was closed in December without notice, as they viewed it both as a cultural symbol of pride and important to keeping the once-high crime rate in Chinatown under control. The Chief exacerbated the frayed relations by refusing to clearly answer questions about the office space and its future, and by making contradictory statements about its potential future use.
At the first of three tense public meetings with members of the Chinatown community, Chief Lanier promised to hire a civilian “Community Outreach Coordinator.” The Community Center spot has just enough space to meet the Chief’s stated requirements for a “workstation,” which she described as “a desk, a chair, a computer and a phone.”
At the public meetings, Chief Lanier was repeatedly asked about the status of the vacated ALU headquarters. However, she refused to offer details about the status of lease or why she would not base the new “Outreach Coordinator” there, as community leaders prefer. But after the Chief left the most recent session, Gallery Place Manager Paula McDermott took the opportunity to give the attendees the information they sought.
“To answer the question directly, the lease has not yet expired. The lease has not yet been terminated. It is up to Chief Lanier at this point to decide what she wants to do with that space,” she said. “The Landlord at this point is open to whatever decision the City decides to make on that lease, because as long as that lease is being maintained as it should be, then it’s up to the City to decide what to do with it.”
McDermott added that one condition of the lease is that the space “is supposed to be manned, that space is supposed to have somebody in it, operating it.”
The Asian Liaison Unit has six full-time officers, all of whom are fluent in at least one Asian language, augmented by specially trained “affiliate” officers from various sub-stations. Members of the ALU now report to a police station away from Chinatown, as they work with Asian businesses and residents around the city. MPD has ten additional officers who are not part of the ALU patrolling Chinatown, so regardless of where the ALU is based, the police presence on Chinatown’s streets remains unchanged.
