There was a time when the idea of having female cops seemed silly. After all, they weren’t strong enough, tough enough, threatening enough, to deal with all the bad dudes out there. And yet here we are, with women in blue who are just as familiar with the First Rule of Policing as the guys. And yet, Slate posits that we can fix the excesses of police violence with this one cool trick.
“We’re not the ones out there shooting,” says Janeé Harteau, former chief of police of the Minneapolis Police Department. “This is really about gender at its very core.”
A growing number of police reform advocates say the way to fix the policing problem in America might be to hire more female police officers. In fact, they say gender parity was a key item missing from the conversation when, in the wake of a series of high-profile police shootings of Black Americans in 2020, a federal police reform bill made its way this year to the halls of Congress.
While it’s not quite accurate that men shoot and women don’t, and while this seems to be a rather flagrantly stereotypical view of women that would be anathema to reformers if used in a negative fashion, such as women cops weren’t up to the job, it’s apparently totally acceptable to argue that women are very different from men when it serves their interest.
Yet decades of research has proved what anecdotal evidence has demonstrated for half a century, that compared with their male colleagues, female police officers use less excessive force, are named in fewer complaints and lawsuits, are perceived by communities as more honest and compassionate, see better outcomes for crime victims (especially in sexual assault and domestic violence cases), and make fewer discretionary arrests, especially of Black and Latino people. And, most important, when female officers do stop or arrest people, they are more likely than their male peers to actually find guns or drugs.
Are men more prone to use violence than women, toxic masculinity being what it is? Are women more empathetic than men? Does this have something to do with the kind of guys who want to be cops? Are there enough women who want a shield anyway?
Advocates say increasing the number of female police officers cannot be dismissed as simply a women’s rights issue. “This is about improving public safety outcomes for communities,” McGough says. While millions of dollars have been spent to reduce violence by police officers, including body cameras and training programs, not much has changed, she adds. Reports show that the number of people killed by police still hovers around 1,000 a year.
Two new studies released this year have reinforced earlier findings about women in policing from the ’90s and the early aughts. Despite studies showing that women have better outcomes, the overall pool of policing research is thin. Researchers say the dearth can be attributed to a lack of transparency by police departments over the last several decades.
It’s curious, given that we’re simultaneously faced with arguments that gender shouldn’t matter, that it’s the solution to police reform. Is it? Are men the problem? Will more women in blue be the answer to excessive force and the premature leap to violence? Or is this just facile gender stereotyping that promotes the facile assumptions about empathetic women and will backfire when some perp decides to beat the crap out of the female cop who tells him to “freeze” because what’s she going to do about it?
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