Hiding in Plain Sight: The sexual harassment law suit. includes information about a law suit filed by a police cadet turned officer who graduated 21st out of 70 in her class yet was fired her first day of work allegedly for filing a sexual harassment complaint in the academy. In her law suit, she asked why she was being terminated and they said they didn’t like her and didn’t have to tell her.

I talked to some experts who said that this chain of events unfortunately isn’t uncommon. No matter what they tell you, if you are sexually harassed in a police academy and “suck it up” as they tell you, you may still have a career, but if you actually complain under their sexual harassment policy, you’re pretty much done. The academy supervisor who investigated the allegation then wrote the cadet a poor evaluation. The police department likely was serving as a gatekeeper. The last thing it wants is a woman who’s already complained about sexism to come into an environment clearly still steeped in it. She’s a known troublemaker.

And you did it without sarcasm?

And your keyboard didn’t, like . . . burst into flames from the concentrated evil?

That’s it. Clearly the internet is broken.

“The U.S. Department of Justice regularly performs comprehensive surveys of state and local law enforcement agencies, collected in volumes called “Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics.”

The inestimable economist John Lott has looked at the actual data. (And I’ll give you the citation! John R. Lott Jr., “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments and Crime,” Economic Inquiry, April 1, 2000.)

It turns out that, far from “de-escalating force” through their superior listening skills, female law enforcement officers vastly are more likely to shoot civilians than their male counterparts. (Especially when perps won’t reveal where they bought a particularly darling pair of shoes.)

Unable to use intermediate force, like a bop on the nose, female officers quickly go to fatal force. According to Lott’s analysis, each 1 percent increase in the number of white female officers in a police force increases the number of shootings of civilians by 2.7 percent.

Adding males to a police force decreases the number of civilians accidentally shot by police. Adding black males decreases civilian shootings by police even more. By contrast, adding white female officers increases accidental shootings. (And for my Handgun Control Inc. readers: Private citizens are much less likely to accidentally shoot someone than are the police, presumably because they do not have to approach the suspect and make an arrest.) ”

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter031705.asp

There are no better female cops and there are no better male cops. I think, some people, regardless to gender or race, are more qualified to do this or that job and some others are not.

I do not think, it has anything to do with feminist or men’s rights issues.
Police needs an overall better management for its personnel department, which is totally outdated and which should be reorganized urgently to catch up with a modern society.

The single most damaging and dangerous mistake I see cops make is to engage in “pissing matches” with suspects and other people they meet on the street. Trading insults or engaging in little power plays has several effects: (1) it can escalate an already dangerous situation; (2) it can lead to resentment of a specific cop which increases the likelihood that a civil suit will be filed, whether it is justified or not; (3) or it can lead to a general resentment among the general public, which kind of sucks when you want the jurors in a case to believe and sympathize with your cops in a criminal prosecution or a civil rights trial. I agree that, due to socialization, male cops are more likely to engage in petty one-up-manship, although female cops aren’t exactly immune.

Often the culture of a particular department encourages this macho, gunslinging attitude. More disturbingly, however, I think our larger culture in America encourages it too. Shows like “Law and Order,” “Cops,” and “NYPD Blue,” glorify bullying by cops. It seems that both cops and average Americans accept that cops have a right to engage in bullying behavior or that bullying is the ONLY means to accomplish the unquestionably difficult work cops have before them.

I’m also thinking that, even if crime rates remained the same, fewer injuries to suspects would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?

It’s more than any patriarchal rule not to hit women though. First of all, a lot of these men don’t follow those rules. Female officers do get attacked like their men counterparts. It might have to do with women’s communicative skills as well.

Yes, it is a good thing. To the community, because many agencies which have problems with officers using excessive force against different groups of people often have that problem start with groups of people, i.e. parolees, homeless that most of the public doesn’t care if it happens to them. Considering how violent parolees can be, there’s a temptation to agree with it, among people. But the problem is, excessive force that is not checked there will spread elsewhere.

It’s good for cities and counties in terms of financial liability. Less excessive force, less law suits for excessive force and most of the law suits filed against police are for excessive force and vehicle pursuits/accidents.

Usually, one of the standards people look for in police officers as a good benchmark is a high number of arrests and low number of complaints, assuming there’s a good complaint system in place(and in many places, there isn’t.)

Red flags in le officers: (Source: National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives(NOBLE)

1) high number of complaints
2)high number of excessive force complaints
3) high number of resisting arrest/battery of an officers charges involving suspects this officer encounters
4) arrests/seizures of evidence/ thrown out by judges
5) negative attitude towards neighborhoods/community policing

Different behavior work in different situations and what Bob King said in his post is true. I’ve heard similiar accounts involving LE agencies in different countries, in regard to handling DV calls. They instituted this strategy in large part b/c DV or “family disturbance” calls are among the most dangerous to handle. A smart agency utilizes what strategies work to both handle the situation without resorting to violating policies including the use of force policy and to keep its officers as safe as possible, but that takes good leadership.

In regards to Biker Dad’s questions, several of the studies done compared arrest rates and use of force rates and found male and female officers to be comparable in terms of those numbers. The rest of the information depends on the agencies. They are interesting questions. Most departments keep records on incidents pertaining to use of force, though they might differ in terms of what their threshold is in terms of incidents reported.

Use of force/defensive tactics training is often specialized to each person, based largely on their size and skills. Smaller women may be trained to rely on baton use, but then again, there are smaller men who may do so as well.

Domestic violence calls are some of the most dangerous calls of all. But they’ve come up with a wickedly effective way to defuse these situations - they pick the tiniest female cop they can find, one with really, really good communications and interrogation skills - and back her up with the biggest, most sterotpically alpha male type they can find. His job is to look extremly aware - and dangerous. Her job is to be cute - and politiely implacable. They give these girls the largest handgun they can plausibly lift, and they ask all the questions - good cop and bad. Bad cop just stands there, perhaps grunting for emphisis here and there.

It would be comical if it the psycology were not so devistaingly effective, and there is no question if you have the fortune, or misfortune of witnessing such a team in action, of what a truly effective team they can be.

Oh, and they don’t tend to get shot, and tend to resolve such situations without incident.

Which is not to say that either stereotype I portray is true of either actual person. But they are playing to, and upon, the hindbrains and preconceptions of - well, people who are pretty vulnerable to that sort of manipulation.

Although I’ll attest (since my involvement was an occasion of no shame at all to me) that not being subject to that sort of low minded manipulation didn’t help a bit. I could tell they were each catching things the other probably wouldn’t.

So anyone arguing that women have no place in police work is emperically idiotic from my pov. They save lives every day, often by NOT being men.

I’m afraid that once the patriarchy is abolished and men feel free to hit women, this benefit will be lost.

Wait…

Also, the argument begs the questions of are the “as many arrests” being made solely by single female officers, pairs of female officers, or mixed pairs? Do the female officers escalate more quickly to using weapons than male officers? In doing so, have they jumped beyond the “minimum force necessary” standard, while not venturing into excessive force? Yes, there can be a wide zone in there. Are the female officers beneficiaries of the patriarchial training “don’t hit a woman”, resulting in less frequent escalation by the “perps”? If so, will “females be better cops” when the patriarchy is abolished?

To support the argument being made, it would be necessary to set up divisions or entire departments that are composed solely of one gender, in areas and/or cities that have similar geo-social characteristics, and then monitor the experiment over time. Without that, the argument is merely a polemic.

I agree that I don’t think that police agencies are trying to move away from the paramilitary structure willingly. Some are doing it under court-mandated reforms(i.e. consent decrees) and even then slowly, or very slowly.(i.e. LAPD).

What I noticed is that there’s this all or nothing among police with minority neighborhoods. Either they bring in the troops or the tanks(metaphorically speaking, sometimes) or they aren’t there at all. That’s paramilitary structure in place. There’s more of an emphasis on community policing or COPs style policing, but I wonder if most agencies even know what that means, or entails. It’s often viewed with hostility though.

I was an EMT for several years, and among our medics were several women that were retired military MPs. Those ladies could be downright frightening when the situation warranted it. I’ve also seen “the good old boy” attitude among many of our officers locally. The sad thing is that for every bad cop in our local office there are two good ones. The misygynistic, racist police officers give the entire department a bad name.

The same thing applies in our Parish Fire Department, where I was told not to apply because I’d have to grow a penis to be hired. I tested for City Fire and passed the physical and written tests. There was no “easier” test for the female applicants. In firefighting and EMS the physical rigors are strenous, so the tests are demanding but not impossible. I took a position with our EMS provider over the fire department, and salary and benefits were the main reason. Our fire fighters barely make what first year teachers in the south make. But, that is a subject for another discussion.

And don’t think the female officer can’t do it, either. I watched a 5′3″ cute-as-a-button-type female officer take down a 6′2″ mean drunk so fast it was actually funny. She didn’t really hurt him but he knew she could have.

In our county we often partner up a smaller female officer with the biggest dude we can find but sometimes the good cop / bad cop thing goes the exact opposite that you think it would. The big cop will go over and say, “Brother, I’m mean…but she’s flat scary.” (Cue evil female smile). Works wonders.

Some of them remind of the cops I knew in the Deep South during the 1960s. We were all animals to them. The advantage they had over the current generation was that the law was on their side. They could “kick ass” with impunity, beat suspects on the street, coerce confessions and tell racist jokes during the booking procedure, and if a few of them actually showed up in sheets for a lynching, well, that was OK, too.