Officer inspired Cagney & Lacey

MARGARET YORK 1941 - 2021 Became LAPD'S first female deputy chief

Margaret York, who has died aged 80, became the first female deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department after a career in which, as one half of a female homicide investigation team, she inspired the popular 1980s television series Cagney & Lacey.

She was appointed to the LAPD in 1965 as a civilian telephone operator, then after training at a police academy joined the force in 1968.

It seemed unlikely at the time that she had much of a future in the police. Not only was she a divorced mother of three, struggling to bring up her children while holding down a demanding job, but policewomen in the 1960s were mainly confined to desk jobs or low-level detective work. They could not be promoted beyond sergeant and were banned from supervising male officers.

Nonetheless, by the 1970s York was working as a detective in the homicide department alongside Helen Kidder — a partnership established almost by default as no men wanted to work alongside a woman. They were soon winning high marks for solving crimes.

York felt that part of the reason for their success was that suspects often seemed to regard them as mother figures with whom they could relax and talk more easily — “or they think we are too stupid to know what to do with the information.”

Helen Kidder said: “We didn't start putting words in their mouths. We gave them a chance to tell their stories.”

She did not wholly approve of the way the women detectives were portrayed in Cagney & Lacey (Tyne Daly played Mary Beth Lacey, the character based on her), observing that the series was “too New York” and depicted “two women trying to do exactly what men do” rather than showing the skills and advantages that women could bring to the role.

But she acknowledged that the series went far in showing how women in the force had to combat sexism from their colleagues as determinedly as they fought crime on the streets.

Margaret Ann Mandley was born on Aug. 4, 1941 in Canton, Ohio. The family moved to California when she was 13.

It was after her first marriage, to Donald York, ended in divorce that she joined the LAPD, and in 1981 she married Lance Ito, then a young prosecuting attorney. As Judge Ito, he would preside in 1995 over the trial for murder of O.J. Simpson.