How policewomen make communities safer Ivonne Roman
I’ve been a police officer
in an urban city
for nearly 25 years.
That’s crazy, right?
And in that time,
I’ve served in every rank,
from police officer to police chief.
A few years ago,
I noticed something alarming.
Starting in 2014,
I started monitoring recruits
as they cycled through police academies
in the state of New Jersey,
and I found that women were failing
at rates between 65 and 80 percent,
due to varying aspects
of the physical fitness test.
I learned that a change in policy
now required recruits
to pass the fitness exam
within 10 short workout sessions.
This had the greatest impact on women.
The change meant that recruits
had about three weeks
out of a five-month-long academy
to pass the fitness exam.
This just didn’t make sense, though.
Police agencies and police recruits
had made huge investments
to get those recruits into the academy.
Police recruits had passed
lengthy background checks,
they had passed medical
and psychological exams,
they had quit their jobs.
And many had spent more
than 2,000 dollars in fees and equipment
just to get kicked out
within the first three weeks?
The dire situation in New Jersey
led me to examine the status
of women in policing
across the United States.
I found that women make up
less than 13 percent of police officers.
A number that hasn’t changed much
in the past 20 years.
And they make up just three percent
of police chiefs as of 2013,
the last time the data was collected.
We know that we can improve those rates.
Other countries like Canada,
Australia and the UK
have nearly twice the amount
of policewomen.
And New Zealand is steadily marching
towards their goal
of recruit gender parity by 2021.
Other countries are actively working
to increase the number
of women in policing,
because they know of a vast body
of research evidence,
spanning more than 50 years,
detailing the advantages
to women in policing.
From that research,
we know that policewomen
are less likely to use force
or to be accused of excessive force.
We know that policewomen
are less likely to be named in a lawsuit
or a citizen complaint.
We know that the mere presence
of a policewoman
reduces the use of force
among other officers.
And we know that policewomen
are met with the same rates of force
as their male counterparts,
and sometimes more,
and yet they’re more successful
in defusing violent
or aggressive behavior overall.
So there are vast advantages
to women in policing,
and we’re losing them
to arbitrary fitness standards.
The problem is,
the United States has nearly
18,000 police agencies –
18,000 agencies with wildly varying
fitness standards.
We know that a majority of academies
rely on a masculine ideal of policing
that works to decrease
the number of women in policing.
These types of academies
overemphasize physical strength,
with much less attention spent
to subjects like community policing,
problem-solving
and interpersonal communication skills.
This results in training that does not
mirror the realities of policing.
Physical agility is but a small
component of police work.
Much of an officer’s day is spent
mediating interpersonal conflicts.
That’s the reality of policing.
These are my babies.
And we can reduce
the disparity in policing
by changing exams
that produce disparate outcomes.
The federal courts have stated
that men and women
simply are not physiologically the same
for the purposes
of physical fitness programs.
And that’s based on science.
Respected institutions
that law enforcement deeply respects,
like the FBI, the US Marshals Service,
the DEA and even the US military –
they rigorously test fitness programs
to ensure they measure fitness
without gender-disparate outcomes.
Why is that?
Because recruiting is expensive.
They want to recruit and retain
qualified candidates.
You know what else the research finds?
Well-trained women are as capable
as their male counterparts
in overall fitness,
but more importantly, in how they police.
The law-enforcement community
is admittedly experiencing
a recruitment crisis.
Yet, if they truly want to increase
the number of applicants, they can.
We can easily recruit more women
and reap all those research benefits
by training well-qualified candidates
to pass validated, work-related,
physiologically-based fitness exams,
as required by Title VII
of the Civil Rights Act.
We can increase the number of women,
we can reduce that gender disparity,
by simply changing exams
that produce disparate outcomes.
We have the tools.
We have the research,
we have the science, we have the law.
This, my friends,
should be a very easy fix.
Thank you.
(Applause)