How to fix U.S. POLICING
There’s a simple solution: Hire more women
Not quite a decade ago, the Newark Police Department was desperately looking for ways to address its need to hire 400 officers, a shortage stemming from layoffs that had taken place in 2010 and subsequent attrition from retirements.
It was around then that Newark Police Chief Ivonne Roman saw a disturbing pattern. Although female applicants did better than their male counterparts on the entrance tests and background checks, 60 to 85 percent of them were flunking out of the academy. She also noticed something else: The physical fitness test, which men and women had previously passed at similar rates, had been moved from near the end of the fivemonth academy to the first three weeks.
Roman began convening female recruits for boot camp sessions in a park, getting them in shape to be better prepared for the test, which includes a 300-meter run, two dozen pushups, and 28 situps, each of which has to be done in about a minute.
“All of the women I trained passed and graduated the academy, becoming the largest representation of women in a police academy class. Thirty-one of the 48 were women,” she recalled.
It was progress, sure, but unlikely to make much of an impact in a profession that remains overwhelmingly male. Only about 12 percent of sworn officers and 3 percent of police leadership in the United States are women—numbers that haven’t budged in decades.
Other countries, including Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, have nearly twice the percentage of women in their police forces.
This needs to change, and maybe will, if only out of necessity. Law enforcement agencies across the country are facing a personnel shortage that is “the No. 1 issue in policing right now,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a leading
research and policy organization for law enforcement agencies.
Gone are the days when police departments were seeing 100 or more applicants for every opening to join the force. Amid new standards of accountability and awakened mistrust in their communities, especially after the reckoning that followed George Floyd’s 2020 death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, there has been an exodus of seasoned officers.
Meanwhile, the pool of candidates for the available openings has been drying up. In some cities, the number of recruits is down by 90 percent.
All of which is compelling police departments across the country to turn their attention to one of the most obvious and untapped solutions: attracting and retaining more female officers. Upward of 300 law enforcement agencies have joined what is known as the “30x30” initiative, signing a pledge to have at least 30 percent of their recruits be women by 2030.
Police officers now get much higher salaries than they once did, at times six figures. But agencies are realizing they must also offer benefits and a culture that could attract more women.
In what is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, the San Diego Police Department, which was losing three or four officers a month and was down by more than 200 officers, has set up an economical child care center that is open from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. The state of Washington has considered legislation that would allow the certification of officers who work part-time, making it easier to juggle a police career with family responsibilities.
Still, progress has been slow. As the Police Executive Research Forum noted in an August report on the staffing crisis, many departments still lack family-friendly pregnancy, child care and parental leave policies. In most departments, female officers have few female mentors to guide them as they try to work their way up the ladder.
The benefits of bringing more women into policing go well beyond the numbers. A host of research suggests female officers tend to be less likely than their male counterparts to use excessive force, and are named in proportionally fewer citizen complaints. They also inspire more trust in the community, making fewer discretionary arrests, particularly of people who are not white.
A 2021 study of four million traffic stops made by the Florida State Highway Patrol and Charlotte Police Department found that female officers are less likely than male ones to search drivers, but more likely to find contraband. “These results indicate that women officers are able to minimize the number of negative interactions with citizens without losses in effectiveness,” the researchers wrote in the American Journal of Political Science.
Getting more women into policing will require agencies to do some rethinking of what qualities, skills and strengths an officer should bring to the job. Physical fitness requirements, which not only exclude women but often do not reflect the daily demands of policing, have been some of the problems.
In suburban Maryland, the Montgomery County Police Department last year dropped the physical fitness test that was essentially a prerequisite for its academy and began offering pre-hire “fitness days” to help aspiring officers get into shape.
Not only did the number of qualified recruits double, but the department discovered another surprising benefit: Half of its 28-member August 2022 academy class was women, marking a first for the department.
“We were ecstatic,” Montgomery County Police Chief Marcus G. Jones told me. “What we’ve seen is that they bring a wide variety of experience and are interested in a wide variety of positions. I think they have branched out and shown that they are quite capable of doing the majority of the positions that are within the police department.”
But he notes that Montgomery County, whose police force is still only 20 percent female, is “not where we want to be. We still think we could do better, which is why we signed on to the 30x30 initiative.”
Easing physical fitness standards for both men and women is happening elsewhere, but not without controversy. In New York City, a decision by training chief Juanita Holmes to ditch a requirement that officers-to-be run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes and 21 seconds sparked an epic internal battle earlier this year with Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell that Mayor Eric Adams had to resolve.
The test was eliminated, but the ensuing furor is probably one of the reasons that neither woman is still in her job. Sewell stepped down abruptly in June after a brief and stormy tenure; Holmes now runs the city’s probation system.
Still, there are legitimate questions about whether fitness tests are weeding out women and men who might otherwise make stellar cops, and whether there might be other means of ensuring they are capable of doing the job. Though an officer needs to be fit enough to, say, race up several flights of stairs or bring aid to an unconscious victim, those aren’t always measured by an ability to do a certain number of pushups or demonstrate a given grip strength.
“There’s a reasonableness to having a level of physical conditioning. What does that look like? That’s up to debate and discussion,” said Kym Craven, executive director of the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives.
Roman’s experience in Newark got her pondering a host of other obstacles and disincentives for women in policing. In 2018, having retired as police chief, she approached Maureen McGough, who was then a top official at the National Institute of Justice, which is a Justice Department in-house research operation looking at evidence-based ways to understand crime and public-safety issues.
After organizing a Justice Department-sponsored national conference in December 2018 on the need for more women in policing, the two of them came up with 30x30 to much skepticism, noted McGough, who is now director of strategic initiatives for the Policing Project at New York University’s School of Law.
For two years, “we tried and failed to get other organizations and funders to engage on this issue,” she said. They nonetheless launched it in March 2021, building a website with a small amount of seed money from Microsoft’s Justice Reform Initiative.
That there were doubts was not surprising. Police recruiting has long been designed with the sensibilities and interests of men in mind. The ads often depict cops as action heroes, dangling out of helicopters, breaking down doors or storming, guns drawn, into dangerous situations as part of a SWAT team. Less often depicted are the far more common day-to-day satisfactions that come with supporting safer communities, mediating interpersonal conflicts and building relationships with citizens.
Similarly, police departments have traditionally looked for new officers from environments that are heavily male: the military and students in criminal justice programs or other law enforcement agencies. Craven, McGough and Roman all made strikingly similar points to me as they described how agencies could broaden their searches; that problem-solving skills vital to policing might be evident in a restaurant server or bartender experienced at juggling hectic shifts or someone with a background in social work.
“We have the tools. We have the research. We have the science. We have the law,” Roman said in a 2019 TED Talk. “This, my friends, should be a very easy fix.”
One that should not have taken a crisis to recognize. A few good women are already making a difference in policing. But a lot more of them are needed.