Denver Post

Can you spell 'insult'? Cop transcripts do
By Jim Spencer
Denver Post Columnist

Sunday, October 19, 2003 - Lemme aks you sumpin'.

D'ya think the Denver Police Department policy of transcribing poh-lice interviews in black dialect is racially insensitive? Or am I jus' bein' hyxsterical?

Anyone who reads transcripts of interviews in the police killing of a 15-year-old mentally retarded black child gets a chance to make up his or her mind.

Anybody can read those transcripts and watch the videotapes on which they're based now that District Attorney Bill Ritter has decided not to charge Officer James Turney in the shooting of Paul Childs.

What readers find may shock and/or confuse.

Police say they try to transcribe the words in interviews exactly as they are pronounced by the person being questioned. The cops say they do it across the board.

Every mispronunciation gets written phonetically, regardless of the race of the speaker, Denver's public safety manager insisted.

"I know the implication is that someone is trying to put a racial spin on something," explained Al LaCabe, who is African-American. "But the transcriptionists are trying to be as accurate as possible."

So if someone says "aks" instead of "ask," that becomes public record for the Denver police. Likewise, something becomes "sumpin'." Police becomes "poh-lice." Bathroom becomes "baf'room." And certain sentences in the investigation of one of Denver's most controversial, racially charged police shootings read like "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

I think the transcriptions make the speakers sound stupid. The translations seemed tortured. Another wedge gets driven into an already divided community.

"It's not only insensitive, it's insulting," said the Rev. Gill Ford, the NAACP's regional director and a member of the state's Peace Officer Standards and Training Board.

It tags blacks as dumb, Ford explained. That dumbness presumes an inability to communicate well. That lack of good communication lets folks blow off your complaints, "because you don't even understand English."

"That," Ford concluded, "is a stereotype and a half."

Barbara Wilcots, an African-American who teaches English at the University of Denver, agreed. None of us use standard English all the time, she said.

You say tomato; I say toe-mot-toe.

"It becomes racist if you accept deviations from majority people, but not minorities," Wilcots continued.

Ford says that's how it looks.

"I don't see this as mending fences," he said. "All it does is add insult to injury.

"I wonder how they translate the interviews with first-generation Mexican-Americans or other Hispanics. Where's the dialect for first-generation Africans?"

Forget that. How do you spell "police"?

For black dialect, the Denver cops go with "poh-lice."

Phonetically, that would seem to concern not-so-well-off lice. Why not Edgar Allen "poe-lease"?

LaCabe didn't know. He only knew that the cops don't act with racial prejudice in attempting literal translations.

You can argue that it would "be better if it had not been done this way," he said.

But "in reading transcripts from the Denver Police Department I have seen those kinds of words used by people of all races."

"If a white person says a word incorrectly, such that it can be spelled differently, it will be. We accurately reproduce exactly what was said."

God help the evidence file and the prosecution if self-described redneck comedian Jeff Foxworthy or a real-life version of "Sopranos" Mafioso Paulie Walnuts ever witnesses or commits a crime in Denver.

Just remember, LaCabe maintained, "nobody is trying to belittle anyone."

Even if they are attributing to them words that don't appear in any dictionary.

Maybe you can figure out the derivation of the word "trippeded" that Childs' 16-year-old sister, Ashley, said as she tried to talk after watching her brother get shot several times at close range by a cop.

But try looking up the word "shew," which appears twice in the transcript of the interview with Childs' cousin, Natondria Brown.

"If you listen to the tape," LaCabe said, "what you hear is what gets printed. If that's what was said, that's what was said."

Or not.

Listening to Paul Childs' mother talk on videotape Friday, I never heard her use the word "hyxsterical." Helen Childs also got saddled with several questionable "akseds."

"Do they have in their mind how they think poor and minority people talk?" Wilcots wondered.

Who knows? I'm just waiting for the Denver cops to transcribe the interview of a guy with a lisp.