Tulsa - Tulsa police are working to solve a language barrier by teaching more officers to speak Spanish. But, it's a short-term solution to a fast-growing problem.

Tulsa has twenty-one bilingual police officers who speak both English and Spanish. Officer Jesse Guardiola is one of them.

"They're spread throughout the city in different units, different divisions," says Guardiola. "But as we're seeing more and more calls for service with the Spanish-speaking community, you're not going to have the availability because they're jobs in other capacities."

In 2000, Tulsa had 40-thousand people who spoke Spanish. In the new census coming up next year, that number is expected to be double that. Guardiola says the current short-term solution is to teach more officers to speak Spanish.

In a house fire several weeks ago, dispatchers had a hard time understanding what Ricardo Rivera's wife was trying to tell them. She doesn't speak English and finally had to call her husband at work.

"I say 'okay, get out of the house and I'm going to call 9-1-1 again'. And I call it and told them," Ricardo says.

She and the children got out of the home safely. Ricardo says in times of high stress, people will revert to their native language.

Guardiola says the bilingual officers are paid an additional 12-hundred dollars per year and are on-call if they are needed.

A long-term solution could be to go to major colleges where more than half of the student body speaks Spanish and recruit officers there. But, it's a long-term solution because there is no new police academy for the year 2010.

The City of Tulsa has a contract with a language line, so if someone calls in to pay a utility bill and the person only speaks Spanish, the clerk can make one call and help that person. The Mayor's action line at City Hall also has a Spanish-speaking operator.

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