ALBANY - The city police department is investigating an incident in which an officer allegedly shouted at a domestic violence victim in frustration over a language barrier.

Acting Chief Bob Sears confirmed that the department was looking in to what happened where the police officer allegedly said, "If you're going to live in this country, you need to learn to speak English."

“It was a very chaotic scene, the fact that the language barrier existed made it that much more difficult,” Sears said. “Now we’re just trying to find out what comments were made and in front of who and trying to figure out how to move forward.”

Police were called to a location near Grand and Elm streets for a reported domestic violence incident. The victims, an elderly man and a young woman, were Burmese immigrants who did not speak English well enough to communicate clearly with the officers, according to a letter to Mayor Kathy Sheehan obtained by the Times Union.

The letter was written by a neighbor, who asked the Times Union not to identify him out of fear of retaliation. His letter describes a chaotic scene with bloody victims and frustrated police officers trying to establish the simple fact of what floor the victims lived on. At one point the officers were trying to use Google Translate to communicate with the pair.

One of the officers allegedly shouted,“If you’re going to live in this country, you need to learn to speak English,” the letter stated and identified him as Officer Craig Apple Jr.

Sears confirmed that Apple was one of the officers who responded to the scene but said he could not confirm that he was the officer who made the comment.

“We’re still trying to figure out what everyone’s role was,” he said. “From my understanding, the officer did not mean for anyone to hear it, he was frustrated with the situation … but unfortunately people overheard it.”

In the letter, the neighbor complained about the incident, questioning the officer’s conduct and the city’s policies for training officers to deal with language barriers.

Sheehan wrote back, describing the department’s policies, which include a translator hotline and the city’s relationship with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. The committee’s president, Jill Peckenpaugh, leads a training session at the Albany Police Academy for new recruits.

“The city of Albany is working to ensure we are minimizing the effect of language barriers, especially when it comes to public’s safety,” Sheehan wrote.

The neighbor also met with the acting police chief last week to discuss the incident. The suspect in the domestic violence case has not been arrested.

Sears said the department needed to do better job of ensuring officers had the tools they need to do their job. The department has a contract with a translation company called LanguageLine Solutions but that night, a translator for the language they needed wasn’t available.

“This is something we take very seriously, this isn’t something we’re going to blow off,” he said. “Comments are comments but still we want to make sure everyone feels safe in this city and we don’t want to degrade any relationships we already have with some of these folks.”