Welcome to the Multi-Cultural Community Relations Office

We are pleased to welcome you Police Chief Meijboom from Rotterdam to the finest City of San Diego and we are happy that you have selected our Multi-cultural community relations office as your new sister Police Community Relations Office storefront. We believe that you will find that this storefront is an exciting community relations office that prides itself on reducing crime, providing public safety, and improving the quality of life in our city.

My name is Buu-Van Rasih,

Multi-cultural community relations office co-founder and I am from Laos, in a South-East Asian country called Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam). I have been in San Diego for over 32 years. I am a language and culture expert and I am an approved court interpreter for the San Diego Superior Court and I speak 5 languages.

As a former city commissioner for the San Diego Human Relations Commission, former Chairman of City of San Diego Indochinese Council, former Chairman and CEO of International Mutual Assistance Association, former Associate Director of Catholic Charities, founding member of Indochinese Chamber of Commerce and Co-founder of the Multi-cultural Community Relations Office storefront,

I fought for full city money to implement real community policing in Mid-City and East San Diego to reduce crime and provide public safety against crime, youth and domestic violence and drug and improve quality of life in our city.

The Multi-Cultural and Multi-Lingual Community Relations Office Storefront represents our pride, our hope and our dream by “Working together for a better and safer community”. To provide community policing services in partnership with the San Diego Police Department, the City of San Diego and the International community of 44 different languages comprised of 40,000 Vietnamese, 20,000 East Africans (12,000 of those are Somalis-2^nd largest Somalis in the country after Minnesota) 18,000 Laotians and Hmongs, and 7,000 Cambodians, and other Middle East and Eastern European refugees arrived in the United States to free a brutal civil war and for their community, it boiled down to a cultural issue, that of people fleeing their country because of persecution, much of it involve in police state. The police were simply not trusted and moving to a new land was not going to change that perception-at least not right away.

Through our work with the San Diego City Council (and with the police department to recruit Indochinese, Somalis and International officers) we have formed a partnership with the International community to support law enforcement (slowly but surely, that cultural barrier came down). We are working together to solve problems, improve public safety, and enhance quality of life in their community.

The MCCRO Advisory Board members and I look forward to the continuing development and advancement of the Multi-Cultural Community Relations Office Storefront. Together We Can Make Difference but development and advancement can happen only with effective leaders who are honest, upright and incorruptible, ethical, accountable, sincere and selfless.

As Co-founder of the MCCRO storefront, I wish to express my thanks and appreciation to the staff and volunteer Advisory Board Members for their work and dedication in maintaining our community as a safe environment to live, work, and play.