Women Officers Are Still a Rarity : Police Officials Find Too Few Interested, Physically Qualified; Supervisory Ranks Remain Male Preserve

Whittier police officer Mary Spadoni craned her neck so the blood streaming from her nose would not soak her blouse.

She had been punched in the face while helping to break up a melee in a park, but what was foremost on her mind was a lieutenant back at the station, someone she considered a “woman hater.”

“He said someday you’re going to come in here covered with blood and I’m going to laugh,” Spadoni, Whittier’s first female patrol officer, said in a recent interview. “That was his way of letting me know he didn’t think I belonged on patrol or could handle it. If I came in there and had blood on my blouse his prophecy would come true.”

Women police officers generally have won acceptance since that incident more than 15 years ago, and there are more females in law enforcement than ever before. But women are still sorely under-represented on the forces that police Southeast Los Angeles County and Long Beach, and they still sometimes swim against a tide of thought that holds they are inferior to their male counterparts.

Only 3.1% Women

Of the 673 sworn employees in 10 police departments from Compton to Whittier, only 21, or 3.1% are women. In Long Beach, the 644-member police force includes 48 women--7.5% of the sworn personnel. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which patrols Commerce, Norwalk, Pico Rivera, Lakewood and other areas in the Southeast, boasts 741 females--11.5%--of 6,418 full-time, sworn department members.

There are still fewer women up the ranks. Long Beach has one woman lieutenant and one sergeant. Compton is the only other police department in the area to have a woman who holds at least the rank of sergeant.

Of the Sheriff’s Department’s 55 captains, only three are women, spokeswoman Deputy Willie Miller said. The department’s 32 top administrative positions are held by men.

Few Females Interested

Area law enforcement officials queried by The Times said they would like to see more women in uniform. But they said few females are interested, and many who are cannot meet the physical standards to enter and graduate from an academy.

“I’d like to see the Police Department be a mirror image of the community it serves, but the reality of it is it’s not going to happen,” said Montebello Police Chief Leslie D. Sourisseau, who has four women officers on his 75-member force. “The fact is, the numbers who apply at the entry level are significantly lower than (for) males.”

The chief’s assessment is supported by Sheriff’s Department statistics. About four times as many men as women applied to become sheriff’s deputies from 1982 to 1986. And of the female applicants during the five-year period, only 1.5% graduated from the Sheriff’s Academy, one of three academies that train most law enforcement officers in the Southeast.

Dana Dunwoody is part of a new generation of female police officers, women who work the streets with guns on their hips and who are likely to draw graveyard shifts like their male counterparts.

There were many who doubted Dunwoody would have the nerve to return to work for the Long Beach Police Department after she was nearly run down in September, 1983, when she and her partner tried to stop a suspect who commandeered their police cruiser.

After only six weeks on the job, Dunwoody found herself draped over the hood of the police car clinging on for her life. Moments later, she was skidding, bouncing and rolling in the street as the car turned and sped away with her partner hanging onto the light bar. Dunwoody got up from the pavement and ran after the car.

A few blocks away, Dunwoody’s partner, Officer David Esrey, fired two shots through the roof of the vehicle, wounding the 23-year-old driver. The car smashed into a parked car and Esrey was catapulted through the air. The suspect was later arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and auto theft.

Dunwoody missed about a month of work with a compressed disk in her back and an injured knee. Esrey leg was broken.

Family Listened to Radio

“I was OK through the whole thing until I talked to (my) family and heard they had heard the whole thing on the scanner,” Dunwoody, 24, said in a recent interview. “They were probably scared to death. That’s the only part that bothered me.

“It made me want to go out and do it more,” she said. “I didn’t want to quit.”

It wasn’t long ago that women like Dunwoody could not enter the fray of daily patrol, an experience the officers said they need to gain equal footing with men.

In the Sheriff’s Department, for example, women began patrol in a pilot program in 1972, Miller said. Now about 10% of the department’s sworn women officers work patrol.

Women began patrolling the streets of Long Beach in 1973, while Compton began assigning women to patrol duties two years later. Montebello had its first woman patrol officer in 1978, and Bell-Cudahy hired its first and only female patrol officer last year.

Before then, the woman officer’s role was mostly that of jail matron and as investigators working rape and child-abuse cases.

Peak Hit in Early 1980s

Law enforcement and training academy officials say the desire of women to enter law enforcement seems to have peaked in the early 1980s, although the number of women who apply to be deputies or officers has increased because of intensive recruiting by the large departments.

They speculated that interest was stimulated by the women’s rights movement and successful legal challenges to restrictive physical entrance requirements and prohibitions against women attaining higher ranks.

Unfair height and strength requirements kept women out of law enforcement, judges found.

Investigator Betty Marlow, for example, had to overcome the Compton Police Department’s height requirement when she joined the department in 1974. At 5-foot-2 1/2, she was a half-inch too short.

Marlow dangled from bathroom stalls to lengthen her short body. For six months, she went to a chiropractor who hooked her up to a traction machine to “stretch” her. She submitted to a similar contraption at home.

“My husband would hook me up to a rigging in the bed to make sure I wouldn’t shrink any,” she said. “That’s really wanting something.”

Height Limit Abandoned

The stretching worked and Marlow met the height requirement, which was abandoned shortly after she was hired, she said.

Even with such requirements aside, some department spokesmen said they still scrounge for women officers.

The Sheriff’s Department and Long Beach have the strongest recruiting programs in Southeast Los Angeles County, while other departments do little, if anything, to reach out to female applicants, according to a Times survey.

Sheriff’s recruiters frequent job fairs and college campuses around the nation looking for prospective employees, while Long Beach focuses most of its attention on Southern California, spokesmen said.

“We want to hire as many of them as possible,” said Richard Foreman, the Sheriff’s Department’s administrative division chief.

But the Sheriff’s Department has proportionately fewer sworn women today--11.5%--than it did in 1980--12.6%, according to personnel statistics. And it has abandoned past affirmative action goals, Foreman said. The department wanted to employ 122 women sergeants by 1980, for example. It has 53 women sergeants and five more females are scheduled to be promoted to sergeant later this month, Foreman said.

Long Beach is developing goals to increase the number of sworn females, according to the city’s new police chief, Lawrence L. Binkley.

“I strongly agree that attaining parity with the community with . . . females is essential,” said Binkley, a former commander in the Los Angeles Police Department, which entered into a 1981 consent decree to hire more minorities and women. Long Beach only recently began keeping statistics on female officers; figures from five years ago are not available for comparison, Sgt. Dennis Webster said.

The competition for female officers is great and the smaller police departments in the Southeast area generally have a tough time attracting women applicants, officials said. With less money to spend on recruiting, fewer types of jobs available and, often, fewer opportunities for advancement, officials said they often lose out to larger departments.

“There just aren’t that many out there,” said Lt. Richard Webb of the Bell Gardens Police Department, which has no full-time female officers. “Most of them don’t want to come to a place like this.”

Women officers interviewed by The Times said they were attracted to the job by various factors, including the excitement and the respectable wages that go along with it. But being a police officer, they said, was not a childhood ambition.

Spadoni, now 40 and an investigator with the Orange County district attorney’s office, joined the Whittier Police Department in 1968 and spent about three years investigating juvenile and sex crimes. When she began patrol duty, Spadoni found that citizens were “shocked” to see a woman in a police car.

She also found herself at a disadvantage on the streets--she had to wear a blue jacket, a skirt, a white blouse, a bow tie and a small cap. She carried her gun, handcuffs and other paraphernalia in a purse. She was not permitted to wear a gun belt because “they didn’t want a gun-toting female to be manning a police car. They didn’t want that image.”

Had to Drop Purse

“I remember one time we had a prowler call and I had to take my gun out of my purse. I stuck it in the waistband of my skirt so I could make it over this fence,” Spadoni said. “Later on (I had to) go back and retrieve my purse, which I was lucky enough to find.”

Women officers now are equipped like the men. They say the public is becoming used to them, although there are still the honks and whistles of men trying to catch a woman’s attention, a woman who happens to be a police officer.

And they say they must work a bit harder than the men to establish a commanding presence because suspects are more likely to think they can overpower a female officer.

“Those first few seconds, if you don’t show who has authority you’ve lost it,” said Montebello Police Officer Teresa Samaniego, 29, who became the city’s first woman patrol officer more than eight years ago.

The women officers acknowledge that, generally, they are physically weaker than their male counterparts. But the officers said they could compensate with their training in self-defense and the use of firearms--and their savvy.

Brains Versus Brawn

“I will readily admit that someone who’s 6-1, 230 pounds, may be more physically qualified to handle a barroom brawl, but that’s only one aspect of the job,” said Officer Cynthia Billings, a 26-year-old triathlete and one of two female officers on the Downey Police Department. “I may balance it out in that I’m a lot smarter than a guy.”

Billings’ boss, Downey Police Chief William Martin, said he is confident of the physical abilities of his women officers.

“Our people are trained to deal with people who are combative at times,” Martin said. “They used to think if you send a cute little girl into a bar, what’s going to happen? The fact is, she’s going to handle it like a man would. She’s trained to handle it.”

The women officers said their gender is a benefit at times, that their presence has a calming effect.

Marlow, the Compton detective, remembers the time she responded to the call of a woman who wanted her husband arrested for beating her. Marlow had a female reserve officer with her.

“There’s this big dude sitting on the couch. He said, ‘You two and who else?’ We talked him into the cuffs,” Marlow said. “A woman could talk to him when a man would have to fight him because of the ego situation.”

While women are entering more dangerous law enforcement assignments, the especially rigorous physical requirements and lack of interest have kept them off special weapons teams of the Sheriff’s and Long Beach departments, officials said. (Other area departments do not have such teams.)

Capt. Pat Devaney, who oversees the Sheriff’s Department Special Weapons Team, said women deputies have made trial runs at the physical agility test to qualify for the team. But none has successfully completed it and actually applied to be formally tested, he said.

Some Can Meet Test

“I don’t preclude that possibility,” Devaney said. “It’s not a sexual thing. Certainly there are women who are capable of the physical requirement for entry here.”

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team has had two women members. Deputy Antonia Leogrande, 33, is currently on the team, while another woman was promoted out of the unit, Capt. Mike Cardwell said.

“Both of them have been very well accepted by their male counterparts and perform just fine,” Cardwell said.

Women generally have been spared the losses that follow the more dangerous assignments: The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has lost only one woman on duty, a reserve deputy who was fatally wounded when her partner pulled a shotgun from its rack and it accidentally discharged, Deputy Lynda Edmonds said. A female officer has never been killed on duty for the Long Beach and Southeast police departments.

On the inside, female officers said their departments are more accommodating now than when women first joined the ranks.

The departments now have locker rooms for the women, albeit small ones, when before there were none. And relations with fellow officers continue to improve, although some male officers--mostly the old-timers--are still adamant that a woman’s place is not in a police cruiser with a shotgun at her side, women officers said. Other officers are overly protective of their female co-workers.

Most male officers interviewed said they would just as soon work with a woman.

“I think there are lots of competent women just as capable of doing as good a job as a man,” said Compton Officer Rickey Petty, 30.

But a Bell Gardens officer said generally women are at a disadvantage in the field.

“They’re not used to being yelled at or being in fights,” the veteran officer said. “You get into a woman’s face and they back down easier.”

The main factor in acceptance is whether the officer, male or female, is capable, officers said. Nevertheless, women police officers said they are more likely to have to prove themselves.

Another potential hurdle for women officers is sexual harassment.

Formal complaints or lawsuits alleging sexual harassment are almost non-existent in the Southeast. Such complaints generally are resolved between officers or handled administratively within the police department, female officers and officials said.

For example, Sourisseau, the Montebello police chief, said he has disciplined at least four male officers for making “harassment kind of statements” to female officers. He said the punishment included time off without pay, but he declined to provide further details.

In Compton, allegations of sexual harassment of women officers have surfaced twice recently as potential contributing factors in workers’ compensation cases where female officers sought stress-related retirements, said Charles Evans, the city’s risk manager

Revenge for Rejection

In one case, a Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board found no evidence of sexual harassment, Evans said. The other case is pending.

“Once in a while you’d have a supervisor ask a female out, and if she didn’t go he’d be mean to her for a little while,” said Deborah Bivens, 34, who retired from the Compton Police Department in April, 1985, after she was seriously injured when a car slammed into the side of her police cruiser.

Usually, relations would quickly return to normal, but Bivens said one rejected supervisor carried a grudge for a woman officer the entire time she was on the department. Then there were times women would use their feminine attributes to “get real close to a supervisor so they could slack off.”

“I’m not saying it didn’t work sometimes,” Bivens said.

The women officers interviewed disagreed over how far women have progressed in law enforcement and the potential for further inroads.

“Considering that women started in law enforcement as it is today in 1976, you’re looking at only 10 years,” said Long Beach’s Lt. Alicia Powers, 42, who oversees the traffic enforcement division. “I think they’re looking for qualified women to promote. In the next five years, you’ll see more women advancing.”

Spadoni, the former Whittier officer, said that it is still tough for women to break into the ranks of the “good ol’ boys” because men “just can’t see a woman as an equal.” And it is especially difficult for aggressive women, she said.

“You shouldn’t have to use your feminine wiles to survive,” said Spadoni, who currently is on disability leave from her job as an investigator. “I think if you’re bright, you’re capable, if you’re aggressive, that you should be able to have them accept you for those qualities.”

Two cases involving allegations of sex discrimination against female law enforcement officers in the Southeast recently made headlines.

Victoria H. Kuhn, 35, of Long Beach filed suit accusing Huntington Park Police Chief Geano Contessotto of sexual discrimination after she was fired in March, 1986. For 10 years, Kuhn had been the department’s only female officer.

Contessotto has denied the allegations, contending that Kuhn had devoted herself to getting a stress disability pension because the mother of two did not want to work evening shifts. The suit is pending.

In the other case, a federal judge ruled in favor of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Susan Bouman Perez in February.

Perez filed a class-action civil rights suit seven years ago accusing the Sheriff’s Department of discriminating against her and other female deputies by denying them equal opportunity when seeking promotion to the rank of sergeant.

Perez, who works at the Sheriff’s substation in Pico Rivera, was awarded back pay, the amount of which still has to be determined, plus interest. A final decision on whether to appeal the Perez case has not been made, said Assistant County Counsel Donovan Main.

Statewide, 5,732 women are employed in law enforcement, from command positions to reserve officers, according to 1986 employment data compiled by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. Supervisory positions--usually the rank of sergeant--are held by 234 women, and 61 hold management and command positions--the rank of lieutenant and above.

“Women have simply opened the door and gone into law enforcement,” said Lt. Dolores Kan, president of the Women Peace Officers’ Assn. of California, a 500-member statewide organization. “We need to encourage women to be promoted and encourage them to become sergeants, lieutenants, captains and chiefs.”

WOMEN OFFICERS The 6,418-member Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has 741 women, including 3 captains, 12 lieutenants, 53 sergeants, 673 deputies and trainees. Here is how Southeast Los Angeles County communities compare:

No. of Total City Women Force Long Beach* 48 644 Whittier 1 85 Downey 2 107 Bell Gardens 0 42 South Gate 3 91 Montebello 4 75 Compton 7 125 Bell-Cudahy 1 42 Hunt. Park 0 56 Maywood 0 22 Signal Hill 3 28

* Long Beach figure includes one woman lieutenant and a sergeant . Compton includes a woman sergeant .