Marcos Gonzales, a native Spanish-speaker living in Kingston, spoke frankly about his wife's recent death. He said she overdosed on Sunday and he was frantic as EMS and police arrived but struggled to express himself to those first responders because they did not speak Spanish.

On the worst day of his life, Gonzales wished he could have spoken to someone in his native language.

"It's not easy to have that conversation with an English-speaking person who doesn't understand me," Gonzales said. "They don't understand at that particular moment a person is really hurt or something like that. They don't understand."

Kingston Police Chief Egidio Tinti expressed during an interview in his office Wednesday morning, "it is a challenge" for his officers to communicate with the city's Spanish-speakers, but the department has a system to deal with language barriers.

Out of 71 officers in the department, there are two Spanish-speakers. Those two officers are called upon whenever another officer needs help translating.

"If [the Spanish-speaking officers] are handling a call at an accident ... and another officer gets dispatched to, say, a domestic [incident] where there may be a language barrier, the Spanish-speaking officer handling the accident will be taken off of that call," Tinti explained. "Another one will replace him, and he'll be sent over."

Since the Spanish-speaking officers cannot be available at all hours to assist on calls involving people who exclusively speak Spanish, the other officers may reach out to other agencies or use technology to communicate, Tinti said.

"There have been officers who have used, on site, Google Translate, as a way to try to communicate," Tinti said. "There are other resources. The State Police have resources. So do the district attorney's office and the sheriff's office."

The department is budgeted for one bilingual officer — selected from a group of candidates who passed the Spanish version of the civil service exam. For that position, a candidate who took the Spanish exam would be selected over an English-speaker, even if that English-speaker scored higher on the exam.

The chief cannot, however, simply load up on officers who passed the Spanish exam. To add another officer who took the Spanish exam, over a candidate who took the English version, the current bilingual officer position must be vacated.

One officer has occupied that position since the summer of 2018. The other Spanish-speaking officer, a lieutenant, started with the department in 2001 and also happened to speak Spanish.

Tinti said there is no requirement for the other 69 officers to study Spanish, but he strongly encourages them to learn the language. He even has two copies of Rosetta Stone's Spanish program for officers to use.

Gonzales suggested that perhaps police officers should be required to study the language. He said he managed to learn conversational English just by immersing himself in the community, and believes police officers could do the same with Spanish.

"Sometimes, they have a misunderstanding with us because they don't speak Spanish," Gonzales said, "so they have to have Spanish [speaking] officers."

Tinti assured that with the two Spanish-speaking officers and assistance from other agencies, Spanish-speakers in Kingston are still receiving the same level of service English-speakers receive. Of course, he would like to have enough Spanish-speaking officers to have one on each shift to give some relief to the other two.

According to U.S. Census figures, Kingston has about 3,500 Hispanics, but several immigrant advocacy groups have ball parked the city's Hispanic population at around 5,000 because of the near-daily arrivals of new families from Central America.

The chief also noted having officers who grew up in a Hispanic household — not necessarily being a fluent Spanish-speaker — would benefit the community. If the police department's staff were proportional to the number of Hispanics in the city, there would be 14 Hispanic officers.

Reaching that number would be difficult, considering the applicant pool and the low turnover among a staff with several longtime officers. Tinti said he has had discussions with other city officials about offering some kind of incentive package to officers who speak Spanish or are learning to speak it.