The Dane County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin has agreed to make a series of reforms meant to ensure that residents who speak little or no English can get the services they need. The agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice resolves a civil rights inquiry that followed ProPublica reporting last year on how the sheriff’s office had mistakenly blamed an immigrant worker for his son’s 2019 death on a dairy farm, ProPublica reports. The reporting revealed that a language barrier between the worker and a sheriff’s deputy had led to the misunderstanding. ProPublica’s reporting had found that a different worker had accidentally put a machine in reverse, killing José María Rodríguez Uriarte's son, an 8-year-old named Jefferson. But deputies never interviewed the man, who like the boy’s father was a recent immigrant and didn’t speak English. A deputy on the scene who considered herself proficient in Spanish did interviews on the scene, but a grammatical mistake led to a misunderstanding of what actually happened.
Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding, such as the sheriff’s office in Dane County, cannot discriminate against people because of their country of origin or ability to speak English. A new language-access policy will set standards on when deputies can use children, bystanders and tools such as Google Translate to communicate with non-English speakers. It also creates a process to ensure that, after an emergency is over, deputies can confirm the accuracy of information that was gathered via unqualified interpreters.