Women Cops on the Beat

Can they do the job as well as men ?

On routine night patrol last August, two policewomen came upon a bizarre scene in downtown Detroit: a naked man, standing in the middle of the road with a Doberman pinscher, burning dollar bills. The officers, Katherine Perkins, 35, and Glenda Rudolph, 26, radioed for help and tried to persuade the man to come along quietly. Before they could make the arrest. Sergeant Paul Janness, 31, arrived. The naked man went berserk, flailing away at the policeman. Janness was badly beaten, and claimed that the two policewomen failed to come to his aid. When witnesses agreed, Perkins and Rudolph were charged with cowardice.

Last month a police trial board found both women guilty and recommended dismissal. Then the case was reopened when a last-minute witness showed up and testified that one of the policewomen had "grabbed and kicked" the man during the scuffle with Janness. Though the trial board has met again to evaluate the new testimony, the incident has undermined the reputation of women in operation units. Some women on the force are bitter because their two colleagues were not given the chance to resign quietly. Even if Perkins and Rudolph are cleared, they say the case will leave the lingering impression that female cops are not up to the job. Admits Executive Deputy Chief James Bannon: "If a woman officer went out tomorrow and saved six male officers' lives, the men would call her a superwoman, but it wouldn't change many attitudes."

Are women cops doing the job? The most negative answer came last fall in a study by Sociologist Patricia Weiser Remmington. After a year of riding five shifts a week on police patrols in Atlanta, Remmington concluded that males cope with the presence of females on the force by dealing with them as natural subordinates --and the females accept the situation. A policeman talks to a policewoman in a teasing kind of banter, as if the female cop were a tomboyish kid sister. Because women cops were not trained in the martial arts or encouraged to handle tough assignments, they often showed a lack of confidence, and sometimes deliberately drove slowly to a potentially violent call. Says Remmington: "Either the view of females as weaker or the view and self-image of American police as symbols of physical power will have to change."

Most police departments give a more positive view of women cops than Remmington does, but the men in the ranks have their doubts. A 1977 study of the Detroit police found that the men consider women cops liabilities in dangerous situations because of "their physical size." A Philadelphia study concluded that men can handle violent situations better than women can. Not so in Washington, D.C., which has 329 female cops, more than half of them assigned to patrol duties. A sociological study done for the Police Foundation in 1974 found that males and females seem to perform equally well in handling violent citizens, but that a valid comparison is impossible because violence is so rare. TV cops may be embroiled hourly in perilous adventures, but in real life a patrolman's lot is mostly routine and paperwork. The report showed that women cops are less likely to engage in serious misconduct, but noted that they make fewer arrests.

Many supervisors worry about small women going up against large and dangerous men. "When you're dealing with a 250-pound gorilla, I'd prefer to have some beef on my side," says Rochester, N.Y., Police Sergeant Dennis Cole. "Most women are not beefy." Still, Cole admits that women do well and that "police work is getting away from brawn anyway."

An argument in favor of women cops is that they are better than men in talking people out of violence. Says Oakland, Calif., Police Sergeant Earl Sargent: "Just as you don't have to teach a man how to fight--they grow up playing war and cowboys--in the same way, you don't have to teach a woman how to talk." That statement, like many issued by male cops these days, accepts the fact that policewomen are here to stay. Indeed, women routinely face the same dangers as men. Last fall in Oakland a drunk attacked a female cop, and authorities there described it as one of the most savage beatings in recent memory. Says Sargent: "We've had quite a number of females get decked and come up spitting blood."

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