On the beat for 100 years
Female officers now the norm
Const. Candace Werestiuk is staring down a young man outside a Jasper Avenue restaurant.
He is drunk and confrontational and appears to be on the verge of violence, swearing angrily as he digs in his pockets, pulling out cans of beer and a package of rolling papers and putting them on the hood of the police car.
“What the f--- did I do, man?” he asks her.
Werestiuk’s manicured hand rests lightly on the gun on her hip. Her cellphone is in a pink case on her belt, and makes the quiet sound of a gun ejecting bullet casings when it rings.
“What kind of record do you have?” she asks the man. “Ugly,” he says. As they talk, the young man gradually settles down, eventually telling Werestiuk his name, then letting himself be frisked and loaded into the back of the police car without any trouble.
“Hey,” he says to Werestiuk, turning to her for a moment as he climbs inside the car with two male officers. “You are a sweetheart.”
It has been 100 years since “Miss Annie Jackson” arrived for her first day of work as a special constable with the Edmonton police department. She started on Oct. 1, 1912, as the city’s first female police officer, and the first female constable in Canada.
The 33-year-old wore an ankle-length skirt and a large, prim hat on the job, and was tasked with protecting “the morals of Edmonton’s young girls,” warding off the pimps who were hanging out at city train stations, prowling for young women.
Jackson’s hiring was big news, appearing in a British newspaper with a headline that read: “Policewoman Appointed to Guard Canadian Flappers.”
Jackson had to leave the force in 1918 because she was getting married.
Though there were many women in those days interested in the job of police constable — 47 had applied for Jackson’s position — the number of female officers in Edmonton remained very low. There were only two in the 1940s, and 16 by 1968. Today, there are 353 female officers in the Edmonton Police Service, with women making up just over 22 per cent of the total force.
The goal in 1989 was to have females make up 10 per cent of the police force. Today, that goal has now been doubled and more women are being actively recruited for the job.
“I hate being called a pioneer, it makes me feel like I am 100 years old,” says Insp. Terri Uhryn, who has been an EPS officer for 30 years and is one of its highest ranking female officers. The 50-year-old says she’d originally planned to be a nurse, but later realized “I’m not that nice,” and decided to be a cop instead.
When Uhryn joined the force in 1981, women still faced challenges because of their gender. Only four of the 27 recruits in Uhryn’s class were female. On the streets, some male officers didn’t want to work with female partners, or, in some cases, their wives didn’t want them to.
“I had a sergeant who was quite sexist,” Uhryn says. “Most of them were quite sexist at the time. But for the most part, when you got to work and you did your job, and you proved your abilities, everybody treated you like they would treat anyone else. But you did have the stupid remarks.”
Today, Uhryn said she considers herself “like one of the guys.” She is not easily offended but says she also makes it clear what her boundaries are.
“It’s just part of being a female in a male-dominatedtype profession,” she says with a shrug.
Candace Werestiuk’s partner, Const. Aaron Ward, says he believes no modern police force could — or would want to — operate without female officers.
Ward says female officers can be essential in dealing with situations such as sexual assaults and spousal violence, where a female victim may not trust or feel comfortable with a male officer. And while female officers usually don’t have the same physical size or strength as the men, Ward says they don’t necessarily have to.
Ward has been scratched, bitten, punched, and kicked by female suspects, but he says many men are hesitant to hit a woman — whether she’s a police officer or not.
He points to a situation like the drunk young man on Jasper Avenue, where the presence of a female officer de-escalated a situation that could otherwise have become violent.
“In that situation, Candace basically talked him down,” Ward says.
Werestiuk has been a police officer since 2005, inspired by the positive role an RCMP officer had in her hometown in Manitoba.
The 30-year-old says police training was frustrating at
times, because she felt like she had to be physically on par with male officers, and got upset with herself if she wasn’t.
“If I couldn’t do 20 chin-ups, I’d really get down on myself,” she says. “Now I know it’s not the end all and be all. I struggled internally with that at the time, but now I’ve tried to set my own goals.”
It took decades before female officers were able to carry guns, and years more before they were be able to wear their guns, handcuffs and billy clubs on their belts like male officers, rather than in department-issued purses.
Eileen Finlayson, who became an Edmonton police officer in 1956, was one of the first two policewomen to pass the same basic training course as male officers, and was one of the first in the country to carry a revolver. A former store detective at Eaton’s, Finlayson fought for wage parity, and helped ensure female officers could earn the same wage as male constables after the same years of service. Before that, female officers were given wage increases much more slowly; at one point it took female officers 15 years to earn the same wage as a third-year male constable.
In 1968, Finlayson, then a sergeant, told the Edmonton Journal that acceptance of women officers was getting better, but that “a slight discrimination” still existed.
“Women still haven’t been fully accepted in the role of police work,” she said at the time.
Almost 45 years later, Const. Heather Herbert says women still have things to prove.
“We do fight a different fight,” she says. “It’s obviously gotten better over time, but I think it’s still very present.”
Herbert says female officers are often held to a different standard: Judged more harshly for their mistakes; their accomplishments lessened by the idea that they may have got a specific position or promotion because of their gender, not their skills.
“You’re constantly having to prove yourself,” she says. “We’re going up against something that males haven’t gone against, and that hasn’t changed.”
But Herbert thinks it will, as a new generation of male and female officers grows into the police force together.
“The guys we are working with now are the ones that are going to be rooting for us,” she says.
Phyllis Milligan was Edmonton’s highest ranking female officer when she retired as Inspector in 1994. She told the Journal at the time of her retirement that male officers used to call her “sir” instead of “ma’am,” because they could never get used to having a woman ranked as high as inspector.
Today, there are three female inspectors, including Uhryn, and the deputy chief is a woman.
But Uhryn was only the third woman to reach the management level in the EPS, and there are still only four female officers working at that level. One hundred years after Annie Jackson was hired, only six women have ever reached the rank of inspector.
“That still blows me away,” Uhryn admits. “That still makes me sad. We’re getting there, but it’s sure still been a long time coming.”
There has never been a woman on the EPS tactical team. Though women have tried out for the elite unit, none have so far been able to meet the intense physical requirements.
Sgt. Brenda Dalziel says she would like to see a time when women don’t necessarily feel like they have to compete against male officers, when there is more recognition of the traits women use as wives, mothers and nurturers.
“We try to push those aside like those aren’t our strengths, and we try to make ourselves a lot more like our male counterparts,” she says.
“But some of those stereotypically female traits, those things that make women women, are our strengths. They do make us different from the guys we work with, and I think we need to lean more heavily on that … and be able to say, ‘We are moms, we are wives, we are partners, but we are still equals here.’
“We are not trying to be all the same people.”
Werestiuk says her mother didn’t want her to be a police officer, thinking it was too dangerous for a woman.
Now Werestiuk is a mother herself, with a 22-month-old son and an eight-year-old daughter, who wants to be a police officer when she grows up.
Werestiuk is one of only three women who work in the coveted downtown beat positions. She is strong and tough. Personable and funny.
She arrives for a night shift on a crisp fall evening with a homemade chocolate zucchini cake for the other officers. Ward says he can’t think of a better partner.
“She’s definitely a good example of a police officer,” he says. “Male or female.”