Female MTA Police Allege Wide Sexual Harassment : Bias: A least a third of women officers have filed complaints. Chief, who is a woman, expresses surprise.

A vocal core of women officers are unleashing allegations of widespread sexual harassment at the county’s transit Police Department, triggering disciplinary action against several top officers and creating a host of unanswered questions for the department’s female chief.

“I’m just trying to figure out what the hell’s going on in my department, because till now I had no reason to believe anyone was being blatantly mistreated,” said Sharon Papa, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police Department.

In all, at least a third of the women officers at the MTA have filed harassment or discrimination complaints over a work atmosphere that they describe as hostile and degrading, records and interviews show. The women allege that a small group of men have engaged in a pattern of harassment--including bumping or groping them in hallways, making lewd comments, humiliating them at staff meetings and circulating embarrassing photographs.

Moreover, the proportion of women on the MTA force--which patrols the county’s bus and rail lines--has dropped significantly in recent years, bucking the trend at many other law enforcement agencies. The number of women officers at the department has dropped from 24 to 17 over the last 14 months, even as the total number of officers at the state’s tenth-biggest police agency has grown substantially to 367 officers.

“This is a drastic reduction,” said Penny Harrington, director of the National Center for Women and Policing, who has met with several MTA officers to hear their concerns that the department has ignored the problem of harassment. “Just about every place else, the trend [in numbers of women law-enforcement officers] is going up. Here we have the opposite.”

The MTA in recent weeks has taken or is considering discipline against four male officers--including the head of the internal affairs department--after they were accused of harassment, and the issue has become so heated that several women officers demanded a meeting with Chief Papa earlier this month to air their grievances. The officers are considering a class-action suit against the department, and the MTA’s inspector general and its Equal Employment Opportunity Office have begun reviewing harassment claims as well.

A group of women officers also met this week with a top aide to county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to seek support. Alisa Belinkoff Katz, Yaroslavsky’s chief deputy, said the supervisor wants the MTA’s inspector general to make the cause a top priority, saying: “We are concerned about the situation.”

Officials at the Police Department--seen as a leader in law enforcement diversity after Papa rose through the ranks to become chief six years ago--deny any pattern of harassment. But more than a dozen officers past and present said in interviews that tensions have sent some women packing for new jobs and discouraged others from even joining the agency.

“This is what you’re up against here--it’s them and us,” said Sgt. Janice Hart, who became one of at least six women at the department to file harassment or discrimination complaints after she alleged that a male sergeant grabbed her breast while they were on duty together.

In one of the more blatant instances over the years, one female officer said she was terrified when her training officer handcuffed her for a supposed lesson in restraining suspects--and then began undressing her as she pleaded with him to stop. He was later fired.

“I was petrified. I didn’t know who to tell,” said Martha Lopez, 36, of Alhambra who has been a patrol officer with the department for the last 4 1/2 years.

Lopez has filed several other complaints with the MTA since then over treatment by male officers that she said she found demeaning. Like other female officers, Lopez said she worked for several security agencies--all male-dominated--before joining the transit police, and “I don’t remember ever being treated like that. . . . There were never the type of incidents like you have at the MTA.”

Interviews indicate that more than half a dozen women currently at the department, along with several others who have since left, have filed harassment or discrimination complaints either within the MTA or through state or federal agencies. MTA officials were unable to provide figures on such claims, but Papa said she believes there have been eight or 10 during her tenure as chief. “I don’t think it’s a high number,” she added.

Several legal and women’s advocates said that while unsubstantiated claims are difficult to assess, they were surprised that such a high proportion of women at the MTA--up to half, by some accounts--had taken formal action. That could signal a pervasive problem, especially at an agency where women would expect a more sensitive ear from top officials, they said.

“Having a woman at the top doesn’t change the culture,” said Connie Rice, western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which has represented bus riders in disputes with the MTA. She said only a top-to-bottom look at the problem--including recruitment, promotions and disciplining--can ensure equal treatment in a department.

Ironically, Papa--the first woman officer at what was then the Rapid Transit Department’s police force--was also the first to file a sexual harassment complaint as a rookie in 1981, after she said a male officer refused to stop asking her out and brought work to her home. He was disciplined.

For that reason, Papa said she was “amazed” by charges that she is insensitive to the problem. “There is no way, as a female chief, that I’m going to allow the women in the department to be mistreated,” she said.

“The incidents that have been brought to my attention have been acted upon,” she said.

The problem, she said, is that she has been blindsided by a sudden surge in complaints about problems that had never been disclosed. In one case, she said a harassment complaint “sat” at the equal opportunity office for eight or nine months before she was told about it.

Women officers “are coming forward with issues that they didn’t come forward with before,” she said. “It’s not like we wouldn’t have taken action. But you can’t take action on something you don’t know about. . . . What is happening is they’ve had things happen over the years that they didn’t come forward with, and now that they’ve all been comparing notes, they’re angry, and so they’re coming forward with all this stuff.”

Papa said she has taken steps to remedy the problem, investigating the spate of recent complaints, letting women officers know that she is available to hear their concerns and assigning a female sergeant to interview the women about the issue.

The chief said she has fired one male sergeant who was the target of a harassment complaint, although she refused to discuss details.

According to sources, she has also put another male officer--the head of the internal affairs division, which ordinarily investigates harassment claims--on administrative leave after a harassment complaint was filed against him by a female officer, while another sergeant was suspended for 20 days over a harassment claim. The case against a fourth officer--a lieutenant--is still pending.

Several women on the force, however, insist that their complaints were ignored for years by Papa and other department officials. And they question whether Papa--serving in a unique and precedent-setting role as the most prominent woman police chief in Los Angeles--has proven too tough on female officers in an effort to avoid charges of favoritism and pandering.

A male chief “would be more afraid” of exposing himself to charges of insensitivity, insisted MTA Sgt. Shari V. Barberic, one of the more outspoken officers on the issue.

“She is using her gender as a shield against any type of this kind of complaint,” Barberic said. “She’s said in interviews, ‘I’m a woman chief and . . . I’m saying [women] are going to get a fairer shake in our department than they would on others.’ I haven’t found that to be true.”

The department’s inattention to the problem is “the really shameful part,” said Barberic, who has sued the department over claims of harassment, including the allegation that a sergeant she had dated circulated intimate photos of her.

Barberic’s boyfriend, MTA Sgt. Robert Delgadillo, maintained in an interview that male officers who tried to support women in their harassment complaints have been ignored or even retaliated against by supervisors.

Sexual harassment against female officers is “a department-wide problem,” maintained Delgadillo, executive board member of the Transit Police Officers Assn., an MTA union that has complained about work conditions at the Police Department and is pushing for Papa’s removal.

“It’s there, it’s happening. It’s been addressed all the way to the top, and it appears our management is afraid to deal with it,” Delgadillo said. When male officers appear to be lending support to women who voiced complaints, he said, supervisors “don’t listen. They just throw you out in the field.”

Women at the MTA say situations like that of Officer Lopez--the woman who was handcuffed by her training officer--are extreme. But they say the climate of hostility is a day-to-day concern, ensuring that some women call in sick when they have to ride with certain officers.

One male sergeant allegedly grabbed the breast of a female sergeant while they were on duty. Another suggested that a female officer was having a lesbian relationship with another officer and he also allegedly made sexual innuendoes to female officers. And a third sergeant allegedly announced in front of a female officer’s colleagues that she had breast enlargement surgery.

Several women officers reported, meanwhile, that a male lieutenant regularly blocks their way as they walk down the hallways.

“It was like a power play for him,” said Lopez. “He had a thing about women in the department. I don’t think he felt there was a place for them here.”

One female officer said that after she complained about harassment, she was sent to a “Stress Reduction Workshop for Women.”

Marla E. Miller, an MTA sergeant who has filed a harassment complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, remembers her frustration on the day she became a sergeant.

A male senior sergeant ordered her to join officers to be inspected, even though two other male sergeants were not ordered to do so. “He wanted me to join the line and be inspected. Sergeants aren’t inspected with the officers. Sergeants do the inspecting,” she said.

“He sent a very clear message the first day I’m promoted to sergeant,” she said. She recalled pointing to the male sergeants and asking: “ ‘You going to make them do it?’ . . . He said no.”

The motive behind such treatment, Miller and other offices asserted, is clear.

“It’s a female thing,” said Annell Witherspoon, a 14-year veteran. “We all know the officers who are the macho men and like to belittle all the women. Then the new guys come in and they think it’s all part of the game, and it starts all over again.”