Asian Advisory Panel Is in Works : Cultures: Officials hope to bridge the gap that language and customs have created between immigrants and police.

SANTA ANA —  The Orange County Human Relations Commission is moving toward creating an advisory panel on Asian affairs that would explore ways to bridge the cultural and language gaps between local police and the Asian communities they serve.

“This is something people are clamoring for,” said Barbara Considine, a county human relations specialist who has helped organize the proposed committee. “We’ve needed this for a while.”

County officials, law enforcement liaisons and representatives from various sects of the local Asian community will meet Nov. 5 in Santa Ana to decide first whether to form the committee and then to discuss details of its implementation.

Discussion of an advisory panel has been aided by the U.S. Justice Department. Federal officials provided $5,000 to fund a September workshop on the topic of police relations with Asian communities. They also consulted with local officials on the experiences of other cities in trying similar projects. If formed, the police/Asian affairs panel would be the ninth established in the state since 1988.

Authorities say cultural and language differences and bad experiences with corrupt police in their native countries often stand between police and the immigrant communities. Many immigrants do not call police, cooperate with investigators or testify in court unless coaxed by officers sensitive to their customs.

Several high-profile local crimes in recent years have highlighted the obstacles that can come between investigators and Asians.

When two young diners were shot and killed in a crowded Vietnamese restaurant in 1985, most of the patrons told police they were in the bathroom at the time of the shooting and saw nothing. Police say that only through patient coaxing of several witnesses were they finally able to win convictions against five people.

Just last month in Costa Mesa, police waited a week to identify the Vietnamese couple and two children killed in a murder-suicide because relatives of the deceased would not come forward to help unravel the crime.

But local officials involved in the Asian-affairs panel say its creation is spurred not by any single incident, but rather by a gradual recognition that the tremendous influx of immigrants to the county has posed new problems for police on the street.

Said Nampet Panichpant-M, a Thai woman who manages a county refugee assistance program and is involved in discussions on the new panel: “It’s become obvious that we now have more and different types of people who may not function within the rules and regulations of this country.

“They’re outside the system and their numbers are multiplying . . . so we need a group like this to bridge the gap,” she said.

Orange County, which is home to about 130,000 Vietnamese, 80,000 Koreans and thousands of other Asian immigrants, probably has a larger Asian population of any of the eight cities where such advisory panels have already been formed, said Stephen N. Thom of the U.S. Justice Department’s community relations service in San Francisco.

The cities are Long Beach, Modesto, Oakland, Richmond, Sacramento, San Diego, San Jose and Stockton.