Ex-Policewoman Shown She Is Force to Be Reckoned With

When a new women’s locker room and weight-training facility was dedicated at the Los Angeles Police Academy on Monday, a tall, gray-haired woman in the audience named Fanchon Blake called it “an impossible dream come true--a reality of acceptance.”

In 1973, Blake filed a lawsuit against the Police Department for unlawful job discrimination. At the time, Los Angeles policewomen were not promoted above the rank of sergeant, and Blake, who had reached that rank with the department, filed the suit after being denied permission to take a lieutenant’s exam.

“When I went to work (after filing the action), it was like the earth opened up and swallowed me,” she recalled. “Nobody would talk to me.”

The attitude was very different Monday.

In a ceremony that included Chief Daryl F. Gates, Police Commission President Robert Talcott and several members of the City Council--the $468,967, two-story building was named after both the late Sgt. Jeannie Eisentraut, who died in a traffic accident in 1981, and Blake. The request for the building’s name had come from the Los Angeles Women Police Officers Assn.

Blake won her case in 1980. It resulted in consent decrees requiring the immediate hiring of more women and minorities.

The department is required to increase the number of women employees until 20% of the work force is female. Blacks and Latinos are to be hired at an accelerated rate until their numbers equal the percentage of blacks and Latinos in the metropolitan Los Angeles work force.

Today, women are 569, or 8%, of the 7,080-member force, compared to 159 (out of 6,986) in 1973. There are seven female lieutenants, and one captain.

Last week, when 53 recruits graduated from the academy, half were women.

Eisentraut, according to a police spokesman, had worked in Gates’ office as a principal coordinator to implement the ruling.

Blake had suffered a stroke soon after filing the case--”the stress was just unbelievable,” she said, and retired from the department in 1974.

Now 64, she traveled from her home in Seattle to attend Monday’s ceremony, receive a certificate, get hugged and kissed by former fellow officers, and see the plaque that will adorn the new building.

“This blew me away,” she said. “The band, the chief, everybody here. After coming up from feeling you had done the worst thing on earth . . . .”

Her voice trailed off, and then she quickly added:

“If I had to do it over again, I would do it.”

Joined Force in 1948

Blake, a former Army major, joined the department in 1948. She worked in several areas-- foot patrol downtown, jail matron, youth detail and detective assignments. She still loved the department, she said, despite the suit: “It’s the best.”

A good friend, Hy Kravitz, now a retired sergeant, recalled Monday that long before Blake became involved in the lawsuit, “she always felt women should have equal rights.”

And she talked openly about it, he added. “She was a fighter. She was vocal,” he said.

Gates, who became chief in 1978, complimented Blake during the ceremony, citing “your long hard struggle in making this come to pass. We certainly appreciate you.”

Diane Harbor, who as a captain in West Valley Division is now the highest ranking woman in the department, said there was “no doubt” that Blake’s suit, which was later expanded to embrace minorities after a second suit was brought in behalf of women and minorities by the Justice Department in 1977, has helped women like herself.

“Whether or not this was the way the department was going to go anyway, because that was the way governments were going,” Harbor said, “or whether or not the lawsuit gave it the extra nudge, the point was before that happened I could not be promoted above sergeant.”

Cutbacks Blamed

Noting Monday that there is still a lack of women in upper-level positions, Gates blamed budget cutbacks.

“They (women) can go on, if you get the City Council to give us a few more positions,” he said. “They will go on to be commanders and deputy chiefs.”

The new building was badly needed, said Pat Fogerson, a female training officer at the academy, because there were virtually no facilities for women before.

“It really is an encouragement to women coming on the department,” she said. “It’s one thing to recruit women, and then another to say, ‘By the way, change your clothes in this corner here, and we won’t give you any weights to work on, but we want you to have the same strength as the men.’ This is a commitment.”

After the ceremony, Blake was one of the last to leave. She would be going right back to Seattle, she said, to work on her autobiography.

Kravitz gave her a last hug and, looking at the dedication plaque, said to her, “You realize that will be up there 100 years from now? People will say, ‘Who the hell was Fanchon Blake?’ ”

Blake laughed. “And I’ll pop right up and say, ‘Here I am.’ ”