Hiding in Plain Sight: A different form of gender harassment

In Investigating Sexual Harassment in Law Enforcement written by Penny Harrington and Kim Lonsway, there's a discussion of sexist attitudes that unfortunately still exist in many police agencies.

Here's a list from the book of some of the more common statements made by male officers who are either reluctant to work with women in law enforcement or hostile to it. They are what are known as harassment comments that are not specifically forms of sexual harassment. Several of these comments are illegal in the workplace, according to state law if they contribute to a hostile work environment or are used to prevent female law enforcement officers from having equal access to opportunities in the agencies. Believing in stereotypes itself is not illegal, according to the book, but behaviors that manifest them are.



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"I don't want to work with a woman as a partner."

"Women can't work in SWAT(Special Weapons and Tactics)."

"I don't want women backing me up in a dangerous situation."

"I won't work for a female supervisor."

"She won't be able to hold her own in a fight."

"I won't work with her because she does not have good survival skills."

"Women should be protected; that's why they shouldn't be police officers."

"I would rather work with lesbians; at least they can fight."





The key words in these statements are apparently "women" and "shouldn't", "can't" and "don't". All negatives to match the negative views about women in law enforcement.


Given how insulated most law enforcement agencies, it's difficult or impossible for those outside of it to know when comments like these ones are being made in most cases. One exception is when the officers make these types of comments in public venues. And several years ago, one male Riverside Police Department sergeant did just that at of all places a recruitment fair at Fairmount Park.

He was giving a presentation on the department's SWAT/Metro team and a female onlooker asked him if there were any female members of the SWAT Team. The sergeant said, no there were not because they weren't physically strong enough to be on the SWAT Team. Then he mentioned that "animal" of a female deputy who served in the SWAT Team of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Interestingly, that was a question asked at Yahoo by an individual, whether women could serve on SWAT Teams. Still, the SWAT Team has been described as the last bastion for male officers but interestingly enough, there are other answers out there being given.

Law and Order Magazine stated that yes, there were women on SWAT Teams. Here are several of them.


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A police officer at the age of 27, Janice Easterling of the Dallas Police Department, now a lieutenant, joined the SWAT team in 1988. "There weren't many women," she stated. "I was motivated by the challenge." Attending college on a volleyball scholarship, Easterling liked the idea of working out and was not intimidated by the physical challenges.

"Most of the men had a positive attitude, but there were a few on the tactical side who didn't want me there," Easterling said. Initially, some subtle hints suggested she was not entirely welcome. During MP5 training the men just stood and watched. Curiosity was a factor, but Easterling, whose sister is on a Georgia SWAT team, just showed them she could do the job. Eventually promoted, she left after two years, returning in 1994 as a sergeant when there was an opening. "They never had a female sergeant before or since," she said.

Lieutenant Denice Faxton of the Tippecanoe Sheriffs Department in north central Indiana made the SWAT team in 1991. The only woman, she was treated equally and never contended with a negative attitude from her male coworkers. Faxton also went through a pregnancy while on the team. Advancing through the patrol ranks, she was, until two weeks ago, the only female in the entire department, which covers 500 square miles.

"I had excellent family support. My parents and husband, an expolice officer, helped out, especially when the calls came at one or two in the morning," says Faxton. One of the biggest challenges for her was finding a place in the middle of nowhere to change clothes. The team is parttime and gear must always be in the car.

Sergeant Cynthia Howard of the Annapolis, MD, Police Department, spent two years weight lifting, running and improving her shooting as a patrol officer before trying out for the SWAT team in 1991. "It started out almost as a joke. I found out there had never been a woman on the team and decided I could do it," says the 5'4", 125pound African American. Howard has nothing but praise for the men, particularly then Sergeant Cross, who mentored her, helping improve her skills. She is now one of two sergeants on the 15 officer team. The other is male.



It's common to see how sexist comments may also be homophobic comments in law enforcement agencies especially comments that demean lesbians or stereotype them as female men like the statement above. They are meant to say as much about a woman's gender as her sexual orientation by placing women into "butch" and "feminine" categories. Often, male officers call female officers "butch" or "lesbians" because they figure that women, according to their definition which might be based on assigned gender roles for women, couldn't be in law enforcement unless they were trying to be men. Or they sexually propositioned them and were rejected and it's one reason they use to save face to mask their own gender insecurities.

The law suit filed by former Sgt. Christine Keers listed examples of comments where officers made references to her and other female officers as being lesbians especially if they were assigned to work together. If Keers rejected any sexual overtures by male police officers, she was on the receiving end of comments that she was a lesbian.

The comments about female officers threatening the safety of their male partners or other male officers appears to be one that is used as a reason to exclude them from the profession. The closest experience I ever had with this particular line of reasoning was in 2005 when an unknown individual stated in a comment left on the blog that I was pushing Chief Russ Leach to go out and kidnap women to work as female officers and putting them and the other officers in terrible danger. That was before this anonymous individual stated that the department was assigning women to drive around answering "safe calls" while the men were out there chasing gang members and arresting or smacking down parolees. If women could do this, then they could hang with the men.

Harrington and Lonsway list other excuses used by male officers to harass female officers.


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"She is too aggressive."

"She thinks she knows everything."

She likes to get all the attention. She's a showoff."




It's not too difficult to figure out why statements like these by male police officers throw up red flags just by reading them. Many women have been hearing these excuses since they first started school and hoped that as childhood passed, statements like these would as well. It's interesting how attitudes that are seen in high school are also seen in the work place of law enforcement agencies. It's almost like you expect the male officers who harass women to say she's got cooties and go running around the room.

The first comment seems to imply that she's too masculine, meaning that she exhibits a quality most men seem to view as being particular to their gender and that's aggressiveness. Or that the male officer comes from a familial background which enforced rigid gender stereotypes and thus has difficulty viewing female police officers as equals to their male counterparts. The flip side is that male officers complain when a female officer is not aggressive enough, meaning that she's too slow or doesn't have guts. In fact, some experts in policing and gender consider the words, "she is too slow" to be code for the words, she doesn't fit in the police culture. Often it's how these evaluations of female officers are handled by supervisors especially if the same male officer(s) keep churning them out.

The second, sounds like something a little boy of about elementary school age would pout and say after a woman volunteered information that they didn't know or did a task better than the men did. These male officers offset the implosion going inside their thought processes and save face, by using the tried and true playground insult, being this person is a know-it-all.

The third, appears to be similar to the second statement in that a male officer is feeling insecure because a female officer knew or did something better than he could. Rather than admit that his assessment of women as a gender being unsuited for law enforcement, it's far easier to use yet another playground insult, she's a show-off.


And the number one excuse used in Harrington and Lonsway's book, is that there's a personality clash. Sometimes there are personality clashes in the social arena or the work place, but if individuals in supervisory positions start seeing one particular male officer having a "personality clash" with different female officers, it's time to call it something else. Of course, if he has a "personality clash" with one female officer who files a complaint, then that should be taken seriously by whoever is assigned to investigate the harassment complaint. That's of course more useful in cases where simply filing a complaint of sexual discrimination and/or harassed doesn't get a female officer bounced out of or run out of the involved agency.



The stories by female law enforcement officers of their experiences with sexual discrimination, harassment and retaliation in the work place can be found everywhere.


Hal Brown, a licensed social worker wrote a paper titled The Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs of the "Lady Cop": Surviving in, and Changing, The Macho Copshop, and How to Cope with Your Police Stress but what was interesting was the responses that Brown's paper received from female law enforcement officers here.

Here's one example on his site.


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"You wanted to know what it's like to be a female officer. I wish I knew where to begin. I've been a cop for 8 years. I'm accepted as "one of the guys", this meaning they can be crude and say what they want in front of me. But when it comes down to being invited out for a beer, or to watch a game at another cop's house, or being called on the radio with a question, I'm not one of the guys. I'm invisible. I've earned their respect over the years, to a certain degree. Yet I get the feeling a rookie is viewed s more competent than myself. Sure, the guys are protective...I really don't mind. In fact I find it comforting to know that I'll always have backup.

But the world of policing is very different for a woman than a man. Women don't get the respect (fear) on the street that men do. Our strength is our ability to communicate and our ability to read a situation, thus avoiding use of force. There are those officers, most in supervisory positions now, that don't think a woman should be an officer. I've been harassed and nit-picked. I have even been criticized in an evaluation for not "looking good" after a midnight shift.

Sure, a few officers have crossed the line with sexual comments directed at me, but female cops can't say anything. If we do, forget the job. I I'll be made so miserable I'd have to leave. There's so much involved."





Brown, who once was a reserve officer gave female officers some advice. Interestingly enough, Brown uses the high school analogy in his analysis of the police culture's attitudes towards female officers and other women as well.


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Going along to get along

All too frequently, women who become police officers find that to get along they have be "one of the guys", and to talk and behave in ways at best they find a strain and at worst, repulsive. In some departments there is what has been called a locker room mentality among the male officers. By this is meant a boys junior high school gym locker room. Can you imagine as a junior high school girl, feeling comfortable in the boys locker room? I don't mean to indict all police department, of course. Many chiefs across the country hire personnel who are mature and have successfully grown out of their adolescent preoccupation with sex and their tendency to treat women as objects.

Can you be too smart?

Female officers also may find that they have more education, or unlike many of their male colleagues actually paid attention, studied and did their own homework while in school. The may not be "street smart" as rookies the way male officers mean the term,; but they are often more wise to the ways of the world. The woman who dares to come across as too smart, however, is likely to be resented. So if you have your eye on promotions, you have to be very careful how you go about proving yourself. Otherwise, even when to come out number one on the sergeant exam and get those stripes, you will be resented by your subordinates.


According to her law suit, Keers discovered that when she was promoted several times albeit with great difficulty under two separate police chiefs in the department. Both Linford "Sonny" Richardson and Ken Fortier told her to be patient, as they promoted male officers with less qualifications, times and greater disciplinary records ahead of her, as if it were owed them not for what they had done on the job but their gender.

Other officers joked when Keers was promoted that she was doing the boss, giving him oral sex to get her promotions. Even when Keers tried to share knowledge about how the military tied certain knots with rope, officers said she was doing the entire U.S. Navy.


Sexist images in policing are here and here. Depictions like this are stereotypical of women in policing that were published as calendars in the 1970s and 1980s. They help feed these behaviors in the workplace even as they are forms of their expression.


The International Association of Women Police offers resources at its Web site including how to file a sexual discrimination and/or harassment complaint and how to find legal assistance.

Here's an interesting blog, P.C. Bloggs, by a female police officer from Great Britain who recently took a look at the past and how much harder she had to work each day to prove herself to the male officers in her agency.


But first here's the introduction to her blog.


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The police: upholding the law, protecting the weak and innocent, bringing the guilty to justice... or just a chaotic bunch of nincompoops? This blog makes no attempt to decide, but read on and maybe you can. The material in this blog in no way reflects official policy or opinion of any police force, it does however represent the official opinion of one very hacked off policewoman. Yes, I did say WOMAN.


Here's her republishing of an older blog entry.


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"21st Century Newsflash - Women achieve EQUALITY:

As I seem to be the only female police blogger out here at the moment (please let me know if I am wrong)*, I thought I should really talk about life as a WOMAN POLICE OFFICER.



To begin, I did some RESEARCH. You can see some of it here, here, here and here (forces chosen from a spread of the country and not very enlightening, but that is all they offer).

I am one of two female officers on my shift of ten (when full strength). It's great being a woman in the police nowadays. In case you were unaware, 21st century women are EQUAL to men. It's taken us a few millennia to catch up, but at last we've done it and the view from up top is pretty fab. I am now permitted to be crewed with another female, which makes for lots of girly chatting. I am also permitted to be single-crewed, which gives me lots of chances to fight men and show how EQUAL I am. For the first time, not all female police officers are lesbians, so that makes for a much happier atmosphere of flirting and inter-colleague affairs, rather than all the nasty insults about "dykes", which are now just reserved for those women officers with short hair.









Who polices the police?

That's a question asked by Eric Hartley of the Capitol Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. His answer for that city is, no one. And like in most cities and counties, this question is sparked by a series of incidents, which most often, are fatal encounters that individuals have with police officers.

Often with the same police officers who were called to help them particularly in incidents involving the mentally ill.

Hartley starts his column on that note.



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Whenever the police do something wrong or controversial, we're told, in essence: "Trust us."

We heard it when county police officers shot and killed an unarmed naked man in 2005 and a scissor-wielding teenager last year. And we're hearing it again in the wake of the Annapolis police raid last month on the wrong apartment.

As always, police promised a thorough investigation, punishment of any wrongdoing and changes in policies so mistakes aren't repeated.

But "trust us" just isn't good enough. It's time for Annapolis and the county to join a growing number of communities across the nation with some form of civilian oversight of police.




And so it begins.

The discussion taking place in yet another city about creating and implementing a form of civilian review over its police agency. There were dozens and soon to be, hundreds of cities and towns like Annapolis in this country. And the same police agencies which resist any form of outside oversight that are bringing these police commissions, independent auditors and civilian review boards to their jurisdictions just as surely as they bring on the consent decrees, also courtesy of outside agencies.

Hartley also discusses the secrecy that surrounds police investigations of their own employees and how more transparency is needed.


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It's a perfect illustration of the problem: Police promise openness, but in the end the public rarely gets the full story. Independent oversight is far from a panacea, but done right, it can bring the truth out of the shadows.

"We provide a certain level of transparency in what is going on," said Richard Rosenthal, the independent monitor of the Denver police and sheriff's departments. But in places without such oversight, he said: "The department might be doing a good job policing itself, but it's so cloaked in confidentiality and secrecy that no one actually knows or believes it."


And fewer people trust it.





In Des Moines, Iowa, the push for a civilian review board there came up in a discussion on the new chief of its police department, Judy Bradshaw. The discussion took place on a forum run by the Des Moines Register.


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A police chief that is disliked by the community is a sure recipe for confrontations (which Bradshaw has had many) and an adversarial relationship with those she is supposed to serve.

Oh, wait a minute, this is Des Moines where what citizens want means nothing. If the city cared they would hear the voices that have said we want a civilian review board for YEARS!!! (Something Bradshaw vehemently resists.)




Two people supported the board. One opposed it, calling it a "panel of do-gooders". Prediction? Civilian review will be coming to Des Moines, but not without some resistance.






A report released on the San Francisco Police Department stated that too many sworn officers were doing desk jobs, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The problem which mirrors one in the police department in Los Angeles has aggravated already existing staffing shortages in the department yet the county that oversees the SFPD seems reluctant to hire more civilians to do these jobs instead.

The use of officers in these positions has also driven up overtime expenses, according to the report that was submitted by the San Francisco County Grand Jury.


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Currently, there are 1,879 sworn officers on full duty, the report stated, and the department has been scrambling to add more academy classes so the shortfall doesn't grow. Most academy classes of 50 recruits average 30 actual graduates.

"San Francisco may soon face a critical shortage of sworn officers, as it is currently understaffed and has a significant number of officers who become eligible for retirement in the next few years," the report said.

The mayor's office, the report said, was less open to the idea than police officials.

"(Officials at) the office of the mayor ... (stated) that using civilians in desk jobs would be impractical; if the city hired more civilians it would still need to have the agreed number of officers, and 'going to the mayor for an increase in full-time equivalent employees is not likely to fly,'" it stated.



San Francisco's shortage of police officers is similar to that faced by many large cities including Los Angeles which struggles to fill its classes while it's issuing mandatory retirements to officers and New York City which is losing officers because it offers salaries considerably lower than agencies in update New York where over 20,000 officer candidates compete for a few open slots annually.

Riverside has an officer shortage as well, even with about 40 positions created in the past two years. The city's growth both in acreage through annexations and population through annexations and migration will more than match that increase in positions in less than five years. If the city doesn't increase positions annually to meet or even anticipate the population growth, then it will have serious problems in the future. I've asked city officials to read the writ of mandamus in that document and count how many allegations made by the State of California's attorney that the department had inadequate staffing to perform its daily operations, to the extent that the department habitually violated both the state's Constitution and legal codes.

The writ is included in the Riverside County Superior Court case, The People of the State of California v the City of Riverside.

In addition like most police departments facing mandated reform by an outside agency, Riverside's police department had an exodus of retirements, both voluntary and encouraged, and other departures. It lost about 80% of its patrol division in several years and nearly faced resignations by entire divisions including the SWAT division and the Field Training Officers' Team, according to a report submitted by the Riverside County Grand Jury in 2000.

The department filled most of the vacancies in its patrol division but consequently, these actions of replacing the old who had departed with the new who had just arrived resulted in a very young force where the average officer was 24-years-old and had 2 1/2 years work experience.

In contrast, a number of civilian positions in the police department were frozen earlier this year after employees departed, which has caused a drop of performance in several customer areas including taking police reports by telephone. Not sure where the money that was supposed to be spent on the replacements went, but it's not difficult to guess where it possibly has been used instead.

But if you increase officer positions to match population growth in a city, it is important to increase the civilian positions as well which support those officers.


One area of training which Riverside's police department has implemented during the past year was in the area of crisis intervention for the mentally ill. Last autumn, the city council's eyes glazed over when this issue was brought before them, except for Councilman Andrew Melendrez who not only expressed an interest in the training, but brought the issue to the public safety committee which he chairs.

Capt. Mike Blakely who heads the department's personnel and training division has been giving regular updates to the committee on the progress of this training.

Last week, I ran into Blakely and he said that the first training classes for police officers in mental health training began at the end of May. Officers were picked for the initial training who the department believed would provide an honest assessment of the training's positives and its shortcomings. And apparently, that's what they did.

The curriculum has been shortened from 40 hours to 30, with a reduction in time spent lecturing on medicines used by those who have mentally illness. Blakely said that the course material provided by the medical experts was too detailed for police officers.

Areas of the training which received much higher marks from the officers was a tour of the county mental health facility where police officers usually bring in people who are mentally ill for a psychiatric evaluation. Also scoring high was a panel of those who were mentally ill including people who had contacts with police officers. The department is planning to expand that session, said Blakely.





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