Every city regardless of the size has a unique immigrant population
. A percentage of the legal immigrants in a given city may not speak the language of the country they are resident in well or at all.
This condition presents a special problem for policing and police officers. Police persons must be able to understand what a person they may have stopped for a routine traffic violation is saying. The need is much greater when the crime is more serious and a police person needs immediate information from on the scene witnesses who do not speak a language the police person understands well.
A police person must be totally aware of the legal ramifications of their actions while they are fighting crime. False arrest accusations from money hungry defence lawyers are a constant threat to policing that can result in judgments that just might break the bank in a small town jurisdiction despite any insurance a small town has against such litigation.
Consider the emotional toll on a police person who cannot save an injured person or prevent a mentally disturbed person from committing suicide because the police officer cannot understand the persons language. The mental toll on the police person and the potential cost for litigation against a city can be devastating.
Very large cities like London have sufficient numbers of people to allow the police department to hire multilingual police officers if and only if such persons are willing to become policemen. Smaller towns do not have this luxury.
Consider a real world example of the problems that translation needs can cause from Alabama in the USA. Alabama passed a law that was intended to prevent illegal immigration and apprehend illegal immigrants. In two instances executives from a large foreign automobile manufacturer that employs thousands of Alabama residents were arrested and detained for more than a day simply because the person arrested and the entire police department of the small town that arrested them could not understand the executive's language.
While no lawsuits were filed the state was embarrassed worldwide for the simple reason that the police in the state did not have a sufficient method of translating a language they did not know into one they did.
For this reason language solutions for policing need to be considered. This is the way then can understand better. These range from multilingual police officers, interpreters on call and translation of documents, audio transcripts.