Breaking Rank (23 page)

Employment discrimination against female officers in the fifties and sixties was sweeping, systemic, and deliberate. The American woman in policing was a subspecies within the classification structure of the civil service “merit” system. Since they were denied patrol experience, a prerequisite for promotion to supervisor, there were no women sergeants, lieutenants, captains, or chiefs. No women policymakers. The relegation of women to entry-level, women's bureau-type jobs denied them the take-home pay, and hefty pensions, of their male counterparts. And ensured that they would wield negligible political power.

It was a pernicious form of discrimination, injected with a large dose of misogyny, that led to the labeling of the lone female officer in my academy class as a “split-tail.” I didn't know what the term meant, and didn't ask, but I speculated it had something to do with a woman's vagina. One sergeant couldn't even bring himself to call Connie Borchers a gal or a girl. His every reference to her was as “the split-tail” in the Forty-ninth Academy class.

But Borchers was a woman of exceptional character, competence, and courage. She fought the system, and individual prejudice, even as she fought back tears. Borchers went on to amass a long list of “firsts” within the SDPD, including the first woman on patrol and the first to get promoted.

Connie Borchers wasn't the only target of the rampant sexism and sexual harassment of the day. The tiny cohort of outstanding women detectives had been hit on, leered at, and generally used and abused by men at various rungs of the hierarchical ladder. One friend tells me she spent as much time and energy fending off panting and pawing peers and superiors as she did working her cases. One of her colleagues had actually been raped by a high-ranking official. Others tell of strenuous physical fights to prevent the crime.

It wasn't just horny or vicious policemen of the late sixties and early seventies who objected to women on patrol. Most SDPD male officers (I'd put
the figure at somewhere between 99.2 and 99.8 percent) were afraid
for
and afraid
of
women in uniform. Afraid they'd get hurt or killed wrestling a drunk. Afraid they'd get a male cop hurt or killed.

When Hoobler made his announcement, a palpable horror shot through the organization. One patrolman took to his soapbox in the coffee shop and delivered a soliloquy, paraphrased here.

Total political bullshit! What kind of a man puts the weaker sex at risk? Let's face it, girls are fragile. They're emotional, excitable, undisciplined, unstable. They can't hold their own with big, aggressive men—the pukes and assholes we fight every day. They can't run as fast or as far as we can. They can't wrench a body out of a burning car. They can't disarm a deranged suspect. They can't pull the trigger and take a life. They can't handle the hours, the cold, the heat. And what are they going to wear? It's certainly not going to be pants, I hope! Or a dress or a skirt? Come on. If they do put them in uniforms they won't fit. And, where are they going to change? They can't use the men's locker room, and that's all we got. And what about their hair? They'd have to cut it all off, basically. None of that eye stuff or lipstick or earrings either. The grooming standards don't make exceptions for girls. They won't be able to come to work once a month, most of them, and if they do show up just before “that” time of the month they'll be impossible to be around. I'm married, I know what I'm talking about. And what if they get knocked up? They won't be able to work at all. The manpower shortage will just get worse and worse, gals taking up slots that should be reserved for men. Furthermore, they're catty. Their gossip will get us in trouble, mark my words—if not with our bosses then with our wives or girlfriends, or both. How many of us can honestly say we can ride around with a chick all night, night after night, and not have “it” happen sooner or later? Even if it doesn't happen the
sexual tension
will distract one or both of us—that's exactly when we'll get our lights punched out. And, what do I do with my partner when the squad goes drinking after work? Even if I'm innocent my old lady's going to think
something's
going on. I can't tell her they're
all
lesbianese, can I?

The moron didn't mention one of the biggest reasons men bitched about women in uniform—that they would out-study and out-perform them in contests for promotions, and for plum assignments too. The women detectives of SDPD were smart, hardworking, self-confident. They'd kill the men on those civil service tests.

Women have now been on the force for more than thirty years. How have they fared? Beautifully. The Police Foundation and the Urban Institute conducted the first major studies of women on patrol back in the mid-1970s. The Foundation's Catherine Milton examined the performance of eighty-six women against that of eighty-six men hired at the same time by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. Milton and her researchers studied data from supervisory ratings, the observations of trained observers (who rode around with the cops), citizen opinion surveys, and arrest statistics. Major findings:

       
•
  
Women police officers “encountered the same number of dangerous, angry, upset, drunk, or violent citizens.”

       
•
  
Women as a group were more effective than their male peers in avoiding violence and in defusing potentially violent situations.

       
•
  
Women made fewer arrests and wrote fewer traffic citations, which did not affect their performance ratings.

       
•
  
Women were less likely than men to engage in “serious unbecoming conduct.”

       
•
  
Women were more likely to be assigned to light duty as a result of injuries, but these injuries did not cause them to be absent from work more often than men.

       
•
  
Women scored the same level of “citizen satisfaction” as their male counterparts.

The Police Foundation did a follow-up study in the early eighties, and another in 1990. The results were essentially unchanged. More recent and extensive studies, including an exhaustive analysis by the National Center for Women and Policing, cast female officers in an even more positive light. They show that women cops build better relations with the community, work more collaboratively with all public safety “stakeholders,” and respond more effectively to crimes against women, particularly domestic violence.

Despite overwhelming evidence that women do at least as well as men on most tasks, and better than men on some of the most critical of those tasks, the number of women in policing seems to have plateaued at around
14 percent. The legal barriers are gone (including the most insidious: height and weight minimums, which were cast aside by the courts in favor of job-related physical fitness testing). Why aren't there more women police officers?

The answer comes in two parts: (a) sufficient numbers of women simply aren't attracted to the job for a variety of reasons, which include (b) the Neanderthal attitudes of knuckle-dragging male cops and officials who persist in keeping a “NO
ALOWeD” sign up over the entrance to their boys' clubs.

One of the first women on the job in San Diego, a ten-year veteran but a rookie in patrol, once cleared from a call to find that someone had let the air out of her tires (the male cop who later confessed contended that women needed to be tested to see if they could change a tire—but all four tires?). Women officers have been the butt of endless jokes, sexual innuendos, and other stupid and crude remarks. Some women are ignored, their calls for backup met with silence. As recently as the eighties, LAPD had within its ranks an underground organization known as “Men Against Women.” Katherine Spillar and Penny Harrington wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
(May 16, 1997) that the “male-only rogue group's purpose is to wage an orchestrated campaign of ritual harassment, intimidation and criminal activity against women officers with the ultimate objective of driving them from the force.” They believe that “MAW” continues to be active, in spirit if not in name.

I figured that by the nineties, “split tails” would have been retired from the vocabulary of even the most backward male cops. Not so. Read Paula L. Woods's award-winning novel,
Inner City Blues
(1999). The term, mined from her research within LAPD, surfaces often enough during the era of the 1992 riots.

The author Joseph Wambaugh, who left LAPD at a time when women were just starting to gain a foothold, believes that at least half a police department's sworn personnel should be women. So do I.