The Effectiveness of Female Police Officers

Women constitute only 9% of the nation's 524,000 police officers, but that number is rising. Still, because of that rather large discrepancy, many arguments, much like the one between Jeanne McDowell and Erica Walter, exist, debating the effectiveness of women in law enforcement. Erica Walter argues in the negative, saying that female police officers hinder law enforcement operations, sometimes to the point of danger for her and all those involved.

Jeanne McDowell, on the other hand, says that, for the most part, (5% of all occurrences, she cites) women do not detract from the operations of police, and she also makes a point to say that women as police officers tend to go about their job with a much different focus than do the men on the same squad. While neither side provides any additional cited research, McDowell's argument seems to me to be much stronger, mainly because it does not rely so much on heresay (from male officers and bystanders), as does Walter's side.

McDowell first writes that "women may help burnish the tarnished image of police officers, improve community relations and foster a more flexible, and less violent, approach to keeping the peace" (McDowell, p. 446). To add to her point here, Edwin Delartte says "individual temperament is more important than gender in the way cops perform" (McDowell, 447). In relation to a part of Walter's article, I argue that Delartte's point here is actually well defended, if only by Walter's poor choice of words. However, in an argument based upon word choice, this point becomes all-too important.

Walter uses an example in her article describing a situation in which a female officer, Angela Jewell, pulled her gun on a Latino offender, Daniel Gomez, and shot him. Walter herself writes that Gomez lunged at Jewell with a knife, and the officer then shot Gomez. Walter concludes the description of what happened by stating that "one may suspect that Gomez...managed both to offend and frighten her, which led to her shooting him" (Walter 451).

When the case was brought to the public's attention in this article, Walter writes that "
First of all, Walter openly provides her own conclusion, not the conclusion of the court (as she provides no such cited evidence), to the shooting. As readers, because of the sequence of events Walter lays out for us, we are led to believe, having no other alternative, that Jewell fired her weapon without reason. However, in looking at the sequence as provided by Walter, we can come to the conclusion that Jewell fired her weapon in self-defense, which is commonplace in police work, and often garners no second thought.

Secondly, Walter brings to light a disturbing situation which again feeds credibility to McDowell's argument. In that same explanation of the alleged event, Walter opened the door for criticism when she described the reactions of the male police officers, who at trial claimed that Gomez miraculously didn't have a knife. Reading closely, it is clear that Walter degrades her own argument by calling attention to the fact that the male police officers changed their story to devalue the reputation (and thereby her abilities) of Angela Jewell. By doing so, she is saying that because of the power men have in law enforcement, the actions of a female police officer can be misconstrued in favor of the men.

McDowell calls upon professor James Fyfe to illustrate her newly-found point here. Fyfe argues that "[W]hen cops are trained to think of themselves as fighters in a war against crime, they come to think of the public as the enemy" (McDowell 447).

Sociolinguist Deborah Tannen would undoubtedly agree with her. Tannen wrote a book called The Argument Culture which examined our society's fascination with equating almost everything between two or more groups of unequal social, political, or economic status with a war, including situations like this war on crime, to which McDowell draws our attention. As Tannen believes, this equality to war only serves to separate the two sides, and doesn't serve to help find a common ground, nor does anything really become "won" in the sense of a war.

With respect to this idea of war, who is it that usually does the fighting? Men. Not surprisingly, this "man's world" approach continues into the world of policing. And as Walter has already proven, it is the man's word that gets remembered, recorded, and debated about.

This male-centered world existed long before the formal police came about, and I think that's where the discussion needs to start; not with respect to a woman's ability compared to a man's. Male police officers, having been in power for so long, are certainly accustomed to such privilege, and will continue to do so. Until studies are done that don't rely so much on anecdotal evidence, the solution to this debate isn't likely to be discovered.

While that exact moment isn't certain, I am sure that constructing an argument around heresay as Walter has done does nothing more than call upon our emotions as readers. While it may not be a sure-fire solution, looking at the debate as someone like Tannen would (thereby looking at language choices) can at least lead us toward a different argument than the simple and ongoing dead-end direction that "I'm better than you" is sending us.

Works Cited

Hickey, Thomas. Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Criminal Justice. Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill, 2007.