The Associated Press
KILLINGTON, Vt. (AP) -- The state’s first female state trooper will retire from law enforcement at the end of the month.
Carol Kostelnik, 60, will step as head of the criminal investigative unit at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
As one of the first women in professional law enforcement in Vermont, she now becomes only the second female police officer to have worked long enough to reach retirement.
Much has changed since Kostelnik first donned the green and khaki uniform of the Vermont State Police.
Kostelnik’s hiring in 1976 of a national trend to open policing and many other previously male-dominated professions to women. While women have flooded professions such as law and medicine since the 1970s, the number of women taking police jobs remains a trickle.
A 2001 Status of Women in Policing Survey pegged the national percentage of women in police agencies at 11.2 percent. At the Vermont State Police, the percentage of women is 7.4 percent. There are 22 women among the 296 state police officers
“We are always actively recruiting women,” said Col. Thomas Powlovich, director of the state police. “We keep trying and trying. We just can’t seem to increase the number.”
Kostelnik found it wasn’t easy breaking into what had been an all-male police agency since its founding in 1947.
“Being a female and having the strong personality I have -- those two things didn’t work in my favor with the officers,” she said.
A few officers made her three years as a trooper so challenging she jumped at an opportunity in 1979 to become a criminal investigator with the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Kostelnik said her problems began after her December graduation from the academy. She couldn’t seem to please her supervisors in the Shaftsbury field office.
She described one reprimand for not wearing her wide-brimmed hat. She had been chasing a suspect and he got into an accident. She said she rushed to the crash scene because the car was on fire. A newspaper photographer captured her hatless head in a picture of the accident.
Kostelnik would have been looking for a new career at the end of her six-month probationary period, but for the direct intervention of Public Safety Commissioner William Baumann. He rejected a recommendation she be fired and transferred her to St. Johnsbury.
Glendon Button, director of enforcement and safety at Motor Vehicles and Kostelnik’s current supervisor, had just begun his police career in Burlington in the mid-1970s. He said assigning women to patrol jobs challenged some officers’ long-held views about who was capable of doing police work. “Some supervisors were reluctant to send women on certain kinds of calls.”
One concern was that women lacked the strength to cope with the physical encounters of police work.
Kostelnik left the state police in 1979 because she was being transferred to a dead-end job fingerprinting people at the Pownal Race Track. “That was the last thing I wanted, to do no police work.”
Danforth, the state’s second female trooper, stayed with the state police for 23 years, but was fired in 1999. She declined to speak about her experiences because she continues to fight her termination.