There comes a time when everyone needs a bit of advice and getting different ideas on how to handle certain issues could prove useful. That is why, shortly after joining the Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Police Department (CPD), Chief Roland “Ron” Camacho made it his mission to engage with the leaders of the community to assess how the agency’s community policing efforts were viewed by the public, specifically in minority communities.

Upon reviewing the 2021 demographics of the Pennsylvania borough, Chief Camacho noticed that the CPD staff did not represent the community as a whole. This caused police interactions to appear biased. For example, of the nearly 40 hired officers, four (10 percent) were Hispanic (and spoke Spanish), despite the fact that 19.8 percent of community spoke Spanish as their primary language. As a result, when a vehicular crash occurred, there was a slim chance that a Spanish-speaking officer would respond. As a result, the Spanish-speaking individuals involved in the crash felt as though the police sided with English-speaking individuals. The language barrier was one issue among several others that the police officers and Chambersburg citizens had to overcome.