Vroom at the Top : Prowess as Racer Smoothes Path to Motorcycle Patrol

For many, the dirt track at the Los Angeles Police Academy marked the end of their attempts to become motorcycle patrol officers. For Joanna Brownell, it was the beginning.

It was along this dusty course in Elysian Park that Brownell conquered such grueling motorcycle maneuvers as skidding the bike on its side and, without dismounting, setting it upright again. And the police motorcycle she was riding was about three times heavier than the 250-pound dirt bike that Brownell, 27, of Newhall rode to a national desert dirt-bike racing championship last year.

“You either can ride or you can’t,” Brownell said. Because she could, Brownell graduated from the academy’s motorcycle school last month and, later this summer, will become the Los Angeles Police Department’s first woman “motor officer.”

Many Flunk Out

About a quarter of those who enter the three-week motorcycle school, almost all of them men and some from other police agencies, are sent back to their regular patrol assignments, said Officer E. Randy Wiggins, the Police Department’s senior motorcycle instructor. Sometimes they are afraid of the bike or cannot control its power, some don’t have the strength or coordination to maintain their balance in the repetitive test exercises, he said.

Three women have tried and failed in the past 10 years, mostly because they lacked the upper-body strength to ride the bike out of the dirt during the difficult “power pickups” and “scramble races,” Wiggins said. In Brownell’s class of 27, in which she was the only woman, three men “washed out,” he said.

Brownell said she made it through the school under a lot of watchful eyes. “A lot of them had heard about my background in riding,” she said, “and there were a lot of bets going around as to whether I was going to make it or not.

“It was the first thing I tried to do that I didn’t know if I would be able to do.”

Competitive Karate

Nevertheless, it wasn’t the first time that she has succeeded in something requiring a great deal of coordination and athletic ability.

In April, Brownell took a run at competitive karate after a seven-year layoff. She saw the names at a tournament outside Las Vegas and recognized them as women she had competed against before. She entered the competition and took home $300 and a first-place, six-foot trophy.

“Some of the poor girls didn’t even know what hit them, with kicks going through their hands and upside the head,” said Brownell, an athletically built woman with waist-long hair.

She keeps the trophy next to her dirt bike in her garage, which is crammed with other trophies, mementos and racing gear.

Her first race was in 1984, when she managed to surprise herself with a third-place finish among a field of 35 women. Since then it has become an obsession. She races up to 35 times a year and is the defending national champion on the American Motorcycle Assn. circuit.

Brownell said she has wanted to be a motorcycle officer since joining the Police Department in 1982. Her interest in traffic- and drunk-driving enforcement spurred her on, and her dirt-bike racing had prepared her.

‘Stamina Was a Factor’

“The stamina was a factor,” she said. “I’m used to burning around in the desert in 100-degree heat.”

Although Brownell is the Police Department’s first woman to wear the motorcycle officer’s white helmet, leather boots and military-style breeches, she is not California’s first woman in the job.

At least three policewomen in California are riding motorcycles, for departments in Santa Monica, Santa Cruz and Burlingame, said C. E. (Gene) Gray, president of the Municipal Motorcycle Officers of California and a sergeant who rides a motorcycle for the Pasadena Police Department.

“Sure, it has a macho aura,” said Officer Bill Mulvihill, a 13-year motorcycle officer. “A lot of it has to do with the uniform: the boots, the helmet, the sunglasses, the leather jacket. Being a motor cop has always been a very prestigious job.”

In 1905, the Los Angeles City Council voted to buy two motorcycles for police use. By 1941, the department had 285 motorcycle officers. Now, the complement consists of 317 officers and 35 sergeants.

A Tough School

The motorcycle school is tough. It emphasizes strenuous dirt maneuvers to teach officers how to handle bikes under adverse conditions so they can concentrate on police work instead of riding, Wiggins said.

More than ever, opportunities for women to join the Police Department’s motorcycle force are emerging now, Wiggins said. No positions in the motorcycle patrol had been open since the 1984 Olympics, because the department added 50 motorcycle officers then, he said. Now, impending retirements are expected to create a position on the motorcycle force for Brownell by the end of the summer.

Women in the department held mostly desk jobs until 1973, when they became eligible for street patrol. In March, the Police Department’s 6,968 officers included 594 women, about 500 of whom were assigned to some form of street patrol. Officers usually are required to have four years in the field before they can try for motorcycle positions.

‘Masculine Instrument’

“If you really think about it openly and objectively, women are probably not as interested in motorcycles as men are,” Wiggins said. “Motorcycles are pretty much a masculine instrument.” But that appears to be changing, he said.

“As in every field where there are males and females, the times have changed, to where the women are finding that they can become motor officers,” said Gray, who heads the 1,600-member motorcycle officers’ association.

Since 1980, when Ramona Murray, 32, became the California Highway Patrol’s first woman motorcycle officer, the CHP has had nine other women enter its motorcycle school, spokesman Kent Milton said. Four have ridden motorcycles for the CHP since 1980, although none is at present, Milton said. The CHP has had motorcycle officers since its founding in 1929, he said, and now has 315 of them.

Three women have passed, and one is expected to graduate this summer, from the CHP school, which lasts two weeks and places less emphasis on maneuvering exercises such as scramble races than the Los Angeles Police Department, said the CHP’s chief instructor, Sgt. Ed Prieto.

It Took a While

Murray’s fellow CHP officers seemed cool at first, she said. “It was 51 years before that male tradition had been broken, you know,” Murray said. “People kind of thought, ‘God, what is this girl doing?’ . . . It’s not so much that they didn’t want to see women doing it. It was just like any change that takes a while for people to get used to.”

Murray, by the way, left her job on a motorcycle last year for a Sacramento desk job closer to her fiancee--Prieto.

In the Police Department, Brownell probably will face “a lot of resentment because it has always been a male-type job,” said motorcycle officer Mulvihill. “If they can do it, let them do it.”

Brownell said her colleagues have supported her, although some have questioned her motives and expressed displeasure that theirs will no longer be an all-male job.

“There’s a lot of old-timers on the job who think that’s the reason I did it: to be the first woman,” Brownell said. “I had a couple of guys come up to me and flat out tell me they didn’t want a woman to make it on the job. They said it was one of the few jobs left on the LAPD that was, I don’t know if sacred is the right word, but something like that.

“I told them I happen to be a woman, but this is what I want to do,” she said.

Some might say her determination to become a motorcycle officer typifies the traditional attitude of her new colleagues, who have a reputation for rugged individualism.

The Not-So-Good Old Days

Gray, an 18-year police officer, remembers that, when he was a rookie cop, motorcycle officers were considered “untouchables” who might as well have been in another police department, he said.

“Policemen wave at each other as a courtesy,” Gray said. “If you waved at a motor officer back in those days, they would just keep on riding. They were the motor officers, and you were the patrol officers, and never the twain shall meet. Basically now, it’s no big deal.”

Brownell now rides in a patrol car for the West Traffic Division, which covers West Los Angeles. Jumping from the car to the bike will mark the pinnacle of her career as a police officer, she said.

Brownell soon will put in her garage the most important symbol of her most prized achievement: the Kawasaki 1000 police bike. Officers who live in Los Angeles County are allowed to take the motorcycles home to care for as their own, although personal use is forbidden.

“I wanted this so bad that I feel if I wouldn’t have made it through the school, I would have changed professions,” she said.