Hermiston leader hopes shooting will be ‘wake-up call’ in Pasco Hispanic relations

Eddie De La Cruz sees many of the same issues facing Pasco that Hermiston, Ore., dealt with 3 1/2 years ago, before the creation of a Hispanic advisory committee there.

The seven-member board — including two Hermiston city council members — has helped change the culture in the city of 17,000, said De La Cruz, the board’s chairman.

He has made several trips to Pasco since Tuesday’s shooting of a Hispanic man armed with rocks by three police officers.

“The city of Pasco would benefit from this,” said De La Cruz, who plans to speak at a rally Saturday at Volunteer Park. “What I see here is they have a big, big communication problem. You have to respond, not react — that’s what happened in Ferguson (Mo.), and they haven’t accomplished a thing.”

The Hermiston committee earned a cultural diversity award in 2013 from the National League of Cities. City officials said at the time that the committee, which conducts meetings in Spanish with English translation, creates better access to government for Eastern Oregon’s largest city for Hispanic residents.

De La Cruz counts among its accomplishments securing two soccer fields for a Latino league, getting 35 new street lights installed in a high-crime neighborhood, and encouraging the council to send messages to President Barack Obama and Congressional representatives supporting immigration reform.

The committee also successfully persuaded Hermiston to move its annual Cinco de Mayo celebration from a city park to Main Street downtown, dramatically increasing attendance, De La Cruz said.

“There are a lot of things we have accomplished in a small, three year period,” he said.

Pasco has the opportunity to use the shooting death of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, 35, as a “wake-up call,” De La Cruz said. The biggest problem he sees in the community is the divide between city and Hispanic leaders.

“It’s a tragic problem that happened,” he said. “It’s very sad. It’s sad it had to get to that level.”

The city is out of touch with the Hispanic community, but Pasco’s Hispanics also need to become more involved with the city, De La Cruz said.

De La Cruz met briefly with Pasco City Manager Dave Zabell this week. Zabell said he wants to discuss the advisory council idea more.

“It is definitely something I would want to look into and advise the city council on,” Zabell said.

Ester Serrano, 46, moved to Pasco from Los Angeles. Sitting in Vinny’s Cafe & Bakery just a few yards from where Zambrano-Montes was gunned down, she said she likes that it is a quieter community, but the shooting changed everything.

“The day before, I came over here and it seemed normal,” she said. “Now it is blurry. When I see police I am very worried.”

Serrano would like to see police go through training to better deal with mentally ill people, she said.

There has been a divide between the Hispanic community and the police force in Pasco for many years, said Felix Vargas, a former Army Ranger and Green Beret who worked as a peacekeeper in war-torn areas like Bosnia and El Salvador. Few officers speak Spanish and communication between police and those they are supposed to protect is broken.

Vargas and the Consejo Latino, a group he chairs of primarily Hispanic business leaders, were assured by Zabell and Police Chief Bob Metzger just weeks before the shooting that officers were trained to de-escalate crisis situations, he said.

Vargas told the Herald it’s clear by Tuesday’s “disturbing” shooting that police need better training and more Spanish-speaking officers on the force.

“The police force remains primarily Anglo and non-Spanish speaking,” Vargas said. “At the meeting we asked (Metzger) to recruit more Spanish-speaking officers. We wanted to make sure there was more communication between police and the community to avoid situations like what happened.”

The divide between communities has grown smaller in the last couple of years, said Michael Goins, executive director of the Downtown Pasco Development Authority since 2013. His organization is trying to drum up interest in the downtown area, which is not far from where Zambrano-Montes was shot.

“I think we’ve made a lot of progress in aspects of community and overall goals,” Goins said. “I have seen an improvement.”

This story was originally published February 13, 2015 at 8:45 PM with the headline "Hermiston leader hopes shooting will be ‘wake-up call’ in Pasco Hispanic relations."