Top Female Sheriff’s Official Takes Place on Fast Track

Kathryn Kemp of Santa Paula was working as an FBI stenographer when she began thinking about becoming a sheriff’s deputy.

She applied “as a lark,” survived the training academy and joined the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

That was 13 years ago.

Since then, Kemp has patrolled the county’s streets, confronted criminals, supervised jail inmates and done the things that make the life of a sheriff’s deputy both exciting and exasperating.

Obviously, she has done her job well.

In little more than a decade she made lieutenant, and found that some of the men she once worked for were taking orders from her.

And in August, she was appointed head of the sheriff’s major crimes unit, the first woman ever to hold that post.

Now, Sheriff John Gillespie says Kemp, 44, is on a fast track to becoming the first female commander in the history of the agency. The eight commanders are in charge of various divisions of the department.

“I’m almost positive she’ll be promoted to commander within a year or so,” he recently said. “I’d be willing to bet on it.”

Kemp, who is married to a Santa Paula patrol officer, is one of 72 women among the sheriff’s 592 sworn personnel. The only other female lieutenant retired this month.

Accelerating her career were successful stints at the sheriff’s honor farm at Ojai; as administrative sergeant in Moorpark; as division training officer in Thousand Oaks; as West County watch commander in 1989, the year she was promoted to lieutenant; and as manager of the main jail.

“The positions have been like building blocks,” she said.

Even with all this prior experience, Kemp said, “I’m not so naive as to say that my gender played absolutely no factor” in her latest promotion.

“But did it happen just because I was a female? No it didn’t.”

Still, Kemp declared:

“The gender question is always there: Are the males going to have a problem working with a female supervisor?

“I think that any male is apprehensive because they don’t know how you’re going to react. Is she going to try to rip out my throat or something?

“But once they work for me, they find out I’m not that way.”

Despite her years with the department, Kemp is the first to say that she had never investigated a major crime such as a homicide, robbery, rape or sexual assault before she took her new job.

“That’s not unusual,” she said.

Her predecessor, Lt. Joe Harwell, agreed. “There are limited opportunities to get that experience” while moving from one division to another in the Sheriff’s Department, he said. Harwell, 46, noted that he was fortunate to gain some major crimes investigative experience only because he was a detective in the sheriff’s East Valley Division.

The big reason Kemp has made rapid progress in a male-dominated agency is her ability to work with people and to effectively supervise them, say her associates and acquaintances.

“She’s well-organized and effective as far as getting the job done,” said Moorpark Mayor Paul Lawrason, with whom Kemp dealt in the late 1980s when she was the No. 2 law enforcement officer in Moorpark, one of the five cities the Sheriff’s Department polices. The others are Thousand Oaks, Fillmore, Ojai and Camarillo.

Working with politicians and the public was an eye-opener, Kemp recalled of her work there.

“I was on the phone all the time with the public,” she said. “People would get angry over parking tickets. You could arrest them for armed robbery and they would be less upset.”

The major crimes unit, which handles high-profile crimes with plenty of media exposure, is considered a plum for a law enforcement officer.

Last December’s slaying of Santa Paula auto dealer Tony Bridges, swiftly solved by Harwell and his detectives, was an example of working in a media fishbowl.

Kemp grew up in Santa Paula, the daughter of a Navy chief petty officer in the Navy.

After her graduation from Ventura College, where she majored in business administration, Kemp took a job in 1968 as a stenographer in the FBI’s regional headquarters in Los Angeles. It was briefly exciting when she was transferred to the agency’s espionage unit--but, she said, only briefly.

“It starts out exciting, but for the most part it was typing up what they were doing,” she said.

Two years later, Kemp joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, then worked for nine years as a secretary at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in Castaic.

Then Kemp decided she wanted more action. She wanted to be a cop.

Having made that decision, she had to commit herself to losing weight to qualify for the Ventura County Criminal Justice Training Center in Camarillo.

“I weighed about 200 pounds at the time,” recalled Kemp, who stands 5 feet, 5 inches tall.

Eighteen months--and 60 pounds--later, she was accepted at the academy, one of four women in a September, 1979, class of 42 recruits.

Kemp said she was apprehensive, but not scared, on her first day at the academy. But it had nothing to do with gender.

“For some of the guys who went through boot camp, it was probably no big thing,” she said. “For myself, who led a rather sheltered life, and never had anyone yelling and screaming and telling me to drop and crank out 25 pushups, it was a culture shock.”

As with most graduates, Kemp’s first assignment was County Jail. Two years later, she found herself hitting the streets and roads of the county and, early in 1982, facing down her first potentially life-and-death situation.

She and her training officer were to rendezvous in Camarillo with Los Angeles law enforcement officers who had been following burglary suspects armed with automatic weapons.

While driving to the scene, she told her training officer that she had a knot in her stomach. “I was concerned that shouldn’t be,” she said.

But he told her not to worry.

“That’s what keeps you alive,” she said he told her.

In the end, Kemp recalled, the suspects surrendered without a fight. “But you didn’t know that going in,” she said.

Such experience served her well when she was alone in a patrol car in Camarillo a year or so later and had to confront an armed robbery suspect. With help from her colleagues, she made the arrest without a shot being fired. In fact, she recalled, although she has drawn her weapon several times, she has never had to fire it.

By 1982, the situation had reversed and she had become a field training officer with a tense rookie in her car. Kemp remembered that they received a call from the Los Angeles Police Department about a low-flying light plane with two suspected drug traffickers aboard, about to land at Camarillo’s airport.

“We did a felony stop on the Tarmac with red lights flashing,” she said. The two arrested the pilot and a passenger and discovered $60,000 in cash aboard the plane.

“He was pretty excited about it,” she said of her rookie partner.

Today, Kemp is looking forward to even more challenges.

“I set a goal that I wanted to make lieutenant before I retired,” she said. “Fortunately for me, instead of taking 20 years to achieve the goal, I achieved it in 10. I guess my next career goal is to be a commander. . . . So far, it’s worked out well.”