POLICE FOUNDATION

RESEARCH BRIEF

While women have long been part of the nation’s police forces, they traditionally were assigned to "women’s work," e.g., clerical duties, working with youth, or guarding female prisoners. Patrolling on the "front lines" of crime would expose women to violence, and it was generally believed that police administrators had serious reservations about a woman’s ability to perform well in violent situations.

But in 1972, Congress passed an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting state and local agencies from job discrimination based on gender. Unless they had valid occupational reasons for not doing so, police departments were required to hire and assign women to jobs, including patrol, on an equal basis with men.

Even before the law changed, however, the Police Foundation had begun surveying police departments to find out what was known about policewomen and their role in the law enforcement community. Little objective information was uncovered.

The foundation asked The Urban Institute to help evaluate how well women performed as patrol officers. The evaluation was designed to provide police administrators with scientific information about the assignment of women to patrol work, how well women performed, and how citizens responded to them.

The Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia was selected for the study. Since 1969, the department had explored means of expanding employment opportunities for women. In 1972, it assigned a substantial number of newly hired policewomen to patrol work, thus breaking a national barrier by allowing women to perform police work traditionally reserved for men.

But departments assigning women to patrol can expect that male attitudes will create personnel problems. Some men, for example, may not believe that women can perform as well as men. As a result, female officers may be assigned by male managers to stationhouse (clerical) duties more often than males.

Male officers also tend to be protective toward women. They may insist that female officers remain in the police car during traffic stops or arrests. Unfortunately, some women accept this less active role. Male officers may then complain that women are not doing equal work while receiving equal pay. The study indicated that the tendency of men to be protective toward women may make it difficult to fire incompetent policewomen during their probationary period.

Many police departments will assign women to patrol only because it is required by law. Deploying female patrol officers, however, creates incentives to question many traditional police management practices now that they must be applied equally to men and women. This, in turn, creates opportunities for developing better selection criteria, performance standards, and supervision for all officers.

The practical impact of this study has been greater than many in the field anticipated. Owing to its findings, the chief asset of the nation’s police departments–their human resources–were suddenly and significantly enhanced. The hiring of women for traditionally male dominated police roles not only enlarged the pool of talent but also reduced the cost of recruiting. According to the latest available statistics, in cities with more than one million inhabitants, the percentage of women officers has risen from two in 1974 to 10.4 percent today, a five hundred percent increase in little over a decade.

The Police Foundation continued its work on the role of women in policing. To disseminate the results of its study in Washington, D.C., it published a manual which covers information on recruitment, training, promotions, performance, and the development of operational guidelines. The foundation published a status report on women in policing in 1981.