By Carli Brosseau
The Oregonian
PORTLAND, Ore. — Janie Schutz didn’t get her first-choice job after graduating the police academy No. 1 in her class.
It was 1994, and the sheriff who oversaw the miles of rural North Carolina she dreamed of patrolling “didn’t put women on the road,” she said. “I think he just didn’t feel women could do it.”
Schutz is now chief of Oregon’s Forest Grove Police Department. But the share of women working as law enforcement officers, especially in rural areas, hasn’t changed much over the two decades she rose through the ranks.
Attracting women to law enforcement has become a timely concern as police departments across the country face a backlash over deaths at the hands of their officers. Women are less likely to use excessive force and less likely to engage in high-risk pursuits, research from the National Center for Women and Policing has shown.
“There’s fewer complaints and less in civil liability,” said former Portland Police Chief Penny Harrington, the center’s founder.
Yet after quick growth in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the share of women in U.S. law enforcement hit a plateau at just above 10 percent and barely budged from 1996 through 2014, federal data show. Some researchers and police administrators have begun to wonder whether it’s a sign that the pool of women interested in the profession has been tapped out.
“It’s simply possible that we have found a saturation point,” said AnnMarie Cordner, a professor of criminal justice at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. “Just because the population is 50 percent women doesn’t mean that 50 percent are interested in law enforcement.”
But departments under court order to diversify their ranks have managed to dramatically increase the share of female officers by changing their recruitment strategies. Harrington helped Los Angeles Police Department hire dramatically more women when the Department of Justice intervened following Rodney King’s beating.
Researchers have found women perform as well as men when it comes to patrol productivity, agency commitment and the frequency with which force is used. And some female crime victims feel more comfortable speaking with female officer, especially in sexual assault or domestic violence cases.
Low representation of women in law enforcement is not inevitable, Harrington said. “It a lack of will on the part of politicians.”
Tiny numbers
Forest Grove defies the norm in a state with a spotty record of increasing the ranks of female officers in recent years.
Oregon stood out when Portland hired Lola Baldwin as a detective in 1908. But Schutz is still one of only five female chiefs in Oregon, according to an Oregonian/OregonLive analysis of data compiled by the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training. The information was current as of June.
Forest Grove was one of only a handful of Oregon agencies with a sworn workforce that was more than 20 percent female. [See the full list of departments.] With 24 officers on payroll, it was also the largest with a female chief.
Statewide, only 9 percent of Oregon’s sworn officers were women. Federal data show a nationwide average of about 12 percent.
A sheriff today would probably provoke more outrage after declaring he “didn’t put women on the road,” as the North Carolina sheriff told Schutz. But, in fact, many sheriffs in Oregon today don’t.
Nineteen of the state’s 36 sheriff’s offices had not a single female officer outside the jails, the analysis showed. The same is true for few dozen more small agencies scattered across the state.
Certainly, the past two decades have brought some important changes in law enforcement leadership and culture.
“Twenty years ago at a conference, I spoke to a chief that said he would love to hire a lady officer, but he was concerned that his male officers would sexually harass her,” said Cordner, the Pennsylvania researcher. “He went so far as to say that the only way he could hire a lady officer is if he could find one who was so ugly no one would bother her.”
Attitudes toward sexual harassment and discrimination have shifted, at least somewhat. Federal lawsuits have forced changes to police hiring, including modifications to physical tests with dubious job relevance.
Nonetheless, agencies seem to have hit a limit on female recruitment, prompting researchers like Cordner to question the reason for the plateau.
In 2011, Cordner surveyed female chiefs and officers in parts of the Philadelphia area with few women officers. An overwhelming majority said agencies hired so few women because few applied. A majority said women found other lines of work more attractive.
But in addition, 48 percent of chiefs and 69 percent of officers said they didn’t think police agencies recruited women proactively. Nearly half of the female officers -- though not female chiefs -- found local police agencies “male-dominated and not very woman friendly.”
It’s not that the labor force lacks enough women, or enough women willing to do shift work, or enough women to do dangerous work, studies have found.
What matters more in attracting women: how a department is run.
Agencies committed to community policing, which emphasizes problem-solving and relationship-building, tend to have more female officers. So do police departments that require higher levels of education.
A new generation
The career of Whitney Black, the most recent female officer to join the Forest Grove Police Department, offers evidence of progress.
Black was in a master’s degree program when she decided to become an officer four and half years ago. She wanted to solve concrete problems, not abstract ones, and she went to Forest Grove because it was a city small enough that she could come to know the people she serves.
Black gave no real thought to her gender and hasn’t had much reason to think about it since.
“They don’t call us matrons like they used to,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve encountered any negative behavior toward me because I’m a woman.”
Black’s ponytail made her a favorite for police academy trainers demonstrating the “hair takedown” technique for controlling suspects. But otherwise she wasn’t treated differently from male recruits.
“They didn’t sugarcoat anything because you’re a female, which I think is important because we have to perform at the same level,” she said. “If we didn’t, it would be dangerous.”
Black said some women may shy from the job because they lack confidence in projecting authority or worry about how officers spend their time, concerns bred by TV imagery.
“Not every call you go to is guns blazing and chaos,” she said. “The majority of what we do out here is communication-based, just talking to people and solving problems.”
The challenge ahead
Moving the needle dramatically on women in policing would require leaders to much more explicitly and aggressively recruit women, experts agree. It also would require a change in police culture.
Police agencies tend to draw heavily from the military and typically recruit at male-dominated events, such as sports games.
, the executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Commission, is among the prominent voices arguing that if Americans saw police officers less as warriors and more as guardians, police agencies could draw a different set of applicants.
Harrington also said a militarized image of police can work at odds with the recruitment of women. “After 9/11 happened, I actually had police chiefs tell me, ‘We don’t have to do that anymore. We’re at war,’” she said.
It’s possible to hit higher goals. A 2013 survey found that women comprise about 20 to 25 percent of police in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
Some Oregon departments are trying to change. Gresham sent recruiters to the local tradeswomen’s job fair last year. A Gresham captain sent handwritten letters to female athletes at Portland-area universities asking them to consider careers in law enforcement.
Portland runs ads in publications targeted at women. The bureau’s website prominently displays images of female officers, and the agency altered its physical exam after noticing the test knocked out women disproportionately.
Addressing a potential recruit’s concerns about family may be the most important step.
Black, the officer in Forest Grove, knows that her work will likely mean she won’t be home for holidays and that she will miss some of her future child’s ballgames.
On balance, though, she thinks the sacrifices are worth it. She can model the values of justice and public service. And she’s seen examples of other women in law enforcement who made it work.
Her chief, Schutz, is a mother of six.
“It goes to show,” Black said, “you can do this job and be a wife and do normal things.”
Copyright 2015 The Oregonian