Mary Ellen Abrecht, early female beat cop who became Superior Court judge, dies

Nineteen sixty-eight was an inauspicious year to become a police officer. Anti-Vietnam War protesters and police battled each other on the streets of Chicago at the Democratic National Convention that summer. The conflict played out on national television and in newspapers. Militant activists of all colors and counterculture followers known as hippies routinely referred to police officers as “pigs.”

Despite the tension on the street, Mary Ellen Abrecht — newly married, newly minted with a college degree in religion — arrived in Washington and needed a job.

She came across a help-wanted police department flier and took a chance on it.

Within a few years, she played a pivotal role in dispelling a firmly entrenched notion on the local force that women, usually placed in deskbound assignments, were too fragile for the rigors of uniformed policing of the inner-city streets.

Abrecht, who helped manage and coordinate a pilot program of 100 women cops on the beat in 1972 and later became a prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and a Superior Court judge, died Aug. 16 at her home in Washington. She was 72, and the cause was metastatic breast cancer, said her husband, Gary L. Abrecht, a former D.C. police deputy chief who retired as U.S. Capitol Police Chief.

In her book “The Making of a Woman Cop,” Abrecht described how in December 1968, as one of the steps in becoming a police officer, a sergeant handed her a black .38 Smith and Wesson service revolver.

Within the District of Columbia, she was told, she would have her gun handy at all times: “When you go to a wedding you wear your gun. When you attend church you take your weapon.”

By the early 1970s the women’s rights movement was gaining prominence, and police departments across the country were facing pressure to expand opportunities for women officers. Washington, like most big-city police departments, had long had women police officers, but they were mostly exempt from patrol duty. They did not walk a beat, nor did they wear uniforms. Against internal opposition from many male supervisors, Washington’s Police Chief Jerry V. Wilson decided to try out 100 women on patrol, and he chose Abrecht as his coordinator on the project.

It would be “the crucial test of real equality,” Abrecht wrote in her book, published in 1976 soon after the she left the force to pursue a legal career. “Patrol work was the background of the entire police service. It meant walking the beat.” It also meant getting women into police uniforms. Without uniforms, she noted, women “could not be recognized as police officers.”

Mary Ellen Benson was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, on Dec. 18, 1945. Her father worked for the Farm Credit Administration, and her mother was a laboratory assistant at the all-woman Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley. She graduated in 1967 from Mount Holyoke College and then spent a year of graduate study at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

While working as a D.C. police officer, she lectured around the country on equal treatment and opportunities for women police officers. She graduated from Georgetown University Law School in 1974 and left the police department the next year as a uniformed patrol sergeant.

She spent the next 15 years as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, until her appointment as a Superior Court judge in 1990. She presided over family, civil and criminal trials, taking senior status for 12 years in 2003 to work part time.

As a senior judge, she took special delight in officiating over same-sex weddings, which were legalized in D.C. in 2009. She was a colored-pencil artist and a docent at the Supreme Court.

In addition to her husband, of Washington, survivors include two daughters, Karen Tompros of Boston and Rachel Abrecht-Litchfield of Washington; two sisters; a brother and five grandchildren.