Female Officers Fighting Crime--and Sexism : Law enforcement: Some policewomen say departments are slow to integrate women and are plagued by ‘a lot of old male views.’

Ventura County’s five police departments lag far behind Los Angeles law enforcement agencies in the percentage of women they employ.

And sexism runs rampant in at least one of the largest departments, a veteran woman officer charged in a recent interview.

“Even some of my closest male friends have confided that they don’t feel women belong here in the department,” she said. “It hurts.”

Women account for 5.6% of the 427 sworn officers in police departments in Oxnard, Ventura, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula and Simi Valley, according to police tabulations.

The Los Angeles Police Department, which is under court order to increase the hiring of women and minorities, says women make up 12.5% of its force. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department says women account for 12.8% of its deputies.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department comes closer to meeting the percentages achieved by the Los Angeles agencies, reporting that women make up 10.8% of its 595 sworn deputies.

In Ventura County, law enforcement figures show, women hold six of the 209 positions at or above the rank of sergeant. Five of those women are employed by the Sheriff’s Department.

“It’s been tough for us,” said the woman police officer. “It’s better for us than it was, but some things have not changed.”

The woman--who asked to remain anonymous because she fears reprisals--said discrimination is rampant.

She said male officers haze women on patrols by clicking the microphones in their patrol cars when women broadcast messages the male officers deem trivial.

Male officers refer to good female officers as lesbians, she said.

The men in her department have refused to go out on calls with women, she said, and they have refused to work with women assigned to back them up on potentially dangerous calls, asking instead for assistance from male officers who are farther away and will take longer to get to the scene.

Chief Robert Owens of the Oxnard Police Department said there are bound to be transition problems as women enter police departments that are still populated primarily by males.

“For the foreseeable time, we are going to have an adjustment problem,” Owens said. “I don’t condone it, but I can’t just wish it away. We’re going to have to deal with it on a case-by-case basis.”

Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said that he discovered in his office that some male investigators--who gather evidence and prepare cases for trial--were discriminating against female job applicants. One of the applicants told him that it was “hard to penetrate that insular male bastion” in the bureau, Bradbury said.

He said that, when he made it known about six months ago that he planned to heavily recruit more women for the bureau, he ran into “a lot of old male views.”

However, by enlisting the men’s help and sending his one woman investigator to recruit other women statewide, Bradbury found and hired three other women for the 36-person investigation bureau earlier this year.

Lt. Pat Rooney of the Ventura Police Department said he believes that discrimination against women has been reduced in the last five years.

“There may still be officers who think of law enforcement as a traditional, male-dominated profession,” Rooney said. “But I think in general that women have become more accepted because of their efforts.”

While most police agencies in the county work under guidelines from affirmative-action plans set in the 1970s, few have actual goals for the number of women they would like to hire.

Ventura County police departments have not been required to institute hiring quotas.

The situation differs greatly from the Los Angeles Police Department, which was charged by a female officer in 1980 with discriminating against women in hiring and promotions. A judge found in her favor and mandated that women make up 25% of each academy class until the force consists of 20% women.

The Los Angeles Police Department continues an all-out recruiting push to attract women. The department has 1,034 female officers, and this year nearly 200 women have been appointed to Police Academy classes, said department spokeswoman Theresa Adams.

She said recruitment is made easier by what the department has to offer: After one year on the job, officers make a “wish list” of three assignments they would like. Officers are presented 250 assignments from which to choose.

And then there is the salary: It starts at $32,000 with a high school diploma.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spent $86,000 in minority and female recruiting efforts last year, exceeding its goal of hiring 15% women during the 1989-90 fiscal year by 1.8%, Lt. Curtis Spears said.

He said the department’s goal is to fill 20% of the sworn positions with women.

“Not only is it the fair and equitable thing to do, but we’re seeing women emerging in the work force,” Spears said. “They have been untapped resources as far as law enforcement goes.”

But Spears acknowledged that everyone in Southern California is fighting for the same recruits. Ventura County officials said smaller police departments struggle to steal candidates away from Los Angeles County.

“Larger agencies can offer a wide range of jobs and higher salaries,” said Chief Walt Adair of the Santa Paula Police Department. “That makes it tough.”

Santa Paula’s 30-officer department offers a starting salary of $25,400, and Port Hueneme, with 20 officers, pays a beginning officer $25,900. In addition, smaller departments offer fewer promotion opportunities.

Chief Bob Anderson of the Port Hueneme Police Department said he has a hard time attracting people because he cannot offer big salaries.

“Not only do females not apply, but it’s also pretty hard to attract a big number of people in general,” Anderson said.

Officials in Ventura County also questioned the way the Los Angeles Police Department has been forced to hire women because of the consent decree.

The Los Angeles department grades men and women the same on all aspects of the entrance exam process except the oral interview, Adams said. People are graded and ranked on the interview, but men, women and minorities are put in separate categories for acceptance, Adams said.

Lt. Bob Klamser of the Simi Valley Police Department said that he recruited women but that he would make no special exceptions for them on the entrance test.

“It doesn’t have to do with gender,” he said. “It has to do with getting full and qualified staffing.”

In addition, Ventura County agencies often suffer because they cannot bankroll a recruitment effort as the two big players from Los Angeles can, said Mark Ball of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. Ball said the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spends 10 times more on recruitment than his department.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department once used the scenic beauty of Ventura as a selling point to lure candidates from other agencies. Not anymore, though.

The cost of living in the county is too high to attract people, some of whom are forced to live elsewhere if they do take a job with the Sheriff’s Department, Ball said.

However, recruiting women is nothing new for the Sheriff’s Department. It has always needed women to run the women’s jails, Ball said.

At one point, women had to wait longer to rotate out to patrols, but now everyone rotates at the same rate, Ball said.

And in the 1980s, the Sheriff’s Department reviewed where women were being weeded out in the selection process and started two programs to help women through the entrance exam, a department official said.

Deputies worked overtime to help women pass the physical agility test, which includes scaling a six-foot chain-link fence, clambering over a six-foot wall and dragging a 165-pound dummy. The wall was difficult for women, who often do not have the upper-body strength to easily propel themselves over it, so the department paid deputies overtime to coach women on how to use their legs to get over it.

In addition, the department talked to women candidates about how to be more aggressive during the oral interview, officials said.

Those two programs have since been dropped because of lack of interest or changes to the test, Ball said.

No matter which department they are in, though, women police officers have faced different battles than their male counterparts.

Officer Nancy Stiles, 38, of the Ventura Police Department, said her department is 100% behind women. But she said some officers still create stressful situations.

“Certain officers are still in the Dark Ages,” Stiles said. “They don’t believe in women being police officers, and the only way to prove it is to have a fistfight with a man.”

Several women talked about the “John Wayne” syndrome, which sometimes makes women officers feel that they must out-smoke, out-drink and out-cuss men to be accepted. Others said they gained the respect of male officers only after they proved themselves in fights with suspects.

Oxnard Police Officer Mindy Morter, 35, said she has experienced less hazing than other women have told her about. The muscular Morter credits her size--5-foot-8 and about 155 pounds--and her physical fitness. Morter has been interested in sports since high school and often participates in triathlons.

The men want to know that the women are physically able to back them up, she said.

Even so, Morter said, she tries to talk her way out of situations rather than brawling.

“I’d rather talk someone into the back of my car than thump them,” Morter said. “I just talk fast and give them the impression that I’m a crazy person with a gun in my hands.”

Women bring different skills to police work, Morter said. For example, she said, women are often able to put a rape or sexual-abuse victim at ease.

“I’m a female, so I can understand what they’re going through,” Morter said.

She said that when she started with the Ventura Police Department in 1979, people on the street would do double takes when they saw her. Now, people are used to seeing women officers, Morter said.

Lt. Kathy Kemp, who joined the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department 11 years ago, once had a man involved in a fight tell her that she should be “barefoot and pregnant,” and she says she will never forget the little boy who saw her in her patrol car and yelled, “Mom, Mom! There’s a lady policeman!”

Kemp started her career as a stenographer for the FBI before becoming an administrative secretary for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

She toyed with the idea of enrolling in the Sheriff’s Academy “as a lark.” But Kemp quickly became serious, taking up a strenuous exercise program and dropping 80 pounds before she applied.

Once she entered the department, she made lieutenant in about two-thirds the normal time. Some of the men for whom she once worked now work for her.

Kemp said her male friends originally thought that the job would make her hard and cynical. But Kemp, 42, laughs easily as she recounts her experiences guarding inmates in the jail, patrolling county streets and occasionally pushing male suspects out of her way with a quick jab in the gut.

Kemp said she has had no problems with her male counterparts in the Sheriff’s Department. In fact, she said, women officers watch each other carefully, eager not to give up any of the ground that they have fought to win.

“Sometimes female law enforcement officers are harder on each other than the men are,” Kemp said. “We get real upset if someone tries to slide by.”