Migration Category: NCWP Old Site

Kiran Bedi, India’s first woman police officer and the current Special Commissioner of the Delhi police, has been appointed Civilian Police Adviser in the Department of Peacekeeping at the UN. Bedi is the first woman to hold the position. The assignment includes oversight of training and legal aspects of UN policing. Bedi is an important voice for innovative policing, prison reform, and women’s rights in India and in Asia. She is the recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Joseph Beus Foundation Award, the Morrison Tom Gitchoff Award, and the Asian Region Award for Drug Prevention & Control. In addition to her professional contributions to improving the quality of policing in India, Bedi is the founder of two voluntary organizations that provide primary education for poor children, and run adult literacy programs and vocational training in inner cities, rural areas and prisons. The United Nations recently granted Kiran Bedi the Serge Sotiroff Memorial Award for drug abuse prevention, a further testament to the international recognition for Bedi and her organizations. Bedi holds a law degree and a PhD in the field of drug abuse and domestic violence.

Last week, the Bloomfield Police Department in Connecticut held a ceremony to inaugurate the state’s first woman police chief, Betsy Hard. Hard is a twenty-year veteran of the Santa Monica, California Police Department, where she climbed from the rank of officer to commander. The town of Bloomfield reported that Hard was chosen for her strong community policing skills, and respected history in law enforcement. Bloomfield Town Manager Louie Chapman Jr. commented that Hard “reflects a keen understanding of the role of the police department as a positive factor in the community. It’s an approach to policing that says you don’t have to be an occupying force in the community to enforce the laws.” The National Center for Women & Policing congratulates Betsy Hard for breaking a glass ceiling and commends her for her achievements. Women are still starkly underrepresented in law enforcement’s top command, holding only 7.3% of top command positions and 9.6% of supervisory positions, as reported in our 2001 Status of Women in Policing survey.

Claudia Childs was named the Chief of Detectives for the Buffalo Police Department last month, and is the first woman to hold the position. She will oversee the detective units of Major Crimes, Narcotics, Special Services, General Investigation Unit, and Sex Offense Section. Childs joined the Department in 1982, just 2 years after the first woman was admitted into Buffalo’s ranks. For the next 15 years, Childs was a patrol officer and also worked as a radio dispatcher. In 1997, she was promoted to lieutenant and then later to Captain. As Chief of Detectives, Childs now holds the rank of Inspector. The National Center for Women & Policing congratulates Claudia Childs for breaking a glass ceiling and commends her for her achievements. Women are still starkly underrepresented in law enforcement’s top command, holding only 7.3% of top command positions and 9.6% of supervisory positions, as reported in our 2001 Status of Women in Policing survey .

A New York City appeals court unanimously ruled yesterday that the independent Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) will have the right to prosecute police officers being investigated for misconduct. The court also mandated, however, that all CCRB trials of police officers will be monitored by New York Police Department officials. Florence Finkle, the Director of the CCRB, and the first woman to head the Board since it became independent from the police department a decade ago, said that both the CCRB and the NYPD are still reviewing the court’s decision to understand if the Board will fully take-over prosecuting officers, a job currently performed by the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner of Trials. Some police union leaders have expressed dismay over the expanding role of the civilian board, but advocates for police reform see the court’s decision as a positive move towards a fairer, more balanced oversight of the NYPD.

Sheryl Paloni, the Albuquerque police officer who filed a discrimination complaint alleging unfair discipline earlier this year, has received a favorable ruling from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As reported in our July 2nd, 2002 article, Paloni accused the Albuquerque Police Department of discrimination after she was disciplined for firing her sidearm during a pursuit, while male officers guilty of the same error in the same incident were not disciplined. Paloni admitted to having shot at the car of a fleeing bank robbery suspect, which is expressly discouraged in department policy. While Paloni accepted that she should have received some discipline, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after the other female officer involved in the incident was also disciplined, while none of the male officers were. Paloni’s victory though is bittersweet. She was pleased to see that the Commission recognized that the Department’s actions were obviously discriminatory, but the incident cost her a 20-year police career. After experiencing significant backlash from her colleagues for filing the complaint, Paloni feared that her fellow officers would refuse to back her up on calls. She felt remaining on the force “just wasn’t safe.” Paloni’s only hope at this point is that she has forced her former Department to take a closer look at a culture that she says was consistently biased against women when it came to promotions and disciplinary action. She also hopes that her actions will encourage women officers who follow her to stand up for themselves and demand equality in the workplace.

Over the last 20 years, New London, Connecticut police officer Genaro Velez Jr. has been arrested five times on domestic violence charges and has had five restraining orders against him from four different women, reports a Connecticut online information source. All five of the charges were eventually dropped, and Velez has never been disciplined or tried for the crimes. In April 1988, after claims that Velez had beaten his girlfriend, then-Police Chief Richard Kistner warned Velez in a letter that future domestic violence would “result in severe disciplinary action.” In response, Velez filed a grievance and police agreed to remove the letter from his file after 18 months. Over the next four years, Velez was arrested 2 more times, on charges that included third-degree assault, kidnapping and sexual assault. The New London Police Department continues to deny any wrongdoing in the investigations and claims that each situation was handled appropriately. Velez remains on the job. Police family violence is a significant problem in police departments.

The Seekonk, Massachusetts Police Department has taken a strong stance against officer-involved domestic violence. The town has unanimously approved a new domestic abuse policy that sets out clear protocol for how police should respond to a domestic violence crime being committed by a fellow officer. The new policy requires that the officer must be arrested, and that the arrest must be immediately brought to the attention of the police chief. The officer’s weapon, badge, police identification and any off-duty firearms also must be confiscated. Additionally a special domestic violence officer will be required to respond to the scene and to advise the victim regarding shelters and other victim services. While this policy may seem like it should be common practice, there has been a long documented history of officers not following proper procedure when it comes to “policing their own,” instead turning a blind eye and allowing the officer crime to go unreported and undisciplined. Seekonk Chief Vito Scotti said that the new policy is important because it explicitly reminds officers of their expected code of conduct. As departments across the country are embracing new policies in response to the police officer domestic violence scandals of the last decade, the National Center for Women & Policing urges that more departments move to implement policies like Seekonk’s. Domestic violence perpetrators working in law enforcement puts the public, and especially women, at risk. See the National Center’s police family violence fact sheet for more information.

Over a year and a half after an internal audit of the Atlanta Police Department found 34 unreported rape cases, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington has launched an investigation. The audit was ordered in February 2001 by now-retired Atlanta Deputy Chief C.B. Jackson after an anonymous letter was sent to then-Atlanta Police Chief Beverly Harvard claiming Jackson and others were “underreporting sex crimes —particularly rape and aggravated sodomy,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. At the time of the audit, Jackson claimed that the 34 rape cases had been investigated, but that if a detective suspected a victim was lying, the case would be put in a special file that wouldn’t even be assigned a case number. Jackson is now retired, and the lieutenant who headed the sex unit when the audit took place has been transferred to another until just over a month ago. The investigation into the unreported rapes is ongoing and as of yet there has been no disciplinary action taken against the accused officers.

Eighty municipalities across Pennsylvania have bucked the progressive trend towards the elimination or reduction of physical agility tests, and have instead implemented a rigorous physical test which involves jumping over a 6 foot wall, and dragging a 185 pound dummy for 50 feet. Police in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania administered the new test the weekend. Of the 17 recruits, only nine passed the test and were able to progress to take the written exam. The agency has not released the gender breakdown of the recruits. Butler Township, Pennsylvania Police Chief Charles Altmiller commented that “police chiefs like the new physical fitness test because it’s so oriented to police work.” This chief’s statement is contrary to the overwhelming research which suggests that tests like the 6 foot wall are irrelevant to police work, starkly evidenced by the fact that many departments have policies that explicitly instruct officers not to jump over anything when they can’t see what is on the other side. Extensive research has found that the majority of police work involves communication and administrative skills, and that one of the most effective skills an officer can bring to policing is the ability to defuse a potentially violent situation, a skill that many women are apt to have. Police reform advocates across the country have spoken out against many police department’s use of excessive physical agilities testing requirements, finding that they often lack any real basis in actual police work, and work to eliminate women and small men from the recruit pool. Additionally, the fact that the majority of departments require tests only upon entry, and never test again for the duration of an officer’s career, further corroborates the fact that these standards do not truly reflect what it required of an officer once on the job. The National Center for Women & Policing advocates the use of tests that more accurately reflect police work by placing importance on communication and cognitive skills, in addition to testing for basic physical fitness.

Mayor Jim Hahn and new LAPD Chief William Bratton announced a plan on Monday to significantly increase the numbers of women in the LAPD. The LAPD, which has been under a consent decree for over 20 years to hire more women, still has not met the decree’s goal of a force comprised of 20% women, though the department is getting close, having been stalled at 19% for many years. The new plan hopes to increase the percentage of women to at least 25% of the department by increasing recruitment efforts targeted towards women, and by strengthening physical preparation programs and mentoring relationships. The plan was developed with input from the National Center for Women & Policing, the Feminist Majority Foundation, and the California Women’s Law Center. Penny Harrington, Founding Director of the NCWP, commented that “while the plan is a good start, it could be improved by increasing the hiring goals, and overhauling the so-called entry requirements. The tests continue to underemphasize communication skills abilities, and in so doing, wash out qualified female candidates.”

Phoenix, the sixth largest city in the country, has the worst record of solving rape cases among the nation’s big cities, reports the Arizona Republic. Citing the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the Republic reports that on average the Phoenix Police Department catches sexual assailants less than a quarter of the time, compared to a national average of fifty percent. Police department leaders and victim advocates say one of the highest factors contributing to Phoenix’s dismal record in solving rape cases is a lack of funding, which has left sex crime units understaffed and the department in need of modernized equipment. Despite a 35 percent increase in Phoenix’s population, chief of Maricopa County Attorney’s Sex Crimes Bureau Cindi Nannetti says the city hasn’t added a detective since 1988. Add to that the fact that many jurisdictions don’t have a computer database where detectives can see patterns and share information about serial rapists, and that federal grants funding detectives to work on “cold cases” has nearly dried up. Stephanie Orr, executive director for the Center Against Abuse and Violence, says there is a “tremendous apathy” in Arizona to spend money on enforcement, education and support programs.