COLUMN ONE : Force to Be Reckoned With : Although still rare, female officers are changing the way police patrol the streets. Their more open style may become a hallmark of the LAPD as it tries to hire a record number of women.

By SONIA NAZARIO

June 5, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES URBAN AFFAIRS WRITER

Los Angeles Police Officer Kelly Shea’s foot beat is a volatile stretch of Venice Beach where Shoreline Crips and Inglewood Bloods commonly collide.

Shea is ready. Her gun is at her side. She begins walking the water’s edge but stops in her tracks--to hug a homeless man. Several hours later, Shea, her hot-pink lipstick intact, has hugged four transients and shopkeepers and chatted with many others about what is on their minds. It seems more like a love fest than crime fighting in an increasingly violent urban landscape.

Female officers such as Shea--just 10% of the total nationwide--are poised to move from tokens to a significant presence in policing. With them comes a less authoritarian, more open style that, studies show, is less likely to trigger showdowns.

It is a style that is beginning to change policing in Los Angeles, which has been thrust into the vanguard as the first U.S. city to embrace the notion of having as many women as men patrolling the streets. The impetus: last year’s City Council resolution--backed by Chief Willie L. Williams--requiring the Los Angeles Police Department to boost the number of women in its ranks to 44% from 14%.

With hiring at a budget-imposed near-standstill, the full integration of women into the LAPD promises to be slow. The force’s 1,076 female officers are gaining acceptance, but the City Council’s bold move has not cheered some of its men in blue, those who still believe that women have no place in a patrol car and are stealing men’s jobs.

Although women remain a rarity in the LAPD’s upper ranks and are absent from its elite SWAT unit, they make up a quarter of its lower-ranking patrol officers. So many work in some areas of the city that officers such as Shea often patrol with a female partner.

The growing female contingent is giving new urgency to lingering questions. Can women--who generally possess less upper-body strength and stature--intimidate or subdue violent people as effectively as men? Are they less aggressive in pursuing bad guys? Will criminals see large numbers of female officers as an invitation to mayhem?

In Los Angeles, and elsewhere, women are beginning to counter their critics in their daily battle with crime, providing strong evidence for what police studies have long held: Women in many ways make better officers than men.

Officer Debbie McCarthy faces skeptics every day. Her red hair neatly braided, McCarthy is constantly teased by male colleagues about her sweet, innocent looks. They call her Mary Poppins. When other male officers recently rushed a building to flush out a felony suspect, they left McCarthy to guard the patrol cars. “Gee, why don’t I hold a Tupperware party?” she fumed.

But as she maneuvers her black-and-white through the crime-plagued streets of South Los Angeles, Mary Poppins can turn as tough as the Terminator.

McCarthy is leaning out her car window to talk to a Neighborhood Watch leader when a message crackles over the radio: “Shooting in progress.”

“Gotta go!’ McCarthy says.

As she races around a corner a few blocks away, a midafternoon shootout is ending between dozens of machine gun-toting Playboys and rival East Coast Treces gangsters on an elementary school playground. McCarthy is the first to arrive, screeching her car to a halt inches from one crew-cut teen-ager. She jumps out, thrusts her Beretta toward his chest and screams: “Down on your knees! Down on your face!” The youth, who clutches a car radio, pauses near the bullet-ridden playground, then thrusts his arms in the air in surrender.

McCarthy, 32, a five-year veteran and former Hughes Aircraft administrative assistant, makes more arrests each month than all but a handful of men in the Newton Division. And despite assertions by some male co-workers that women are too dainty for policing, she doesn’t drag her heels when facing the job’s dirtiest tasks.

Earlier that day, she stumbled upon a man so drunk he could not move, except to grasp a flask of whiskey. Fearful that he would wander into the street, she steadied the man, gripping his soiled polyester pants. He began to gag. “Don’t you choke on me!” she said sternly, shoving him into the back of her patrol car. At a detoxification center, she emptied his front pants pockets of change and a knife. The man alternated between being hostile and flirtatious. He even tried to pick her up.

In 1971, then-Chief Ed Davis told a hushed audience of 100 women officers that they didn’t belong in patrol cars and couldn’t be trusted with guns during “that time of the month.”

At the time, the LAPD barred women from patrol and consigned them to work with juvenile offenders or in women’s jails, wearing long skirts and packing pistols in purses. Female cops were viewed as “either lesbians or nymphomaniacs,” said retired LAPD officer Bobbi Squire.

In 1972, Los Angeles and other police departments were forced by federal legislation to hire female patrol officers. “The men said: ‘They’ll get us killed. Our marriages will break up if we have to ride with them,’ ” said former Portland, Ore., Police Chief Penny Harrington.

Some LAPD men argued that the department would have to add one more pouch to officers’ belts--to hold tissues for women’s emotional outbursts.

Real change didn’t dawn until 1981, when Los Angeles settled a lawsuit alleging sex discrimination by promising to make 25% of its recruits women until a fifth of L.A.’s finest were female.

Women officers say most men now accept them as partners. “Women are one of the better things that have happened to the LAPD,” said McCarthy’s former partner, Vincent Rodriguez. “She taught me how to de-escalate rather than escalate situations,” he said. “I haven’t had a fistfight in five years.”

With women has come a striking body of evidence that they benefit policing. Studies show women are more effective in investigating rape and child abuse, as well as domestic violence, which accounts for half of all emergency calls to 911 nationwide.

As part of the first female duo in the LAPD’s homicide department, Capt. Margaret York says she and her partner had the highest rate of confessions. “These people either look at us as a mother figure, or they think we are too stupid to know what to do with the information,” said York, the LAPD’s highest-ranking woman.

Although the LAPD doesn’t break out its records by gender, a 1990 study of the New York Police Department found that women fired their guns less than half as often as male officers. “Men draw their guns when they shouldn’t. They play with their guns,” said Long Island University criminal justice associate professor Sean Grennan, the study’s author.

“With a male suspect and a male officer, it’s like two dogs meeting on the street. They get their hair up on their backs,” and take insults as a blow to their egos, said LAPD Detective Vivienne Gomez. By contrast, she said, suspects often avoid confrontations with female officers, fearful that a woman will not take any chances and just blow them away.

Shea added: “A lot of gang members were raised with the Virgin Mary. They don’t want to strike a woman.”

Preventing showdowns is particularly pressing in Los Angeles, where officers proportionately kill or wound more civilians than any of the nation’s other five largest cities, a 1991 Police Foundation study found. Last year’s Christopher Commission noted that none of the 120 LAPD officers most frequently charged with excessive use of force were women. Promoting the city’s hiring resolution, Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said more women officers would bring potential relief to taxpayers, who have paid more than $49 million in recent years to settle lawsuits alleging excessive use of force.

As crime rates soar, skeptics fear Los Angeles’ move to increase the number of women will put the public in danger. There are fewer than seven LAPD patrol units per 100,000 residents; Philadelphia has nearly four times that, the Police Foundation study found. Los Angeles officers make six times more violent crime arrests in a year than a Chicago officer.

“If we have gender parity, the criminals will have one big party,” said one of Shea’s male colleagues, who also patrols Venice.

“As a citizen, I want guys around who can take care of business,” he said, recalling a 1985 incident in which a female LAPD officer was hurled into a trash bin by a suspect, who stole her gun and escaped.

“The men ask: Can she back me up?” said Sgt. Lita Abella who, at 5 feet, 9 inches, acknowledges that she asks the same question of a woman in her division who stands 5 feet, 1 inch and weighs 87 pounds. “I don’t know if I’d want her as a partner. I could throw her over my shoulder with one hand.”

The Police Academy is fueling the debate with what some say is a lowering of standards to let in more women. In 1981, the height requirement was slashed from 5 feet, 8 inches to 5 feet. Almost half the women brought into the academy between 1985 and 1991 were given preferential treatment; many received entrance test scores in the 70th percentile, while white men had to score in the 90s. Almost all female candidates now graduate from the academy, compared with just half in 1981. This year, the academy began grading its final physical test on a curve adjusted for gender and age.

Even some female officers bristle at the idea that women are a magic bullet for beleaguered police departments. “People don’t innately have certain qualities because of their gender,” said Karen Kimball, the LAPD’s Women’s Coordinator. She says she has seen some “Jane Waynes” in the department who swagger, spit and are so aggressive they make many testosterone-charged men seem tame.

She and others emphasize that a female officer can sometimes escalate situations when suspects resist only because they don’t want to follow a woman’s commands, or because word of having been taken in by a woman without resistance can cause trouble in prison.

“You two bitches ain’t taking me to jail,” one stocky suspect told Abella and a female partner. She made the arrest but only after threatening: “We have 12 bullets in our guns. We can do this nice and easy, or we can use our weapons and call for backup.”

At least seven studies show no significant difference between the effectiveness of women and men on patrol, with women using defensive tactics such as karate or a baton instead of their fists. In Los Angeles, women and men are fired at the same rate during their first, probationary year. In performance evaluations by supervisors, men received twice as many unsatisfactory ratings that first year, and “women performed better than men in every major category of patrol duty,” according to a comparison of 68 female LAPD officers hired after 1980.

McCarthy and other female officers compensate for their smaller size by using different techniques and employing verbal alternatives to brute force.

McCarthy says she avoids violent situations by cuffing suspects faster and requesting backup sooner. Size, she adds, is rarely an issue: Contrary to the TV image of policing, where cops face a series of death-defying showdowns with thugs, by most estimates 90% of police work is nonviolent, involving such tasks as traffic problems and burglary reports. After five years on the job, McCarthy has yet to draw her nightstick. “A man is stronger. But the number of times that makes a difference is very rare,” said Temple University Professor James Fyfe, a nationally known police expert.

Verbal alternatives often defuse dangerous situations. “A lot of times people just want to talk. I say: I want to hear your side,’ ” McCarthy said.

One recent afternoon, a 6-foot-2 stabbing victim apparently on cocaine lashed out as male officers and ambulance workers drew near. When McCarthy approached, he spit on her and cursed. She did not take it personally. “We’re just trying to do a job. Don’t you have a job?’ she coaxed, inquiring if he was in pain as he spit on her clothes again. “I don’t want to hurt you. You have a family to go home to,” she said.

Finally, she played her trump card: “Look,” she pleaded, pointing to her male colleagues, “you are making me look real bad.” The man surrendered.

“Men are more confrontational,” said Officer Shea, who rejects the us-versus-them tactics long associated with the LAPD and instead moves in lock step with community-based policing, which extends law enforcement’s presence by using residents as their eyes an ears. On foot patrol, she pauses and greets Bob, a man with a grizzled gray beard, then holds his hand as he swigs a bottle of high-octane Cisco wine in the middle of the Venice boardwalk.

“Kelly, I love you. I love you baby,” says Bob, who recently returned Shea’s kindness by helping to identify a robbery suspect. He whispers a new tip in her ear, fingering someone selling crack cocaine nearby. Several other beach contacts helped Shea solve the murder of a man gunned down on the boardwalk.

“I used to be very hard. I was taught it was that way or no way,” said Shea, whose first brush with law enforcement was as a girl in the San Gabriel Valley. Sheriff’s deputies ended a fierce family fight by beating her parents, she said. But now, “I rely on people to help me solve problems.

“The police feel people should quiver in their shorts when you come by. (But) if you (make people feel that way), you aren’t approachable, even by a victim.”

Shea and others say major problems loom for the LAPD in attracting equal numbers of women. A Los Angeles city survey found that 48% of women in protective services departments had been sexually harassed in the past year. Of those who reported harassment, 30% had filed complaints. Half a dozen women in the past four years have alleged to the LAPD that they were raped by male colleagues, some in the Police Academy and even in Parker Center, said Katherine Spillar, co-chairwoman of the Police Commission’s Women’s Advisory Council.

Chief Williams has ordered sexual harassment training to begin later this year for his top officers after the LAPD’s board of rights found that a case in which a male officer had pulled a woman’s face into his crotch was not harassment because he did not derive gratification. (He recently was suspended after he was found guilty of inappropriate conduct involving the same officer.)

Echoing fears expressed by male colleagues, many female officers say they also wonder if enough women want to face daily encounters with dead bodies, abused children or an increasingly hostile citizenry.

“Two LAPD officers will die in the city of Los Angeles tonight,” Sgt. Clayton Tave to says officers assembled for roll call in the Wilshire Division one recent night, repeating a threat called in earlier that day.

Sgt. Abella squirms, knowing that two male colleagues nearly lost their lives in an ambush three months ago. She also knows that female officers are fair game. Two years ago, she sat through the funeral of officer Tina Kerbrat, who was shot in the face after stopping to question two men drinking in public. Abella recalls looking at Kerbrat’s two children, 3-year-old Nicole--clad in a black velvet dress and pink ribbons--and 6-year-old Craig, as they sat on their father’s lap.

“I thought: There could be a day I won’t come home to my 2-year-old son,” she said, strapping on her gun and heading out into the night.

WOMEN FIGHTING CRIME

As policewomen’s numbers grow in Los Angeles and across the nation, so does information about their perceptions and their abilities.

THE WOMEN OF THE LAPD

The LAPD’s sworn personnel include few women in the higher echelons, but a growing contingent among the rank-and-file who patrol the streets.

Men Women Chief 1 0 Deputy Chief II 2 0 Deputy Chief I 7 0 Commander 13 0 Captain III 26 1 Captain II 16 0 Captain I 18 1 Lieutenant II 115 6 Lieutenant I 84 0 Detective III 270 13 Detective II 512 40 Detective I 428 67 Sergeant II 264 12 Sergeant I 538 23 Police Officer III 1,572 251 Police Officer II 2,650 619 Police Officer I 116 43 Total 6,632 1,076

Source: LAPD

WHAT THE WOMEN IN BLUE THINK

A survey of 64 female officers attending a 1988 Ohio Policewomen’s Conference shows that most believe gender plays a role in how a police officer battles crime.

There is only one way to do policing and policewomen perform the same way (as men).

Agree: 15.7%

Disagree: 81.2%

Undecided: 3.1%

Male and female officers handle calls differently.

Agree: 84.1%

Disagree: 6.4%

Undecided: 9.5%

Do you believe your style of policing differs from the males’? If so, how?

Yes: 85%

No: 15%

Women are less violent: 35.3%

Women are more communicative: 49.0%

Women are more respectful to citizens: 27.5%

Note: Officers could provide more than one response.

I have to do things better than the males in my department to be viewed as their equal.

Agree: 57.8%

Disagree: 37.5%

Undecided: 4.7%

Source: Forthcoming survey in American Journal of Police by Joanne Belknap, University of Cincinnati department of criminal justice and Jill Shelley, retired police officer.

HOW THEY PERFORM

Officers receiving commendations during first year on patrol:

Men: 85.3%

Women: 85.4%

Officers receiving citizen complaints during first year on patrol:

Men: 29.0%

Women: 22.1%

Among the findings of a 1990 Claremont Graduate School survey of more than 1,000 Los Angeles police officers:

HOW L.A. COMPARES

Police officers’ competence is perhaps more crucial in Los Angeles than elsewhere. Of the six largest cities in the United States, Los Angeles has the fewest patrol cars deployed per square mile, a 1991 Police Foundation study found. By day, the study said, half of Los Angeles’ officers patrol alone. Los Angeles police officers, it added, must make more violent crime arrests on patrol than police officers in the other big cities.

Marked patrol cars per square mile:

Philadelphia: 4.9

Chicago: 4.5

New York: 4.3

Detroit: 3.8

Houston: 1.7

Los Angeles: 1.5

Violent crime arrests per sworn officer:

Los Angeles: 3.1

Detroit: 1.9

New York: 1.8

Philadelphia: 1.4