Hiding in Plain Sight: How to address sexual harassment in law enforcement
This posting is part of an ongoing series on gender and policing called, "Hiding in Plain Sight" which was first started in November 2005 on this site. Look both at this posting for updates and future postings.
The book I'm currently reading, Investigating Sexual Harassment in Law Enforcement, is written by former Portland Police Bureau Police Chief Penny Harrington and researcher, Kim Lonsway who works for the National Center of Women and Policing in Los Angeles. It was published last year. More information about it is here.
Harrington was the first woman to head a large police agency in this nation's history in the mid-1980s. Many of the proposed changes she brought in her job were historic for the time period. After she left policing, she founded the National Center for Women and Policing which is umbrellaed under the Feminist Majority organization which is based in Los Angeles. The Center provides many resources for educating, evaluation and training of law enforcement officers and agencies on issues pertaining to gender in policing. It also addresses the handling of crimes which greatly impact women like domestic violence and sexual assault, crimes which traditionally have been mishandled and even ignored by law enforcement agencies.
Here's some resources available at that Web site.
Training issues
Publications
Harrington's book, Recruiting and Retaining Women: A Self-Assessment Guide for Law Enforcement should be required reading for the personnel and training division of any law enforcement agency truly interested in hiring and retaining more female officers.
I've known Harrington since 2001 when I emailed some statistics on women in the Riverside Police Department for her to evaluate and she sent her insights back. She thought the statistics which included the promotion of women were "horrible". And she was right.
She's got amazing insight, she's fearless, she's generous with her time and she's brought a lot to the table in order to produce a better reality for female law enforcement officers than she and others faced when they worked as pioneers in a profession which wanted nothing to do with them. She continues to work very hard at doing so and her work and that of others in her field has made a lot of difference for female law enforcement officers today.
I first met her at the civil trial involving Riverside Police Department Officer Roger Sutton's racial discrimination, harassment and retaliation law suit in 2005 and was amazed at her decorum while on the witness stand. The city's attorney could not pick apart her professional analysis of the police department's handling of claims of racial discrimination and harassment so he attacked her personally. Sutton of course as you know, received a $1.64 million verdict from the jury who heard his case and while the city initially chose to fight it, eventually it paid the verdict out to Sutton and attorney fees to his counsel.
During her testimony at his trial, Harrington had said that the city and the police department had a discrimination and harassment policy in place that was acceptable in its language, but she believed that it wasn't being enforced properly.
However, people feel about Sutton and his law suit and various identified and unidentified individuals expressed those sentiments here, he stuck his course and his attorneys proved his case to the jury's satisfaction. And the city could have opted out earlier by paying out the $200,000 an arbitrator awarded him in 2004. Instead it opted for a jury trial even after one of Sutton's attorneys warned he'd do better there. He was right and the city of Riverside discovered the hard way, racism costs.
As far as sexual harassment law suits, the Riverside Police Department went there when former Sgt. Christine Keers filed hers in the mid-1990s after she was denied a promotion several times and worked in an environment where porno movies were shown in the roll call room when male officers were promoted and female civilian employees performed oral sex on male rookie officers at the Orange St. Station, according to her initial complaint.
Keers was on the receiving end of numerous sexist and sexually derogatory comments. Female officers who worked together drove in the "lesbian" car and a female canine officer(in a division which has seen few female officers) was said to be having sex with her police dog. Females who were promoted were naturally, doing the boss not only to get ahead but just, because.
One male officer told Keers he would love to shove his fist inside her. Others spoke of female "snail trails" and "scoot marks". Most of the names listed in the law suit belonged to officers who are no longer employed at the department today.
Reading the law suit makes you feel as if you're getting a close look inside a high school locker room or a frat house, not a professional law enforcement agency. The portrait that Keers painted of the Riverside Police Department was ugly, in ways that not only reflected sexism, racism and misogyny but an agency out of control. Who was minding the store when these incidents and others were taking place?
It sounded like those who were in charge of the police department and in supervising positions were either out to lunch or participating in the abhorrent misconduct. An officer who allegedly laughed along with a sexist remark made about Keers in her presence was eventually promoted into upper management by former chief, Jerry Carroll. Another sergeant would make appearances as a defendant in other employee grievances including Sutton's. One high-ranking officer was a defendant in Metzler's case and referred to in both Sutton's and Keers' cases to varying degrees.
Was this what current Chief Russ Leach means when he said the working environment was "loosey goosey" when he was hired in late 2000? A better term for it might be embarrassing but his definition fits also.
Today, there are closed circuited television cameras in the roll call room, in part because of Keers' law suit but also due to those filed by Sutton and former Officer Rene Rodriguez. So to an extent, the conduct of police officers is being monitored in certain areas, but whether or not that has impacted the behavior of the officers outside these areas remains to be seen.
After all, according to depositions in Sutton's law suit, inappropriate conversations took place that demeaned Arab-Americans and Muslims just outside the roll call room before or after sessions held there.
Keers supervisors continuously tried to maneuver into situations where they could come onto her whether it was arranging for her to meet them in remote areas or inside vehicles.
However, Keers knew what to do when she was being sexually harassed. The skills which made her an effective homicide detective who broke two serial murder and rape cases may have vilified her among the male population in her agency, but they helped her greatly when filing her law suit. She knew that carefully documenting the incidents as they happened would greatly assist her case as would gathering evidence of the sexual harassment and retaliation that she faced.
And gather evidence she did from hostile male officers who were only too willing to help her with that, given the amount of sexual cartoons and other offensive material they left on her desk or pasted on walls and inside elevators at the police station. Some of that evidence is stapled to the back of her law suit.
Keers persevered even while the same officers who she had filed complaints against, came into the station to arrest her on receiving stolen property charges stemming from a booth she ran at a swap meet. Even though the Riverside County District Attorney's office had prohibited those officers or any officers from arresting her at that time, they did so anyway.
Her criminal case went to a jury and she was acquitted in under an hour. Jurors came up afterward and hugged her. Not every officer in the department harassed her. In fact, many officers, men included, paid money into her defense fund.
The city would be paying out much more money to Keers later when it settled her cases which it litigated for about $19,000. Her settlement was well into the six-figures and included a retirement.
Keers' ordeal wasn't unique at all. In fact, the Police Foundation stated in a study that 68% of female law enforcement officers have been sexually harassed.
The article addresses the issue of integrating women into the male-dominated profession of law enforcement through recruitment, retention and promotion as well as addressing serious problems like sexual discrimination and harassment. An interesting section of the article provided scenarios of male supervisors who are confronted with these problems in the officers that they oversee.
(excerpt)
How would you handle it?
You are a male sergeant in charge of canines. You are expecting to receive the first female officer on your specialized unit shortly. Your squad members know that a female officer will be joining them and are collectively grumbling to each other about the lowering of standards, which has resulted in letting in too many women who can't cut it physically. When you have overheard these conversations, or when they have been addressed to you directly, you have refuted them by pointing to the women in the department who are in outstanding physical shape. This strategy has not been effective, as the squad members continue to complain that women officers can't do the job.
You are a male sergeant. Two single men on your squad are constantly talking about their sexual conquests, but only when the two female officers on the squad are not present. When the two female officers on the squad are nearby, they stop their conquest conversation and start laughing and whispering. They displayed a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar but took it down at your request. They have replaced it with photographs of Moslem women covered in head-to-toe black veils. There is tension between these single officers and the two women officers. The women officers have not told the male officers to stop their behavior, but their body language and demeanor indicate that the behavior is unwelcome.
You are a male sergeant and you observe another sergeant continually questioning the abilities of his squad's only female officer and verbally abusing her. He has a reputation as an extremely tough supervisor but he is treating the female officer much worse than any of the men. He continually points out the female officer's mistakes in front of others, cuts her off when she talks, mimics her and generally sends her the unspoken message that she is stupid. Over a period of months, you have watched the female officer's resentment grow and her self-confidence diminish.
What would they do? Would they confront the male officers on their conduct in public? Would they pull them aside and do it in private? Would they stand there and watch and be so disturbed or unnerved by it that they would be rude to its victims? Would they not only do nothing about it, but participate in the conduct alongside their officers?
Being a supervising officer particularly in a small to medium-sized agency requires professionalism and also maturity, because unlike in large agencies, an officer could be working with a group of officers today that he or she could be assigned to supervise tomorrow. In many smaller agencies, the management is limited in where he or she can assign newly promoted supervisors. Some new sergeants(which appears to be an especially challenging assignment) adjust quickly to this challenge, some take longer. Others never make this adjustment and some of these could potentially fail to pass probation(which in Riverside, is now nine months) and be demoted.
The summer of 2005
Kelsy Metzler had been hired by the same police department in 2005 and entered the training academy to do her stint there before she would join the police force. According to the law suit she filed, she graduated 21st out of 70 in her class and passed her tests to become a police officer. However, the first day she showed up to work at the Riverside Police Department, she was led into an office and told that she was being terminated.
When she asked for an explanation, she was told by the officers in the room which included a representative from the Internal Affairs Division that they didn't like her and they didn't have to tell her. It's true that because she was a probational officer, she could be fired without cause and no reason would have to be given her.
Metzler was stunned by what happened apparently, but if she knew the history of sexual harassment complaints in law enforcement, she should have seen this one coming. In fact, experts say that what happened to her isn't uncommon.
Earlier, she had filed a complaint alleging that a male cadet not affiliated with the Riverside Police Department had sexually harassed her and other women in the academy. Her supervisor, again not a Riverside Police Department employee, told her he would investigate it but then refused to give her a copy of her complaint or any updates on the progress of his investigation. If what she stated in her law suit is true, then that seems to be direct violations of any appropriate harassment policy which would include provisions that would allow her access to her own complaint.
Then, in July 2005, according to her law suit, two male police officers who incidentally are sergeants today allegedly approached her either representing themselves as individuals or the Riverside Police Department as an agency and said that the department had heard about her complaint and wasn't pleased about it and with her. It's odd that the department would have sent these individuals out to notify her that it had received her complaint in this manner and it doesn't appear like it was a very professional encounter at any rate.
One would think that the agency who employed Metzler which was the Riverside Police Department would have advocated on her behalf during the investigation of the complaint. After all, the department and the city that runs it had spent and could spend over $100,000 in city funds to recruit, hire and train Metzler and any other officer. But did Metzler cross the line when she filed a complaint of sexual harassment? Was the department, not to mention the city's risk management division(which appears to be married to the police department as evidenced by testimony in the Sutton trial) saying, oh my God, she's already complaining about sexism in the academy, what's going to happen if she starts working for us?
In other words, did the department and the city view Metzler as an officer in training or a proven troublemaker who might cost them money down the line if she filed another complaint of sexual harassment while employed by the department and the city?
Even though Metzler was never told by the department why she was terminated, apparently the department told other agencies where she applied for positions in Southern California. She claimed in her law suit that those agencies were told that she was a bad officer, an unfit officer and that she had slept with several instructors at the academy during her stint there.
Omigosh! And naturally upon hearing that this had happened, those who ran the academy in question conducted an internal investigation involving this alleged conduct of several of their male instructors having sex with female cadets in their classes. If the allegations were sustained and they must have been if those at the Riverside Police Department named as defendants in the law suit were relating negative accounts about Metzler to other law enforcement agencies, these instructors were of course immediately disciplined and terminated from their employment at these academies not to mentioned disciplined by their respective law enforcement agencies.
Probably didn't happen. Either because the alleged misconduct by Metzler related to other law enforcement agencies didn't actually happen or if it did, because of the "boys will be boys" attitude that still apparently takes place in law enforcement agencies and their training centers. Meaning that the women get punished and the men who are just as complicit get slapped on the back, taken out for a beer and told what great studs they are.
Metzler stated in her law suit that other female cadets were also harassed by the same male cadet who's probably working happily at a law enforcement agency in Riverside County. But Metzler apparently learned a harsh lesson. Those who stay silent about sexual harassment may keep their careers as long as they can endure the behavior but those who try to use the policies that agencies encourage them to use, will probably never have a future in the law enforcement profession.
Who advocates for female cadets and officers who are being sexually harassed in their agencies? Those who train them are required to inform them of the agency's sexual harassment policy and accompanying reporting process but what they don't tell these women is what will happen to them and their careers if they utilize this process.
Their careers will be over. Sometimes, before they've even begun.
Female officers and Law Enforcement Unions
Every police officer belongs to an association or union comprised of other officers in their respective ranks. These unions are assigned a variety of duties to perform. One of which is to represent female officers when they file complaints of sexual discrimination and harassment with management.
In Keers' case, she had a union advocate who appeared enthusiastic and was a strong advocate. In Metzler's case, it's not clear whether her status of being an academy cadet denied her this representation in her complaint. Traditionally, female officers who report harassment have had problems receiving support from police unions, which isn't surprising given that the leadership of most associations and unions is comprised of mostly White men and few if any female officers.
Even male police officers in different law enforcement agencies often say that it's difficult for them to even access let alone serve their unions in any capacity because they feel like those positions are closed off. For women, many of these appointed or elected leadership positions may feel even more restricted.
Many associations and unions in law enforcement also have specially designated committees or groups to address complaints by police officers, also known as grievances, but how these committees are organized and operated impact the access female officers have to this process. Do those who lead and serve on these committees serve as true advocates for these women in their departments or are they further examples of the boys' clubs which believe women have no place working in the profession?
And who handles the legal work for women who file these complaints and legal actions? Who handles the legal work for men of color in their law suits against the city and department? In all four situations mentioned here involving men of color and women, private attorneys were hired at the expense of those filing the law suit. Unlike the recent law suit filed by Officer Ryan Wilson where he alleged his own mistreatment, officers like Keers, Rodriguez, Sutton and Metzler had to search for their own attorneys to fight their battles inside the court system.
Constrast those cases with the reverse race and gender discrimination grievences and law suits filed by five White male sergeants in 1999, where the attorney of record was an associate with the firm retained under contract by the police union at that time. Whether they retained this attorney privately or through their memberships in the union was never revealed.
Very often female officers dealing with the issues of sexual discrimination and/or harassment have to look elsewhere for assistance, far outside their respective agencies.
A female police officer from Little Rock, Arkansas received advice from a woman at Feminist.com on resources to contact for assistance.
A fact sheet on sexual harassment for employees is here.
The National Institute of Justice has an interesting position paper on attitudes towards women in law enforcement agencies in different European countries, which shows that opposition to women in law enforcement appears to be universal. In Peru, female officers are harassed not just by male officers but by male civilians who lash back at them and even try to run them over with their vehicles.
(excerpt, Feminist Daily News)
Ana Maria Yanez, from the women’s group Manuela Ramos says that the backlash is a reflection of the low status given to women in Peru. “If men beat their wives at home – or don’t let them work or keep them from voicing their opinion – it only makes sense that a man, infuriated by a traffic ticket, will try to run a policewoman down with his car,” she said.
So sexual harassment of female law enforcement officers is not an uncommon occurance. Harrington's comprehensive book on the topic is engrossing and very informative on the many different aspects of this troublesome, pervasive issue that serves as a stamp of the police culture that still not only exists inside but essentially governs most if not all police agencies.
In the first chapter of Harrington's and Lonsway's book, which is titled "Understanding the Problem of Sexual Harassment", they list some of the warning signs that an agency might exhibit that puts it at risk of fostering an environment encouraging sexual harassment of its female officers. They are as follows:
(excerpt)
They have few or no women in the upper ranks.
They have an unprofessional work environment that encourages casualness in dress, language and relationships.
They have a work environment in which sexual language, sexual joking and sexual relationships are common.
They do not have policies and procedures for responding to sexual harassment.
They do not have managers in the upper ranks sending a strong message that sexual harassment will not be tolerated.
They send message, either explicitly or implicitly, that sexual harassment will be tolerated, that no one who is found guilty will be disciplined, and that anyone filing a complaint will be punished.
Do any of the above or all of them seem familiar? Do any of them seem familiar when evaluating both the Keers case in 1996 and the Metzler case 10 years later? If so, which ones?
Further analysis of the above risk factors and other parts of this excellent book will be posted in the future.
Cost of sexism in dollars and cents according to the following recent examples:
Berkeley Officer wins $25,000 in sexual harassment law suit
City of Houston pays out $600,000 on sexual harassment claim
Federal jury in Los Angeles County awards $3.9 million to two female officers
Houston pays $1 million more for sexual harassment
Canadian agencies pay out too
Cost of sexism for female law enforcement officers
and the profession: Immeasurable.
The book I'm currently reading, Investigating Sexual Harassment in Law Enforcement, is written by former Portland Police Bureau Police Chief Penny Harrington and researcher, Kim Lonsway who works for the National Center of Women and Policing in Los Angeles. It was published last year. More information about it is here.
Harrington was the first woman to head a large police agency in this nation's history in the mid-1980s. Many of the proposed changes she brought in her job were historic for the time period. After she left policing, she founded the National Center for Women and Policing which is umbrellaed under the Feminist Majority organization which is based in Los Angeles. The Center provides many resources for educating, evaluation and training of law enforcement officers and agencies on issues pertaining to gender in policing. It also addresses the handling of crimes which greatly impact women like domestic violence and sexual assault, crimes which traditionally have been mishandled and even ignored by law enforcement agencies.
Here's some resources available at that Web site.
Training issues
Publications
Harrington's book, Recruiting and Retaining Women: A Self-Assessment Guide for Law Enforcement should be required reading for the personnel and training division of any law enforcement agency truly interested in hiring and retaining more female officers.
I've known Harrington since 2001 when I emailed some statistics on women in the Riverside Police Department for her to evaluate and she sent her insights back. She thought the statistics which included the promotion of women were "horrible". And she was right.
She's got amazing insight, she's fearless, she's generous with her time and she's brought a lot to the table in order to produce a better reality for female law enforcement officers than she and others faced when they worked as pioneers in a profession which wanted nothing to do with them. She continues to work very hard at doing so and her work and that of others in her field has made a lot of difference for female law enforcement officers today.
I first met her at the civil trial involving Riverside Police Department Officer Roger Sutton's racial discrimination, harassment and retaliation law suit in 2005 and was amazed at her decorum while on the witness stand. The city's attorney could not pick apart her professional analysis of the police department's handling of claims of racial discrimination and harassment so he attacked her personally. Sutton of course as you know, received a $1.64 million verdict from the jury who heard his case and while the city initially chose to fight it, eventually it paid the verdict out to Sutton and attorney fees to his counsel.
During her testimony at his trial, Harrington had said that the city and the police department had a discrimination and harassment policy in place that was acceptable in its language, but she believed that it wasn't being enforced properly.
However, people feel about Sutton and his law suit and various identified and unidentified individuals expressed those sentiments here, he stuck his course and his attorneys proved his case to the jury's satisfaction. And the city could have opted out earlier by paying out the $200,000 an arbitrator awarded him in 2004. Instead it opted for a jury trial even after one of Sutton's attorneys warned he'd do better there. He was right and the city of Riverside discovered the hard way, racism costs.
As far as sexual harassment law suits, the Riverside Police Department went there when former Sgt. Christine Keers filed hers in the mid-1990s after she was denied a promotion several times and worked in an environment where porno movies were shown in the roll call room when male officers were promoted and female civilian employees performed oral sex on male rookie officers at the Orange St. Station, according to her initial complaint.
Keers was on the receiving end of numerous sexist and sexually derogatory comments. Female officers who worked together drove in the "lesbian" car and a female canine officer(in a division which has seen few female officers) was said to be having sex with her police dog. Females who were promoted were naturally, doing the boss not only to get ahead but just, because.
One male officer told Keers he would love to shove his fist inside her. Others spoke of female "snail trails" and "scoot marks". Most of the names listed in the law suit belonged to officers who are no longer employed at the department today.
Reading the law suit makes you feel as if you're getting a close look inside a high school locker room or a frat house, not a professional law enforcement agency. The portrait that Keers painted of the Riverside Police Department was ugly, in ways that not only reflected sexism, racism and misogyny but an agency out of control. Who was minding the store when these incidents and others were taking place?
It sounded like those who were in charge of the police department and in supervising positions were either out to lunch or participating in the abhorrent misconduct. An officer who allegedly laughed along with a sexist remark made about Keers in her presence was eventually promoted into upper management by former chief, Jerry Carroll. Another sergeant would make appearances as a defendant in other employee grievances including Sutton's. One high-ranking officer was a defendant in Metzler's case and referred to in both Sutton's and Keers' cases to varying degrees.
Was this what current Chief Russ Leach means when he said the working environment was "loosey goosey" when he was hired in late 2000? A better term for it might be embarrassing but his definition fits also.
Today, there are closed circuited television cameras in the roll call room, in part because of Keers' law suit but also due to those filed by Sutton and former Officer Rene Rodriguez. So to an extent, the conduct of police officers is being monitored in certain areas, but whether or not that has impacted the behavior of the officers outside these areas remains to be seen.
After all, according to depositions in Sutton's law suit, inappropriate conversations took place that demeaned Arab-Americans and Muslims just outside the roll call room before or after sessions held there.
Keers supervisors continuously tried to maneuver into situations where they could come onto her whether it was arranging for her to meet them in remote areas or inside vehicles.
However, Keers knew what to do when she was being sexually harassed. The skills which made her an effective homicide detective who broke two serial murder and rape cases may have vilified her among the male population in her agency, but they helped her greatly when filing her law suit. She knew that carefully documenting the incidents as they happened would greatly assist her case as would gathering evidence of the sexual harassment and retaliation that she faced.
And gather evidence she did from hostile male officers who were only too willing to help her with that, given the amount of sexual cartoons and other offensive material they left on her desk or pasted on walls and inside elevators at the police station. Some of that evidence is stapled to the back of her law suit.
Keers persevered even while the same officers who she had filed complaints against, came into the station to arrest her on receiving stolen property charges stemming from a booth she ran at a swap meet. Even though the Riverside County District Attorney's office had prohibited those officers or any officers from arresting her at that time, they did so anyway.
Her criminal case went to a jury and she was acquitted in under an hour. Jurors came up afterward and hugged her. Not every officer in the department harassed her. In fact, many officers, men included, paid money into her defense fund.
The city would be paying out much more money to Keers later when it settled her cases which it litigated for about $19,000. Her settlement was well into the six-figures and included a retirement.
Keers' ordeal wasn't unique at all. In fact, the Police Foundation stated in a study that 68% of female law enforcement officers have been sexually harassed.
The article addresses the issue of integrating women into the male-dominated profession of law enforcement through recruitment, retention and promotion as well as addressing serious problems like sexual discrimination and harassment. An interesting section of the article provided scenarios of male supervisors who are confronted with these problems in the officers that they oversee.
(excerpt)
How would you handle it?
You are a male sergeant in charge of canines. You are expecting to receive the first female officer on your specialized unit shortly. Your squad members know that a female officer will be joining them and are collectively grumbling to each other about the lowering of standards, which has resulted in letting in too many women who can't cut it physically. When you have overheard these conversations, or when they have been addressed to you directly, you have refuted them by pointing to the women in the department who are in outstanding physical shape. This strategy has not been effective, as the squad members continue to complain that women officers can't do the job.
You are a male sergeant. Two single men on your squad are constantly talking about their sexual conquests, but only when the two female officers on the squad are not present. When the two female officers on the squad are nearby, they stop their conquest conversation and start laughing and whispering. They displayed a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar but took it down at your request. They have replaced it with photographs of Moslem women covered in head-to-toe black veils. There is tension between these single officers and the two women officers. The women officers have not told the male officers to stop their behavior, but their body language and demeanor indicate that the behavior is unwelcome.
You are a male sergeant and you observe another sergeant continually questioning the abilities of his squad's only female officer and verbally abusing her. He has a reputation as an extremely tough supervisor but he is treating the female officer much worse than any of the men. He continually points out the female officer's mistakes in front of others, cuts her off when she talks, mimics her and generally sends her the unspoken message that she is stupid. Over a period of months, you have watched the female officer's resentment grow and her self-confidence diminish.
What would they do? Would they confront the male officers on their conduct in public? Would they pull them aside and do it in private? Would they stand there and watch and be so disturbed or unnerved by it that they would be rude to its victims? Would they not only do nothing about it, but participate in the conduct alongside their officers?
Being a supervising officer particularly in a small to medium-sized agency requires professionalism and also maturity, because unlike in large agencies, an officer could be working with a group of officers today that he or she could be assigned to supervise tomorrow. In many smaller agencies, the management is limited in where he or she can assign newly promoted supervisors. Some new sergeants(which appears to be an especially challenging assignment) adjust quickly to this challenge, some take longer. Others never make this adjustment and some of these could potentially fail to pass probation(which in Riverside, is now nine months) and be demoted.
The summer of 2005
Kelsy Metzler had been hired by the same police department in 2005 and entered the training academy to do her stint there before she would join the police force. According to the law suit she filed, she graduated 21st out of 70 in her class and passed her tests to become a police officer. However, the first day she showed up to work at the Riverside Police Department, she was led into an office and told that she was being terminated.
When she asked for an explanation, she was told by the officers in the room which included a representative from the Internal Affairs Division that they didn't like her and they didn't have to tell her. It's true that because she was a probational officer, she could be fired without cause and no reason would have to be given her.
Metzler was stunned by what happened apparently, but if she knew the history of sexual harassment complaints in law enforcement, she should have seen this one coming. In fact, experts say that what happened to her isn't uncommon.
Earlier, she had filed a complaint alleging that a male cadet not affiliated with the Riverside Police Department had sexually harassed her and other women in the academy. Her supervisor, again not a Riverside Police Department employee, told her he would investigate it but then refused to give her a copy of her complaint or any updates on the progress of his investigation. If what she stated in her law suit is true, then that seems to be direct violations of any appropriate harassment policy which would include provisions that would allow her access to her own complaint.
Then, in July 2005, according to her law suit, two male police officers who incidentally are sergeants today allegedly approached her either representing themselves as individuals or the Riverside Police Department as an agency and said that the department had heard about her complaint and wasn't pleased about it and with her. It's odd that the department would have sent these individuals out to notify her that it had received her complaint in this manner and it doesn't appear like it was a very professional encounter at any rate.
One would think that the agency who employed Metzler which was the Riverside Police Department would have advocated on her behalf during the investigation of the complaint. After all, the department and the city that runs it had spent and could spend over $100,000 in city funds to recruit, hire and train Metzler and any other officer. But did Metzler cross the line when she filed a complaint of sexual harassment? Was the department, not to mention the city's risk management division(which appears to be married to the police department as evidenced by testimony in the Sutton trial) saying, oh my God, she's already complaining about sexism in the academy, what's going to happen if she starts working for us?
In other words, did the department and the city view Metzler as an officer in training or a proven troublemaker who might cost them money down the line if she filed another complaint of sexual harassment while employed by the department and the city?
Even though Metzler was never told by the department why she was terminated, apparently the department told other agencies where she applied for positions in Southern California. She claimed in her law suit that those agencies were told that she was a bad officer, an unfit officer and that she had slept with several instructors at the academy during her stint there.
Omigosh! And naturally upon hearing that this had happened, those who ran the academy in question conducted an internal investigation involving this alleged conduct of several of their male instructors having sex with female cadets in their classes. If the allegations were sustained and they must have been if those at the Riverside Police Department named as defendants in the law suit were relating negative accounts about Metzler to other law enforcement agencies, these instructors were of course immediately disciplined and terminated from their employment at these academies not to mentioned disciplined by their respective law enforcement agencies.
Probably didn't happen. Either because the alleged misconduct by Metzler related to other law enforcement agencies didn't actually happen or if it did, because of the "boys will be boys" attitude that still apparently takes place in law enforcement agencies and their training centers. Meaning that the women get punished and the men who are just as complicit get slapped on the back, taken out for a beer and told what great studs they are.
Metzler stated in her law suit that other female cadets were also harassed by the same male cadet who's probably working happily at a law enforcement agency in Riverside County. But Metzler apparently learned a harsh lesson. Those who stay silent about sexual harassment may keep their careers as long as they can endure the behavior but those who try to use the policies that agencies encourage them to use, will probably never have a future in the law enforcement profession.
Who advocates for female cadets and officers who are being sexually harassed in their agencies? Those who train them are required to inform them of the agency's sexual harassment policy and accompanying reporting process but what they don't tell these women is what will happen to them and their careers if they utilize this process.
Their careers will be over. Sometimes, before they've even begun.
Female officers and Law Enforcement Unions
Every police officer belongs to an association or union comprised of other officers in their respective ranks. These unions are assigned a variety of duties to perform. One of which is to represent female officers when they file complaints of sexual discrimination and harassment with management.
In Keers' case, she had a union advocate who appeared enthusiastic and was a strong advocate. In Metzler's case, it's not clear whether her status of being an academy cadet denied her this representation in her complaint. Traditionally, female officers who report harassment have had problems receiving support from police unions, which isn't surprising given that the leadership of most associations and unions is comprised of mostly White men and few if any female officers.
Even male police officers in different law enforcement agencies often say that it's difficult for them to even access let alone serve their unions in any capacity because they feel like those positions are closed off. For women, many of these appointed or elected leadership positions may feel even more restricted.
Many associations and unions in law enforcement also have specially designated committees or groups to address complaints by police officers, also known as grievances, but how these committees are organized and operated impact the access female officers have to this process. Do those who lead and serve on these committees serve as true advocates for these women in their departments or are they further examples of the boys' clubs which believe women have no place working in the profession?
And who handles the legal work for women who file these complaints and legal actions? Who handles the legal work for men of color in their law suits against the city and department? In all four situations mentioned here involving men of color and women, private attorneys were hired at the expense of those filing the law suit. Unlike the recent law suit filed by Officer Ryan Wilson where he alleged his own mistreatment, officers like Keers, Rodriguez, Sutton and Metzler had to search for their own attorneys to fight their battles inside the court system.
Constrast those cases with the reverse race and gender discrimination grievences and law suits filed by five White male sergeants in 1999, where the attorney of record was an associate with the firm retained under contract by the police union at that time. Whether they retained this attorney privately or through their memberships in the union was never revealed.
Very often female officers dealing with the issues of sexual discrimination and/or harassment have to look elsewhere for assistance, far outside their respective agencies.
A female police officer from Little Rock, Arkansas received advice from a woman at Feminist.com on resources to contact for assistance.
A fact sheet on sexual harassment for employees is here.
The National Institute of Justice has an interesting position paper on attitudes towards women in law enforcement agencies in different European countries, which shows that opposition to women in law enforcement appears to be universal. In Peru, female officers are harassed not just by male officers but by male civilians who lash back at them and even try to run them over with their vehicles.
(excerpt, Feminist Daily News)
Ana Maria Yanez, from the women’s group Manuela Ramos says that the backlash is a reflection of the low status given to women in Peru. “If men beat their wives at home – or don’t let them work or keep them from voicing their opinion – it only makes sense that a man, infuriated by a traffic ticket, will try to run a policewoman down with his car,” she said.
So sexual harassment of female law enforcement officers is not an uncommon occurance. Harrington's comprehensive book on the topic is engrossing and very informative on the many different aspects of this troublesome, pervasive issue that serves as a stamp of the police culture that still not only exists inside but essentially governs most if not all police agencies.
In the first chapter of Harrington's and Lonsway's book, which is titled "Understanding the Problem of Sexual Harassment", they list some of the warning signs that an agency might exhibit that puts it at risk of fostering an environment encouraging sexual harassment of its female officers. They are as follows:
(excerpt)
They have few or no women in the upper ranks.
They have an unprofessional work environment that encourages casualness in dress, language and relationships.
They have a work environment in which sexual language, sexual joking and sexual relationships are common.
They do not have policies and procedures for responding to sexual harassment.
They do not have managers in the upper ranks sending a strong message that sexual harassment will not be tolerated.
They send message, either explicitly or implicitly, that sexual harassment will be tolerated, that no one who is found guilty will be disciplined, and that anyone filing a complaint will be punished.
Do any of the above or all of them seem familiar? Do any of them seem familiar when evaluating both the Keers case in 1996 and the Metzler case 10 years later? If so, which ones?
Further analysis of the above risk factors and other parts of this excellent book will be posted in the future.
Cost of sexism in dollars and cents according to the following recent examples:
Berkeley Officer wins $25,000 in sexual harassment law suit
City of Houston pays out $600,000 on sexual harassment claim
Federal jury in Los Angeles County awards $3.9 million to two female officers
Houston pays $1 million more for sexual harassment
Canadian agencies pay out too
Cost of sexism for female law enforcement officers
and the profession: Immeasurable.
Labels: business as usual, culture 101, recruitment, retention and diversity
posted by Five Before Midnight | 9:37 AM
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