By the time Pia Kinney James arrived as a trainee at the Madison Police Department in Wisconsin, women were no longer required to wear skirts and 2-inch heels to work. By then, they were even allowed to carry guns.
Despite the department's advances toward diversity, James, a black woman with an Afro, said she became a target at the largely male police force in 1975.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday May 31, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
Women and policing -- The On the Law article in Friday's California section misidentified the National Center for Women and Policing as the National Center of Women and Policing.
"I had three strikes against me," she said, listing her dark skin, gender and hairstyle -- all traits that her male training officer disliked.
Speaking at a recent Los Angeles conference for women in law enforcement, James -- now an investigator at the department -- recalled the tense, often silent hours in her training officer's patrol car.
"You took some man's job. How's he supposed to support his family?" she recalled him saying.
Kinney, then a divorced mother, said, "How am I supposed to support my family?"
About 250 women, many of them high-ranking officers, gathered at the Wilshire Grand Hotel recently for a conference sponsored by the National Center of Women and Policing. Participants stressed their principal objective: increasing the number of female law enforcement officers in all ranks.
For years, police agencies have systematically kept women away, mainly by using agility tests that focus on upper-body strength, said Katherine Spillar, executive vice president of the Feminist Majority. Departments, especially those plagued with brutality complaints, have discovered that having more women is in their best interest, Spillar said.
"When women first came into policing, the concern was that we weren't strong enough, we weren't tough," said Travis County, Texas, Sheriff Margo Frasier.
But as most of the women at the conference pointed out, physical strength is not essential to fighting crime.
"We've been learning our whole lives how to deal with things without having to resort to physical strength and physical violence," she said. "I think the thing we most bring in is the ability to handle situations without having to ever lay hands on."
After the 1991 Rodney G. King beating, the Christopher Commission, which investigated Los Angeles Police Department practices, reported that women officers did not employ excessive force as often as their male counterparts. Male and female officers interviewed for the report said they thought women were better skilled at defusing confrontations with suspects through verbal communication.
