The Fight Against Crime: Notes From The Front : First Female Cycle Cop Had Ticket to Ride

In 1987, Joanna Needham was The Lone Rider.

As the LAPD’s first female motorcycle cop, she pushed aside naysayers who thought a woman couldn’t handle a bike. Her compensation, she recalled recently, was public support, in the form of smiles and thumbs up signals she got from surprised drivers as she zoomed by them in the smoggy Los Angeles traffic.

Now, with Needham hanging up her helmet, she leaves only two women among the LAPD’S 245 cycle officers. Although there were once five, Needham and two other women were promoted off their cycles recently.

The low numbers reflect women’s slow infiltration of one of the last almost all-male bastions in police work, surpassed only by the LAPD’s SWAT unit, which has no women in its ranks.

The CHP, which put Ramona Murray on cycle patrol for the first time on Nov. 1, 1980, now has nine statewide, and six out of 168 in its southern division, which includes the Los Angeles area.

Almost a decade after breaking the LAPD gender line, Needham, 36, is still proud of her achievement and her 14-year love affair with motorcycles. But she is parking her cycle to take a new assignment to retrain the department’s 8,000 officers in self-defense, to better deal with more violent criminals.

Needham hopes to see more women on LAPD bikes, recalling that it was a lonely existence until Lisa Turvey became the second woman motor officer in 1992, before three other women started last summer. Turvey, who earlier this year was struck by a suspected drunk driver and suffered minor injuries, was until recently the only woman cycle cop in the Valley.

Male cycle cops are getting used to the idea, said Valley Motor Sgt. John Amott. “When Joanna got on, it was news,” he said. “But now it’s to the point where it’s no big deal.”

When she began training, Needham said, some male officers obviously doubted she could make it, but “after the first few days, I think they didn’t doubt me anymore.”

Unlike the six women who tried out but failed to make it before her, Needham had some early training and a few special advantages. As a child she dreamed of hopping on her big brother’s motorcycle and riding off into the sunset. As a teenager she began competing in tennis, karate and cross-country motorcycling. “We basically raced motorcycles across the desert,” she said. She won a national title in the sport in 1986.

But passing rigorous LAPD tests takes more than just the balance and reflexes of a championship dirt-bike rider. It also requires raw strength, especially upper body strength, which hurts some female candidates who have trouble lifting the 800-pound Kawasaki Police Specials the LAPD rides.

Officers must learn to push the bikes off hilly areas, “bully” the bike into swift changes in direction and ride very slowly for long distances--a difficult task which takes far more strength and balance than riding at normal freeway speeds.

Her years of sports were an advantage, Needham said; “I was naturally strong.”

According to Needham, who lives in the Littlerock area of the Antelope Valley, she’s the only one of the 17 students in her LAPD cycle training class who hasn’t been in a crash.

She’ll be gone, but there are replacements coming from the ranks of current women officers stuck in patrol cars, she says. “There are a lot of girls that come up to me and say ‘that’s a neat job and that’s what I want to do.’ ”