Police Immersion

Citibank and Dartmouth were given commemorative plaques by the New York City Transit Authority at a luncheon at Citibank headquarters in Manhattan in April. The event was a promotional celebration of the successful collaboration hi the three that led to the establishment of Dartmouth's Spanish course for transit police.

In the summer of 1979, a custom-designed course of "total immersion" language training (a la Rassias) was given : 25 officers who volunteered two weeks of

their vacation time to come to Hanover as guinea-pigs for the program, which was funded largely by Citibank. Part of a nationwide call for upgrading higher education for police officers, the program was the brainchild of New Yorker Dean Essermar '79, now special projects director at the transit authority.

The classes used exercises based on subway situations such as requests for directions, turnstile-leaping, and molestation, and the first graduates were unanimous!;, surprised at how much they learned. The widely acclaimed program was repeated in 1980, when a second group of 25 transit officers came up from New York City, where the nation's rapidly growing Hispanic minority now constitutes over 2 quarter of the total population.

Money was tight in 1981, however, anc the program was shelved last summer for lack of funding. Esserman and James Meehan, chief of the transit police, are currently working to secure backing for a 1982 session that would bring another 25 officers to Dartmouth-, where a side benefit c: their language training has been the breaking down of a number of stereotypes about both cops and students.