FORCE DIVERSITY
Women in Danbury area PDs looking for equal treatment
When Ridgefield police officer Kate Williams responds to calls she is sometimes greeted by people as “honey” or “sweetie.”
“We go out there and people are not shy to say what they may think of you off appearance so, in the past, it doesn’t happen all the time, I’ll get comments about my looks, my appearance,” she said.
Williams doesn’t take it personally though, she recognizes it as something that’s “obviously gender influence,” and she knows more often than ever people are expecting a “middle-aged man” to show up, not a woman.
“We make up such a small percentage of the cops in this department, so I think it’s more just the expectation,” said Williams’ colleague, Detective Victoria Ryan.
Williams and Ryan are the only two female police officers in the overall 39 officers the Ridgefield department has. National data shows women account for just 12 percent of all police officers nationwide, despite women representing more than half of the country’s population.
In recognition of the need for more female officers, several agencies across the country and locally have been making additional efforts to hire women to the force.
Danbury Police Chief Patrick Ridenhour said he has seen diversity be an issue among police for years.
“For many years it’s been a white male-dominated profession going back to when formalized policing began,” he said.
And Danbury officer Melissa Morrill — a 16-year cop and one of 12 female officers in a 153-person police force — knows exactly what it feels like to be a woman working in a male-dominated field where only a sliver of your fellow officers are women.
“It is a male-dominated profession but when we took this job… I just want to be treated the same. We don’t need to be treated any differently, our limitations are probably the same,” Morrill said.
“We just want to be treated equally and being a female in this line of work, sometimes it’s not that easy,” she added.
Like Williams, Morrill is no stranger to people expecting her to be a male officer when she answers calls. And, she’s noticed some people “don’t always appreciate” a woman showing up, because not only do they expect a man, but they “prefer a man.”
“With the public, sometimes you know, you call for a police officer and you expect some big muscley kind of guy to show up and then you have this 5’8 female that weighs 130 pounds show up and they’re like ‘what are you going to do,’” she said.
“They don’t want to talk to you. I really feel at times that I have a problem with that, but as soon as you start talking to us you realize that we’re just as good as the men we work with,” she added.
Granted these Danbury area police officers explained they have not faced discrimination from their male colleagues and praised them, that is not always the case for others.
Under-representation
Ridenhour joined the police force in 1988. And in all his years as an officer, he said there’s always been a “fair” number of female police officers in the departments he’s worked in.
However, as demonstrated by the Ridgefield and Danbury department metrics, female police officers are hard to come by. Nationally, women only make up about 12 percent of all police, a number which is up about 8 percent from the 1980s, according to Terrence Dwyer, a legal studies professor at Western Connecticut State University, lawyer and retired police officer.
Similarly, only about “one-in-10 supervisors or managers and just 3 percent of local police chiefs” are women, according to a 2013 Pew Research study, and four in ten female officers have admitted they feel men are treated better when it comes time for assignments and promotions.
Ridenhour said one piece of the puzzle that hinders attempts to diversify departments are recruiting obstacles, indicating “numbers are always a challenge.”
“It takes time, a willingness for females and people in underserved communities to really take a serious look at law enforcement and put their hat in the ring,” he said.
“There’s definitely ways that we can do things better in my view, but it’s not just at the agency level where those changes need to take place,” he added.
What discrimination some female officers face looks like
While Ridenhour said he has not personally witnessed any discrimination first-hand, he recognizes it is an experience some female and minority officers endure.
“In general, it’s difficult when you enter a profession that is dominated by people who don’t look like you. There’s always a desire to prove yourself, challenges when you’re trying to move up the ranks and, just like there is for male officers, challenges balancing the work life and the personal life,” he said.
Dwyer, who personally knows the field and has prosecuted cases of discrimination against female officers, said women get “a lot more scrutiny” and certainly deal with forms of discrimination throughout their careers.
“One thing I noticed is that they always have to be that much better than their male colleagues,” he said.
In his experience, Dwyer believes female officers “put up with things no male officer would ever have to put up with,” whether it be demeaning comments or assignments, harassment or even assault.
Despite it not being a prevalent issue, he said it is surely occurring enough that departments have to be aware of it and guard against it.
How discrimination cases brought forth often play out
Dwyer recently took a sabbatical to research this very discrimination. He examined over 175 cases from departments nationwide dating as far back as 2000 to look at the gender discrimination some women faced at the hands of male officers. Several of these cases of discrimination, harassment and assault did happen on Connecticut soil and Dwyer had merely scratched the surface in his search.
In many cases, he found, the behavior worsens when a woman issues a complaint. Dwyer has frequently warned his clients to “be on your guard,” because of retaliation.
Additionally, because of said retaliation, some women who call him for advice become “hesitant” to move forward with a case because they’ve “seen retaliation in their departments or heard the stories about it,” he said. He’s seen plenty of cases dropped as a result.
In his years defending a range of female police officers in discrimination, harassment and assault cases, Dwyer said he often sees accused officers "blaze this trail of sexual harassment wherever they go," by jumping between departments to avoid charges that eventually catch up with them later.