Police Staffer Shatters Stereotype : Employment: Undertaking a career in law enforcement has helped Jenny Truong break restrictive mold for women of Asian descent.

By BERT ELJERA

Nov. 9, 1993 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

WESTMINSTER — Jenny Truong still remembers the stares, snickers and hostile looks she received when she first walked down Bolsa Avenue in Little Saigon in a police officer’s uniform.

“There was this guy, about 50, looking at me like, ‘What’s this girl doing in a police officer’s uniform? Is she Vietnamese?’ ” said Truong, a 27-year-old mother of two. In joining the Westminster Police Department in December, Truong broke a longstanding tradition that keeps women of Asian descent out of law enforcement jobs.

Truong wasn’t surprised by the cool reception. Her own mother wasn’t too thrilled about the job either.

“She asked me, ‘Can’t you find another line of work?’ ” Truong said. It didn’t help that Truong was six months’ pregnant with her second child when she was hired, she added. But that was 10 months ago. Now, Truong says, her mother is proud of her and the Vietnamese-American community has embraced her as a link to the often intimidating world of law enforcement.

Truong, who came to the United States when she was 8 years old and is an American citizen, does not wear a gun or chase bad guys. As a civilian “police service officer,” her job is community relations, the “soft side” of policing. But Truong, who speaks English and Vietnamese, is a full-time employee of the force.

“She speaks our language, she knows our culture,” said Hung Nguyen, 49, a job developer and counselor at the Little Saigon Resource Center on Bolsa Avenue where Truong works twice a week.

Police Lt. Andrew Hall, community relations officer of the Westminster Police Department, said that Truong was hired as part of the continuing effort to reach out to the Vietnamese-American community, which makes up 23% of Westminster’s population of 81,000 people.

Only four of the department’s 101 police officers are Vietnamese-Americans, Hall said, but there are efforts to recruit more. In addition to Truong, one other police service officer of Vietnamese descent will soon be hired, he said.

Hall said that police recruitment efforts are hampered because many Asian parents do not want their sons or daughters to become police officers.

“In Vietnam, people hate the police because of abuses and corruption,” Nguyen said. Nguyen, who came to the United States five years ago after spending seven years in a communist labor camp, said many immigrants carry that perception of the police when they arrive here.

However, Truong is helping erase those perceptions. Truong, who graduated from Westminster High School in 1984, teaches crime prevention classes to newly arrived Vietnamese refugees at the Little Saigon Resource Center and at the St. Anselm Refugee Center in Garden Grove.

The Little Saigon Resource Center, which opened in January with federal, state and local government grant money, is jointly run by the Westminster Police Department and the Vietnamese Community of Orange County, a nonprofit organization.

At the center, refugees can take English classes, get legal advice, receive job training and inquire about Social Security benefits that may be available to them. The Public Law Center, the Girl Scouts of America and other social service organization also provide services.

“This is the ultimate crime prevention tool,” Hall said. “We’re trying to empower a vulnerable community and teach it how to protect itself.”

Truong conducts twice a week classes on traffic safety, home security, gang prevention and domestic violence, which are integrated into the language classes the refugees are taking.

“She’s very useful to the Vietnamese community,” said Nguyen of Truong’s work. “It makes our relationship with the Police Department a lot better.”

However, Truong says she sometimes fields complaints that police often do not respond quickly to calls for assistance or they appear to be targeting Vietnamese-Americans for traffic citations.

“There is a perception in the community that the police are out to hassle people,” Truong said. “What people don’t realize is that a majority of traffic citations in Little Saigon are against Vietnamese-Americans simply because most motorists are Vietnamese-Americans.”

She said it’s part of her job to explain the complexities of police work to people.

The key, said Hall, Truong’s immediate superior, is to persuade Vietnamese-Americans to trust the police. Truong plays a key role in achieving that, he said.

Truong said the biggest fear among Vietnamese-Americans, as most city residents, is street gangs.

It affects even how business is conducted in Little Saigon, Truong said. “Gang members would come up to a merchant, ask him to pay up or he wouldn’t have a shop to come to the next day,” she said.

A recent city study identified five Vietnamese gangs, with a combined membership of more than 500 people, as some of the biggest in the city.

There are also some crimes, such as domestic violence, that are kept hidden from the public eye because of cultural pressures, Truong said. She said she has referred cases of battered women to other agencies.

Truong said her decision to become a police officer was a personal choice and was not influenced by anyone. But she said she admires women who are involved in issues affecting women and minorities.

For the moment, she’s happy with her work in the community and being a mother to Bridgette, 2, and Brandon, 4 months old. Her husband, Tuan Ngo, 33, an electronics technician, supports her all the way, she said.

However, her father, Chanh Truong, 73, doesn’t say much about her work, Truong said.