Funfact: Officially the US does not have an official language despite the fact English is required to be taught from K-12.
Personally I think everyone should be required speak basic English, it is costly and difficult to train officers to speak a language to cater to every minority. For example, after Vietnam, a lot of refugees migrated to a neighboring city of mine here in California. A lot of them couldn't speak English, and a lot of their kids were off causing trouble and getting arrested. Back then finding a translator was difficult because their weren't all that many available. Today that isn't a problem because their kids integrated into society and adopted American culture. Similar thing here too with the Assyrian community.
Plus you have different dialects within the language. For example the Spanish that people from Mexico speak is completely different from the Spanish spoken in Spain. It is like our English when compared to the English spoken over in the UK. Plus different words change meaning over time and for example if you asked someone older "¿Muéstrame las agujas?", that might have meant show me what time is it on your watch, to a younger person you are probably talking about drugs.
Being able to speak multiple languages is good on the international level, but not so much on the domestic level. Look at china where they have hundreds of different dialects and several other languages other than mandarin that each one requires a translator.
Another problem too is that these people who come over here have a fear of police. A lot of them came from countries where police were corrupt or were known as thugs, so that fear carried over with them. A lot of them don't want to talk to American policemen to begin with because of that. The young Vietnamese actually took advantage of that too because a lot of people in that community didn't trust banks, so most of their money was kept under a mattress. Because of its, you had kids who stole from their parents and members of their community, and the older people were afraid to talk to the police. I can't vouch for other states, but hear in California you can't spank your kid really hard to the point where it causes physical harm, you could still spank, just not brutally injure them. So the Vietnamese kids going to school were told this, then they came home and told their parents and lied to them by saying they couldn't spank them period. Eventually it got to the point were the older folk reached out to the schools asking why they couldn't spank their kids. So the Schools and the PD saw the opportunity to build relations with the older members of the community by hiring a translator and by having them attend an assembly where they told the parents that they could spank their kids and discipline them, just don't hurt them.
