Uniform Treatment : Are Policewomen Still Battling Harassment? O.C. Rookies and Veterans Disagree : UNIFORM: Policemen Had ‘Benevolent Tolerance’ for Pioneering Women

The older the woman, the worse the stories get.

Some, the pioneer female patrol cops of the 1970s and ‘80s, relive their anger when they tell the stories: of men remarking on and grabbing their breasts, of men passing erotic pictures under their noses, of men telling barbed jokes, of men offering cash to be transferred away from a female partner, of men spending an entire patrol shift ignoring their female partners--or lecturing them on a woman’s proper place. Even of men endangering their female partners’ lives by holding back when they need help.

But could this still be going on in 1992?

The view of a female sergeant, an 18-year veteran in a large department: “Things have gotten much better. Women who have entered police work in, say, the last five years, it’s much less likely they’ve experienced harassment.”

The view of a female detective, explaining why she couldn’t be candid: “If I tell what’s actually wrong with this department in terms of what I’ve gone through personally, believe me, I won’t have that job for long.” The view of an Orange County police chief: “I’m more than satisfied today. There are just no (objectionable) cartoons, verbiage, jokes present in this department today.”

And the view of four women who filed suit last month against the Newport Beach Police Department: “This police department is a hotbed of sexually offensive conduct at the top levels of the command structure.” A captain fondled them, made sexual overtures and lewd remarks to them and the police chief winked at it, they allege. The department has issued a blanket denial of the allegations.

There are 349 women wearing police badges in Orange County, but there are 11 times more men. Police departments, still male-dominated, have used indoctrination and official policies to try curbing the resentment that greeted early female recruits.

“I would say there’s a mentality in certain departments, very macho, and I believe it has to come down from the top,” said Sharon Edwards, a Bay Area deputy sheriff and president of the Women Peace Officers’ Assn. of California.

“What counts is how the management deals with and feels about women in law enforcement. From the management level, if they don’t really want women in police work, it’s going to be felt. I sincerely believe it varies with the department.”

The Pioneers

Westminster Police Sgt. Bill Lewis, 44, remembers how it was 20 years ago for the pioneering female patrol cops. Some men “had a pretty much old-fashioned attitude about women going on patrol. But, of course,” he added, “they did not say anything about it.” He described their reaction as “benevolent tolerance.”

But Laguna Beach Police Sgt. Danell Adams, 40, a 17-year veteran, flushes with anger when she recalls her supervisors in the early days.

“I was a rookie, and they told me that if I wanted to pass probation, then I had to go to bed with them. I remember laughing it off because I was young and didn’t know what else to do. Then I remember getting angry. I remember telling one officer that ‘if you ever, ever, make that proposition again, I will have your badge.’ ”

Her bravado worked; the unwanted advances stopped.

But more time passed before pictures of male genitals stopped circulating for her benefit during roll calls, longer still before the most offensive sexist joking eased, if not disappeared. Although uncomfortable, Adams usually laughed along awkwardly or tried to ignore the harassment, she said. She thought she must to be accepted.

“Fifteen years ago, I could tell you horrible stories,” Adams says. “If what happened to me (then) happened today, I could own the City of Laguna Beach. But back then, you couldn’t say Jack. It’s not as bad today, because our tolerance level has changed.

“I’m not saying harassment doesn’t exist. I’m just saying we’ve come a long way and things are not as bad.”

A 10-year officer with the California Highway Patrol agrees with Adams’ assessment, and she, too, judges from her own experience.

She vividly remembers the afternoon as a rookie when a supervisor walked over to her, grabbed her breast and asked, “Are you wearing your armor?”

“I was starting a brand new career that I wanted to keep more than anything,” she said. “I thought if I said something, I’d lose my job, or that I would be told I was too sensitive. So back then, I kept quiet.”

Her breaking point came one day at roll call. While she leaned over to pick up an object she had dropped, she heard loud laughter. Straightening up, she sensed the same supervisor’s presence behind her. He had been making suggestive body motions from behind.

“Of all the officers in the room, no one said anything, no one did anything, but laugh . That’s when I confronted the supervisor for the first time, and it worked. He left me alone afterward. If you don’t confront that type of man, the harassment will go forever.”

Not all experienced female officers believe confrontation is an option. Said one Orange County detective who pleaded for anonymity: “We can’t talk about it, even among ourselves, because it’s not like you let someone know there’s something wrong with their staff and they’ll slap you on the back for a job well done. . . .

“I love what I do. I’ve invested seven years of my life in this job. I don’t want to lose it. Right now, the harassment is not so intolerable that I’m willing to give up what I love doing.”

The Newcomers

Susan Howey is a four-year officer with the Brea Police Department and is only one of two female motorcycle officers in Orange County. Twenty-six years old, 5-foot-10 and 165 pounds, she said she considers herself part of a team and has no expectation or fear of sexual harassment.

“I never looked at law enforcement as a field where women had to break barriers to be accepted. I come into the job thinking I’m one of the guys, and I think to put a label on officers (as male or female) is unfair.

“As to jokes that some people may find offensive, the fact of the matter is I tease, too, and I joke, too--just as bad as the guys.”

By contrast, Janet McKee, 28, a three-year officer in La Habra, is quiet and keeps to herself most of the time, but she said she feels completely at ease with her fellow patrol officers.

She said that as a rookie, she believed she had to work doubly hard to gain the men’s respect, but now that she has it, she believes there is mutual trust.

“We’re a group of close-knit people who respect each other,” McKee says. “Sure, there can be a bad apple anywhere, but I don’t like to hear about things like (sexual harassment), because those charges cast a bad light on all of us as police officers.”

At 23, Julie Chew is the youngest officer at the Buena Park Police Department. She totes her equipment in a purple floral bag and wears a violet-colored pager, a gesture to show she will not disguise her femininity.

Chew, two months from the end of her 16-month probation, said she has never felt isolated from the rest of the force because of her gender. “Everyone here treats me the same. When I’m out there on the street, I’m an officer. I’m not thought of as a woman officer. I do the same thing the men do; I have the same badge they have.”

Courts ordered Chew’s department to pay $212,500 this year in two sexual harassment lawsuits. “I’ve heard about those charges, but they don’t really interest me,” she said. “It’s not my business, so it really doesn’t concern me.”

The Chiefs

It was 1982 or ’83 when Laguna Beach Police Chief Neil J. Purcell Jr. attended a statewide meeting of police chiefs and learned of the latest crisis.

A lawyer asked the chiefs how many had official policies regarding sexual harassment. “Only a couple raised their hands. He said: ‘If you do nothing else, put together a sexual harassment policy. It’s coming down the pike, it will hit police departments, address it--the sooner the better.’ ”

Purcell introduced his sexual harassment policy in 1983, one of the first in Orange County. Then he tried to sell it to his men.

“There was a lot of disbelief. A lot thought, ‘Hey, this is baloney. I can’t have a picture in my locker? I can’t tell a joke?’ A lot thought it was kind of ridiculous.

“This was a way of life. It’s a tradition in male locker rooms, like girlie calendars in auto shops. It was considered an area of privacy, and they didn’t see any harm to it.

“I had to convince them: ‘It’s not what you think, it’s what they think.”

Purcell concedes that he finally got the support of his command staff after he explained that under the policy, if a supervisor aware of sexual harassment does nothing about it, “the supervisor can be nailed. That was kind of the turning point. They started selling it to the troops.”

A longtime sergeant was fired after he refused to curb his ribald remarks to and about women. An investigator was suspended. A patrol officer was reprimanded.

And that was it, Purcell said. Sensitivity to sexual harassment reached the point that when a gay man complained about secretaries’ beefcake calendars, they were removed without a squawk.

The wise police chief is stern in his punishment of sexual harassment, said Irvine Police Chief Charles S. Brobeck, because even trivial remarks or actions can cost a police department big sums to settle lawsuits.

“We get beaten up pretty bad by the attorneys. There are attorneys out there who take us on. You get hammered in the press, and when that happens, you get embarrassed, whether you’re right or wrong.

“It’s a very, very touchy subject, and it’s always hanging over your head. Because when you’re working with a woman who’s a poor performer, pretty soon it stops being a matter of performance with them and becomes a personal issue: ‘You’re doing this to me because I’m a woman.’ That’s why people walk on eggshells over this.”

Another chief was willing to air his feelings only if he could do it anonymously.

“You don’t see the heroines of police departments suing to set things right,” he said. Lawsuits are more likely to come from “women unhappy with the job or discipline, who see a way out with a profit. What is tolerated before as just being locker-room behavior is suddenly not OK.

“I agree with the idea that no woman should be harassed . . . but they’re using lawsuits as an outlet for their anger. I think, frankly, we’re all sitting here waiting for it to happen.”

The Lawyers

Steven R. Pingel, the Seal Beach attorney representing the women suing the Newport Beach Police Department, agreed that working conditions for female police officers are probably better than a decade ago. “But I don’t know if they’re a lot better.”

Sexual harassment in the workplace is forbidden by state and federal law, and lawsuits complaining of harassment are up in recent years. Last year a jury in Long Beach awarded a record $3.1 million to two officers. Detroit has spent more than $2 million defending itself against five such suits. Others have been filed in Los Angeles, San Diego, the Bay Area, Des Moines, Boston and New York.

News over the last three weeks of Pingel’s lawsuit against Newport Beach has, he said, prompted between 25 and 50 calls from female officers in Orange County. “They say somewhat similar things happened to them--many different stories of sexual harassment--and they want to talk about (legal) representation.

Pingel, who specializes in employment law, said that while he has received many reports of sexual harassment by low-ranking officers, the Newport case alleges the harassment came from a captain and was tolerated by the police chief. The department denies the allegations.

“I don’t have knowledge of this type of misconduct (in top ranks) in other police departments,” Pingel said.

“You have a historically male-dominated organization coupled with the old-boy group running most departments. It’s essentially a paramilitary-type organization, very rigidly structured on a command basis.” Pingel said people within the Newport police force have told him they’ve been told by management “to not make comments to the press, but if you do, the comments had better be positive. That’s a pretty obvious management message: Your job is at stake. All I’ve got is what I hear, but I believe it, absolutely.”

(City Manager Kevin J. Murphy denied any effort to intimidate his officers. He said that at the City Council’s request, he has ordered only that all press queries connected with the lawsuit be referred to his office.)

Michelle Reinglass, an attorney representing a woman suing the Garden Grove Police Department for alleged sexual harassment, discrimination and wrongful firing, said complaints by female officers to unsympathetic superiors can cost those officers dearly. Retribution can range from verbal abuse to being fired.

“If you’re classified as a troublemaker, you’re blackballed,” she said. “It will always follow you. You’re not going to be working in law enforcement ever again.”

Orange County Female Officers

Women compose half the population of Orange County, but they constitute only 8.5% of the county’s law enforcement officers. (The national average is between 10% and 14%.) From Los Alamitos, with no female officers, to the California Highway Patrol, with nearly 18% female officers, here is an agency-by-agency rundown:

Total Sworn Percent of sworn female female officers City officers officers on force Anaheim 351 29 8.3 Brea* 106 7 6.6 Buena Park 89 2 2.2 Costa Mesa 136 10 7.4 Cypress 53 4 7.5 Fountain Valley 62 6 9.7 Fullerton 150 8 5.3 Garden Grove 175 8 4.6 Huntington Beach 229 7 3.1 Irvine 126 10 7.9 Laguna Beach 47 6 12.8 La Habra 60 4 6.7 La Palma 24 1 4.2 Los Alamitos 25 0 0 Newport Beach 150 7 4.7 Orange 143 7 4.9 Placentia 54 1 1.9 San Clemente 45 5 1.1 Santa Ana 390 15 3.8 Seal Beach 35 3 8.6 Tustin 84 5 5.9 Westminster 99 2 2.0 O.C. Sheriff’s Department** 1,239 156 12.6 California Highway Patrol 256 46 17.9

* Brea Police Department also serves the incorporated areas of Yorba Linda.

**Orange County Sheriff’s Department also serves all unincorporated areas of the county, as well as contracting services with Dana Point, Laguna Niguel, Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, San Juan Capistrano, Stanton and Villa Park.

Source: Individual cities, Orange County Sheriff’s Department, California Highway Patrol