DEA SHOULDN'T PAY FOR HELP TO TRANSLATE 'EBONICS'

I stand corrected on a claim I made seven years ago that Multnomah
County, Ore., was run by the dumbest bureaucrats on earth, after they
sought to hire a Klingon translator to communicate with mental
patients who prefer the language invented for Star Trek.

I stand corrected because the Drug Enforcement Administration is
looking to hire people who can speak "Ebonics" in Miami and several
other cities, and can translate it for agents who are having a hard
time understanding what suspected drug dealers are saying on the
business end of wiretaps.

That's right, the urban, street-inspired slang that a group of
numb-skulled, short-sighted California educators in 1996 insultingly
deemed "black English," or "African American Vernacular English,"
rather than just another bastardization of English, is being given
more undeserved credibility by one of the nation's largest law
enforcement organizations.

Apparently the chief agency tasked with curbing drug crime in the
United States has met its Waterloo in the form of slang-talking
suspected drug dealers in its Southeast Region, which includes Miami,
the Caribbean, New Orleans, Atlanta and Washington.

Seriously, it was supposed to be a joke back in the day, when actress
Barbara Billingsley cheerily called out in the movie Airplane, "Oh
stewardess, I speak jive!" Guess the DEA didn't get the memo.

Understanding drug-dealer-speak? Sound, logical idea for federal
agents.

Putting someone on the payroll to help you understand? A waste of
money, says Norm Gregorisch, a retired Miami-Dade Police Department
lieutenant, whose experience is that local police officers know local
slang. So DEA should seek their help. . . for free.

Local officers tend to be from the cities and counties they serve,
Gregorisch explained.

"MDPD would not hire for this. It's not necessary," he says "I was
assigned to the MDPD's Northside District for a total of seven years
as a field training sergeant. I ran one of the squads that trains
recruits after they graduate the academy. Northside is adjacent to the
City of Miami's Liberty City and included the Scott projects,
Larchmont Gardens, Brownsville, etc. It didn't take long for me to
pick up on the slang. . . ."

The DEA insists its intentions are being misconstrued.

Lawrence Payne, a spokesman for the DEA, said in a prepared statement
that Ebonics is one of "more than 100 languages, dialects,
colloquiums, and idioms. . . generally referred to as 'languages"' in
the job-posting, but that his employer "does not recognize or
accredit Ebonics as a formal language."

Whatever the DEA calls Ebonics, its offer of related translation jobs
is a problem that goes beyond smart money management or catching drug
dealers.

Kids who live in drug-riddled neighborhoods in the agency's target
areas already face an uphill battle against poverty and their
circumstances. The last thing they need is the government telling them
that committing linguistic and grammatical murder is something to
strive for, like the elusive professional sports or music contract.

These are kids who are more likely to find Big Foot under their beds
and capture indisputable photographic evidence of him than they are to
find success when they grow up speaking Ebonics.

Only one kid I can think of ever found that success. And he was a
cartoon character, whom comedian and educator Bill Cosby via Fat
Albert called not Well-spoken Funny Guy With Great Prospects for the
Future, but rather Mush Mouth.