The Dallas Police Department still hasn't given a very satisfying explanation for why it took officers so long to respond to an armed robbery and shooting at a West Dallas grocery on Sunday. Partly it was the 911 caller's heavy accent, partly that officers were working what they thought was a separate shooting call down the street. Either way, you come up with a ridiculous 75-minute response to an armed robbery.
The folks at the Arlington-based Lone Star Tea Party have a theory: Dallas is so focused on coddling illegal immigrants that it neglects to provide basic services to English speakers like Joe Cho, the Korean-born manager of the West Dallas grocery.
"We wonder if this would have been a mexican 911 caller instead of a Korean Caller (Joe Cho) the DPD would have said there was an accent problem?" a blogger writes on the group's website. "What makes it moronic is this is coming from a sanctuary city that encourages immigrants not to learn English and assimilate. But we are sure there was a mexican speaking 911 dispatcher on staff, everyone else is hung out to dry. Bottom line is if you shoot someone or get shot, stay calm talk clearly or help may not arrive anytime soon."
To be fair to DPD, Cho's 911 call was really hard to understand. Some of that was the accent, some the fact that Cho spoke with the panicked air of a man who'd just shot an assault rifle-wielding robber. But the call taker got enough of the conversation to glean that there had been an armed robbery. The communications breakdown came in the process of conveying the urgency of the situation to officers in the field. But hey, let's not let that stop us from hopping on our anti-immigrant hobby horse.
