Crusading Cop : Fanchon Blake broke the thin blue line’s bias barrier in 1973. : Many in LAPD made her suffer for it. But she gets last word.

She is a retired, 69-year-old grandmother who often goes to bed by 7 p.m., residing in a pristinely peaceful artist’s colony here, a half hour’s drive from Seattle.

But don’t send Fanchon Blake off to bake cookies for the artisans’ local fund-raisers just yet.

This tough ex-cop and former Army major is the reason why there are now female lieutenants and captains on the Los Angeles Police Department--and why there may eventually be female commanders, deputy chiefs and possibly even a woman chief of police.

She is similarly the reason why female officers in Los Angeles no longer have to be at least 5-feet-6 and can now qualify for the job at merely 5 feet.

And though Blake is white, she is also the reason why there are now more Latino, more black and more Asian officers on the LAPD than ever before.

What’s more, she is still a woman to be reckoned with, especially now that she’s completing work on “Silent Force,” a tell-all autobiography that already has attracted the attention of television producers from a major network.

Blake personally dates the beginning of the end of LAPD’s sexual and racial discrimination practices to 1969.

That’s when, after 20 years on the LAPD, she was a detective sergeant who had been pushed too far. Or more precisely, not promoted far enough. Like all women officers working under then-Chief of Police Ed Davis, she was forbidden from taking a lieutenant’s exam. Sergeant was the highest rank open to female officers at the time, but Blake wanted to move up and be a lieutenant. After four years of taking her complaints before the City Council and the Police Commission with little result, Blake took to the courts. In 1973, she filed a sex-discrimination lawsuit against the LAPD, which, after seven years in the courts, was finally resolved in 1980.

The department then agreed to two historic consent decrees, vowing to increase the number of women on the force until 20% of sworn officers are female. And it pledged to increase minority representation to equal the minority representation in the Los Angeles work force.

The city also agreed to pay $2 million, for recruiting and training programs aimed at women and minorities and for “monetary relief” to Blake and others denied advancement or employment opportunities.

She walked away with $50,000 for her efforts. Other women on the force picked up anywhere from $2,000 to $12,000 based on the length of their service.

Though it has been 10 years since the decrees, Blake has not forgotten what she went through during the time when Davis openly told women officers he would put them in patrol cars--when then-Rams coach Tommy Prothro put women on the football team’s front line.

“I was scared to death to even walk into that police building,” Blake recalled, sitting in her home office and describing the day that news of her lawsuit hit the media. The room, dominated by an oak roll-top desk and a computer on which she is writing her book, is filled with framed souvenirs of her stints in both the LAPD and the U.S. Army. “I walked in the police building and they had cleaned out my desk and I was put out in the reception area. I was taken out of investigation work. I was ostracized, given a receptionist’s job, basically.

“I found out the silent treatment had been imposed,” she said. “Nobody was to talk to me. Nobody was to acknowledge that I was alive. I got out to the reception desk and the phone lit up. Media from all around the world wanted to talk to me.”

Then things really got worse.

“For three months after I filed my case, I thought they had let a contract on my life,” added Blake, who during her 25 years on the force had worked such assignments as jail division, youth detail, public information and bunco and forgery detail. “I saw somebody from IAD (Internal Affairs Division) following me. My phone was bugged. They deny it vehemently, but I know better.

“Finally,” she said, “I was scared enough and about ready for a nervous breakdown. I called a woman at the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (which, along with the American Civil Liberties Union had joined Blake in her suit). She got the attorney general of the United States to write the city and the department a letter telling them that I was the main plaintiff and that they were responsible for my safety and health until the suit came to trial. Then the department got off my butt a little bit.”

A few months later, however, Blake suffered a stroke while she was at work and chalks it up to stress from the suit.

Even though she needed medical attention, she got no help from her co-workers: “I went to the lieutenant and told him there was something the matter with me. I couldn’t see out of this (right) eye. And I couldn’t talk out of this (right) side of my face. I called my doctor and he told me, ‘Don’t drive home. Have them drive you and I’ll be waiting for you in my office.’ I went back to my lieutenant and asked him, ‘Please, could somebody take me home.’ He stood up and said, ‘Does anybody want to take Fanchon home?’

“Of course, nobody volunteered. I waited till 4 o’clock and drove 25 miles to the doctor’s office. He was fit to be tied because I’d had a stroke. I was off the job for three weeks.”

Shortly after she returned to work, Blake decided to see if the department would allow her to participate in a special task force to arrest robber-rapists. Telling her captain, “If you deny me this, then I’m not well enough to come to work,” she said got herself assigned to the duty.

But one night, when walking the beat with two officers supposedly tailing her in an area of South-Central Los Angeles, she found herself alone without backup.

“A Cadillac pulled up and a black gentleman asked me to get in. I said, ‘Shove off,’ ” Blake remembered. “He went around the block again and did the same thing. I said, ‘Bug off, buster.’ I became very intimidating. I got back to the station and the lieutenant was laughing up a storm. He said ‘What did you do out on the beat tonight? So I told him. He said ‘Well, I just had a report from a snitch that the main pimp in the area is really upset because he thinks you’re taking over his territory.’ ”

That night, Blake decided “to hang up” her handcuffs. She put in for retirement and lined up a security manager’s job.

She has held several security management jobs since retiring in early 1974. In 1980, she moved to the Northwest, where she is working exclusively on her book. In it, she makes no bones about who she thinks is responsible for the LAPD’s discrimination difficulties: former Chief Davis.

“Davis spoke to the women in the department saying that we couldn’t become chief of police because we had our little monthlies,” she recalled, sipping a cup of tea. “He told us that, if he had his way, there would be no more than 12 women left as policewomen, that we weren’t needed and that the men did a much better job. . . . He was just ruthless with the women. And cruel. As soon as the chief takes a stand, it brought out everything in the men that was distasteful for the women to have to survive.”

Reached by telephone, Davis declined to comment “on any of her (Blake’s) personal attacks on me, I see absolutely no point in it.” Then he said of Blake: “She’s been a vindictive person for as long as I can remember.” And he acknowledged that he did, in fact, say he would put women on patrol only when Prothro put women on the Rams’ front line.

It is clear that Davis is still proud of his actions regarding the status of women and minorities while he was chief. He pointed out that after Blake’s suit was filed, he abolished both the ranks of policeman and policewoman, replacing them with a “unisex” rank of police officer. Davis, now a Republican state senator from Santa Clarita, claimed he was the first police chief in the country to make such gender-based distinctions a thing of the past.

As for the consent decrees, he said he never would have agreed to sign them, as did his successor, current Police Chief Daryl Gates.

And Davis criticized the increases in women and minority officers that have occurred on the LAPD in the last 10 years. “It’s impossible today, it’s virtually impossible for a white male to become a Los Angeles police officer today,” Davis said. “It just can’t happen. What is it they tell me? A white male has to get an oral grade of 97 (on the 100-point hiring exam) to have any chance of getting on. They’re loading (LAPD) up with Hispanics and blacks and females under an idiotic consent decree. The city is getting shortchanged.”

(According to LAPD Deputy Chief Mark A. Kroeker, “Roughly one-third of all the officers that we hired during fiscal ‘89-’90 were male Caucasians and 54.9% of the officers are male Caucasian. It is true that, since we have a huge number of applicants in the male, white variety, when it comes to deploying the test for the selection process it ends up that the oral score is higher because of the large number in that group.”)

Despite critical views from Davis and others, the LAPD has officially celebrated Blake’s struggle and the impact she has had on the department. In June, for example, Chief Gates and other top officers paid a surprise tribute to Blake at a ceremony marking the fact that there are now more than 1,000 female officers on the LAPD.

It was not the first such ceremony. In 1980, when Blake’s sex-discrimination case was settled, the city of Los Angeles held a reception for her.

She remembered it this way: “After I retired, I became a roaring alcoholic. I went into treatment. . . . At the reception in November, 1980, the mayor and City Councilwoman Pat Russell were there. I got up in front of this meeting, this big group of people at the top of City Hall, and all I could remember to say was ‘My name is Fanchon Blake and I’m a recovering alcoholic.’

“You could have heard a pin drop. Everybody was just frozen. I saw that and I said, ‘And thank God.’ ”

Blake’s recovery from alcoholism is not the only surprise she has in store for readers when her book is published. The autobiography, which she has not yet attempted to sell to a publisher, includes her discovery in her 50s that she is gay--despite three marriages and a grown son. Divorced from her first two husbands and widowed by her third, she now lives with a woman with whom she has had a relationship for 14 years.

Being gay “is gonna come out in my book,” Blake said, “because it’s part of me. And it’s been part of me. I had to sober up to understand who I was. First of all, I think I had to be drunk to make the decision (to become a lesbian). I think if I’d been sober, I would have stayed in denial. . . .

“It’s been shocking to a lot of people. I’m not closeted per se, but I’m not out in Los Angeles like I am here. But living in this community, we don’t go out and tell people we’re gay. We just live. The thing of it is, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. And I’ve been very blessed to have a woman come into my life who’s intelligent and sharp and challenging. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs, but the relationship has sent me into finding out who I am.”

Blake can also rest assured that women are no longer subject to the sort of harassment and discrimination she endured. According to Kena Brutsch, an LAPD detective who also serves as the department’s women’s coordinator, female officers now make up 12.8% of the sworn personnel, compared to 2.6% when the consent decrees went into effect. She also said that about 25% of those in police academy classes are women; the goal of a 20% female force has not yet been met.

Although it may seem hard for outsiders to believe, Brutsch maintained that the problems of sexism have pretty well vanished at the LAPD.

“We are now at the point in the organization where women’s problems are not women’s problems,” Brutsch emphasized. “They’re employee problems.”

George Felkenes, a professor of criminal justice at the Claremont Graduate School who recently completed a two-year study of Blake’s impact on the department, agrees.

After analyzing results of a survey of 1,400 male and female LAPD officers (which included an over-sampling of female officers) Felkenes concluded, “I suspect the attitudes of male and female officers now are the same. The women are very close to male officers in terms of how they perceive their jobs. They did not feel they were discriminated against, but one of the problems is that they’re not in upper level positions yet.”

As for Blake’s significance, Felkenes found it to be so vast as to be “really impossible to measure. There’s little doubt of the courage and of the fortitude she had to buck the bureaucracy and open doors for females and minorities.”

Former City Councilwoman Pat Russell, who served on the council from 1969 to 1987 and became a friend and ally of Blake’s, likes to point out that one of the reasons Blake was so successful was that she always worked “as a loyal officer, interested in what was good for the police department.”

“Fanchon went through a lot of suffering,” Russell observed. “It was remarkable. She had no role models and had to invent it as she went. She felt good about the suffering until she filed the suit and they gave her the silent treatment. I did what I could as a friend to help her. But she was very alone.”

No longer alone, no longer suffering, Blake indicated she’s not convinced women have attained true equality at the LAPD. “I think the women are frustrated on (the lack of) promotions and (good) assignments,” she speculated, adding that they also need to realize that they must work for advancements.

“Nothing’s going to be given to them, especially by the men,” she insisted, noting however, that she considers Gates to be “a very honorable man.”

As for herself, Blake keeps a simple lifestyle these days, working on her book and meeting with a group of writers for support three times a month. She recently decided to have a psychiatric evaluation because of her age, dyslexia and to see if her stroke produced any lingering psychological effects.

“The aging process is certainly a challenge,” she said with a laugh, leaning back in her chair and starting to relax. “I’ve been trying to learn how to grow old gracefully and it’s just so out of character for me.”