Today, Explained - Can women fix the police?

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

Police departments across the US are signing a pledge to increase the share of women in their ranks, hoping the move will help reduce excessive force by officers. Researchers say it’s not that simple. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's been two years since George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. Two summers ago, in the middle of the pandemic, we saw a protest across the nation the likes of which you hadn't seen since the 1960s. We still haven't fixed the police. Growing calls for justice as demonstrators in Grand Rapids demand the arrest and termination of the still unnamed police officer who shot 26-year-old Patrick Leoya. But there's an organization out there pushing for a big change to police departments across the country. There's a growing body of research that shows that there is a very compelling, unique value to women officers.

They say hiring more women police will foster greater trust in law enforcement and even reduce incidents of excessive force. On the show today, we're going to ask if something as simple as hiring more women can fix policing. I'm Sean Ramos for M. It's Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA

from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Today, today explained. When I was growing up, I rarely saw officers in uniform that looked like me. Women make up 12, 13 percent of police officers in the United States today, something like 3 percent of leadership positions in law enforcement. Growing up, I didn't really see that many Hispanic females or even females in general doing police work.

But there's a program out there right now trying to change those numbers. Not just change them, like overhaul them. They want women to make up 30% of police forces across the country. More or less double the amount of women in law enforcement right now. Correct. It's the 30 by 30 initiative. Maureen McGough is leading the charge. To completely revise police policies and strategies so that they adequately support women officers and really transform agency culture. It's a national grassroots effort that I launched with my co-founder Yvonne Roman,

who's a former captain out of the Newark Police Department. I was working with Yvonne on a different project and she pointed out sort of the growing body of research about the value of women officers and the persistent underrepresentation and challenged the USDOJ to do something about it. We brought together women leaders in policing from across the country, all the way down to women officers who'd been on the job for less than a year, researchers, policymakers, and really tried to understand what do we know about women in policing? What is their unique value? Why are they so underrepresented? And what do we need to do in order to fix it? It felt like we were in high school throwing a party and we weren't sure if anybody was going to show up. And then one of

the first guests was the NYPD. The NYPD has just signed a 30 by 30 pledge. They hope to increase representation of women to 30 percent by the year 2030. And we've got many, many other major metros signed on. The Baltimore City Police Department is working to get more women on the force. It has signed the national 30 by 30 pledge. We are here to announce MPD's commitment to the 30 by 30 pledge. Austin Police making a pledge to recruit more women to get APD to 30% women by the year 2030. And we've got LAPD, Seattle, Dallas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, and we've got state agencies. State agencies have even lower representation of

women. Iowa Department of Public Safety and Illinois State Police have both signed the pledge of increasing the amount of women in their departments to 30 percent by 2030. I think we're up to 12 state agencies who are working with us, all the way down to rural and smaller departments with maybe 10, 12 sworn officers on the job. What exactly do police departments have to do when they sign up with your program, 30 by 30? We have the 30 by 30 pledge, which is a series of no and low cost actions that a police department can take immediately

to improve the way they support women. And none of it is rocket science, right? I mean, we heard at the summit some really concerning stories about things like women not having Kevlar that fit them when they were on patrol because it was designed for a man's body. Or women spending thousands of dollars over the course of their career to tailor men's uniform pants to the curves of a woman's body. Or women returning to the workplace after giving birth and having to pump in their cruiser in a dark alley or in a public restroom on the toilet. Yikes. You know, there's really basic things that are very simple, not costly, basic minimum requirements for showing that you're supporting somebody in your workforce.

And we're helping agencies to do that in the immediate term. So when they sign up for this pledge, they sign up and they commit to do a series of immediate actions like the ones I just described and longer term actions over two years, things like policy improvements, improved data collection, surveys, focus groups, strategic planning to really prioritize this issue. They also commit to reporting to us in six month increments so we can get a better understanding of where they need support and design technical assistance to support them moving forward. Are you saying that police departments have been so exceptionally patriarchal over the past few decades that they didn't even realize until y'all came in that maybe women wouldn't want to pump in their cruisers in a dark alley? Is that what you're saying? What I do know is that I've heard from a lot of chiefs. they knew that their agency didn't adequately support women and non-white

officers. They didn't necessarily know exactly how to start addressing that. And what we've given people is not only just a really stepwise framework for how to make those types of improvements, but also a reason to, right? Like there are so many different priorities. Police leaders are pulled in all of these different directions. It's complicated. There's union issues. And what we've done is really create a space and a movement that people can be a part of with a really clear framework for how to achieve the change that's needed. Let's talk about the differences between how men and women police and why so many departments around the country, including some of the biggest ones, are so eager to, I guess, get a little closer to parity here. So what do we know? What data do we have

on the differences between the way men and women police? You know, the research is somewhat limited, but most of it tends to be trending in a very particular direction. And that is that there's a unique value to women officers. So there's research out there that shows that women officers use less force and excessive force. They're named proportionately less in citizen complaints and lawsuits. They use their discretion to make fewer arrests for minor nonviolent offenses. They're less likely to make a traffic stop, but more likely to find contraband when they do. So they're more accurate in their decision-making about stops. They're associated with better outcomes for crime victims, especially victims of sexual assault.

You know, the list is growing. And I think the reality is, if there was a training out there that promised police departments these types of outcomes, every department in the country would be clamoring to implement that training, right? And instead, it really is just thinking differently about who it is that is fit to do the work and who you seek to hire and promote. Why do you think there hasn't been a real shift in gender parity on police forces across the country in decades, you said? Is it our attitudes about who should police this country?

We as a society still have a really long way to go in terms of gender parity. We've certainly come far, but there's a lot of work still to be done. I think policing is no different, and it's an especially hyper-masculinized profession. It was predominantly held by and designed for men, which makes progress a little bit more complicated. And then it's compounded by the fact that there's over 18,000 different police departments in this country and no sort of centralized federal leadership about standards or priorities or, you know, what types of assessments are shown to be validated to accurately assess whether or not somebody can do the job or not.

So creating any type of broad scale change in policing, no matter the issue, is actually extraordinarily difficult, compounded by the fact that we're trying to make this change in a society that is yet to realize gender parity on a lot of fronts. Is part of the idea here sort of traditional patriarchal thinking that this is a job that is unsafe for women. I have not heard that concern when I get pushback. And I will say, I don't get a lot of pushback. But when I do, the concern that I get is not that we need to protect our women, but it's skepticism that women are fit for the job of policing. I think it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what the job of policing actually is and requires. And I think it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what the job of policing actually is and requires. And I think it shows a fundamental misunderstanding about the skills and abilities and strengths

of women as a gender broadly. I don't want to be too gender reductionist about it, but, you know, the research is there and we've got evidence to support it. In a scenario where there's, say, a, I don't know, a pursuit of a potentially violent criminal and a suspect is being apprehended, but then resists arrest, let's say, is there any data out there that suggests how that suspect or violent criminal, whatever it is, might respond if his or her arresting officer is a woman versus a man? So I haven't seen it directly answering that question, but I think you can extrapolate from some of the use of force research that there would be more cooperation because there is less of a need for force. And, you know, just anecdotally, when we're talking particularly to police leaders around the country who are women about their career and how they've gotten to the point where they've gotten. Almost universally, they reflect on the strength of their emotional intelligence

and their ability to have a conversation with someone. You know, they're not interested in going hands-on because there's usually a size disparity in the people that they're interacting with, and they know they have to rely on their emotional intelligence and their brains in order to gain compliance. On the flip side of this, is it sort of sexist to assume that women have more emotional intelligence than men and say like, oh, if we put more women on the force,

they'll make better decisions because they're women? Is that happening here? And is that the sort of, you know, opposite problem? I struggle with this a lot when we talk about it, right? Because it's really easy to misinterpret this as just sort of this gender reductionist thing. Women have emotional intelligence, men have brawn and strength, men don't have emotional intelligence, women don't have brawn and strength. And those things aren't true. But the research suggests that there is an over-representation of those

strengths and traits in women officers. And, you know, if we didn't have that research, I don't think we would be doing this work, right, just based on general assumptions about gender-specific traits. But when the research shows these types of outcomes, we feel very confident that it's worth pursuing. When will you get to, I don't know, start seeing the results of your work? When do you get receipts? Well, we've got a police chief in Bellevue, Nebraska, who's really prioritized this. Basically, if you're not intentional about recruiting everyone and showing everyone that they can be successful here, then you're intentionally excluding people. He has had recruit classes since joining the

initiative, since prioritizing this, since completing some of the initial steps of the pledge of over 50% women. He's one of the only agencies, if not the only agency in Nebraska, who's actually seeing application numbers go up. And he's actually seeing women join his ranks from neighboring states. That's exactly what we're trying to do is be successful with the population that we have by being as diverse as they are. There's absolutely reasons to be positive about this. It's going to take a really long time and it's going to be fraught and it's going to require a lot of dedication and resources and consistency. But I think we're pretty optimistic that it's imminently doable and we're close. It's truly empowering people that are talented to go do what they were hired to Law. It's

a non-profit focused on improving democratic accountability and policing. In a moment on the show, we're going to ask someone who studies policing if simply hiring more women can make enough of a difference. It's Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. Thank you. ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained, cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. That's the sound of the police. That's the sound of the beast. We're back. It's Today Explained. We're here with Dr. Samantha Simon. She's an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Dr. Simon, earlier in the show, we heard about this initiative, 30 by 30, that has a lot of police departments around the country excited about and even committed to putting more women on the force. How far does that go to solve what are clearly some of our systemic policing problems in the United States? I just want to preface this answer really by explaining that I would never push to not try to hire more women police

officers, right? Of course, it is a worthwhile endeavor or effort to create equal access to opportunities across gender, across race, across sexualities, across all kinds of social identities. What I do take issue with, however, is the way that women have been framed as sort of a cure-all for U.S. policing's problems of racism and violence. And why are you not reassured by this initiative as far as its potential to solve a lot of the problems in policing we see? First, it's really impossible to separate hiring and training with regards to policing from policing more broadly and from policing's history more broadly. A lot of Southern police departments evolved from slave patrols, groups of white men who patrolled areas and were responsible for squelching any kind of uprisings and also capturing people who had been enslaved. So this origin story is really,

really important, right, for understanding why the police are who they are and why they operate the way that they do today. Second, talking more about training specifically. So I spent one year doing ethnographic fieldwork, meaning I participated and I also observed police training at four different police academies. And what I found and what I was really, really struck by throughout the time that I did field work, and I'm still struck by, frankly, when I go back and read some of my field notes, is just how overwhelming the emphasis is in the academy training on violence and on danger. Tell me more about the issues that are inherent in how police officers are trained. My primary argument in my work about training academies is that throughout those six to eight months, hundreds of hours they're spending there. Nearly every day, they are warned that around any corner, at any moment, if they let their guard down, they will be murdered.

And that they really needed to prioritize officer safety above everything else. And if you're living in that reality, it's not hard to understand why we see repeatedly police officers overreacting of them thinking that when someone reached into their pocket to grab their phone, they were grabbing a gun. Of thinking if someone is running, that they are running to get a weapon, right? Because these are things that they are trained to think about and to conceptualize during those six to eight months in the academy. And so, though I can't necessarily draw causal arrows from what I'm seeing in the academy to specific instances of racist violence that we've seen repeatedly over the last century, but we've been talking about for the last several years,

right? I can say that the worldview in which you are being hunted by people, and they really do feel that they are in danger of being ambushed know, ambushed at any moment. They are trained to believe that this violence is getting worse, that it is intensifying, that Ferguson has made it worse. To get into the academy and then to graduate from the academy, you really had to align yourself with this worldview, regardless of your gender or your race. And that's like really the important part there. I mean, I want to be sensitive here because police officers do get murdered in the line of duty. But I think what you're trying to say here is that by focusing so much on this idea that they could and will potentially get murdered out in the field, we're losing some crucial training in de-escalation. Is that right? I'm not arguing that police officers should not receive like any tactical training in the academy,

right? The question though that I'm more focused on is whether the way that new officers are socialized during their training, so at the academy. And once they're in the institution, increases the likelihood of mistakes, of brutality, and of injury or death of the public. So just as like a quick example, and this was during a de-escalation class. So this was in the presentation on de-escalation of one of the academies I went to. They would show a picture of General James Mattis. So, you know, with a quote credited to him that read, be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet. And again, that was the de-escalation class. What? Come on.

So that's sort of the undercurrent of the de-escalation class, right? The general approach was that you should be polite, you should be communicative about what's going on, where you can try to, you know, verbally resolve the issue, but ultimately always be prepared for violence. What is this environment like for women? Is it any different? Do you see different results in the field? So when I went into this research, I was really interested in knowing, like, I felt really optimistic about, like, about initiatives like the 30 by 30 initiative, right? I'm like, yes,

there should be more women officers. This could potentially change policing. I became less optimistic about it the longer I spent time at these academies because really in order to get into the institution, so to get hired and then to graduate, you really do have to align yourself with this general worldview that emphasizes violence. I will say, like, the academy is a very intense experience for everyone. They're working 10 to 12 hours a day. They're going through really intense workouts. They have exams weekly. So it is really intense for everyone. But it is certainly harder and more complicated for cadets who don't embody the traditional ideals of masculinity and of whiteness. So for women, like even seemingly small things really revealed how foreign their bodies were to the institution. So for example, one woman cadet talked to me about

how hard it was to be on her period while she was at the academy because you could not ask to go to the bathroom if you were doing like a four-hour workout. As another example, one of the defensive tactics instructors, whenever the cadets were in a plank position or doing a push-up, he would yell at them to get their ball sacks off the ground. There are many bodies in the room, but he's yelling about that. So there was sort of an assumption that male bodies were, you know, the norm and the expectation. You are socialized into this institution so that you learn how to look, how to act, how to sound like you're a police officer. And all of that revolves around the use of violence. Once they get into the field, are women more likely to de-escalate? There is a lot of mixed evidence empirically as to whether or not women police differently than men when they're on patrol. So, for example, women officers are less likely than men officers to use force or excessive force or their firearms, but women are not any less likely to use force broadly defined, and they're not more likely to provide

comfort to civilians during encounters. So these are all different studies that all have sort of like, they paint a very complicated picture of how different gender compositions and racial compositions play out on patrol. Other scholars have found no direct link between an officer's gender and race and the outcome of an encounter with a civilian, and that more gender and race diverse departments do not have significantly lower rates of police-caused homicides. A sign of hope here is that it seems like this 30 by 30 initiative isn't falling upon deaf ears. Major, massive police departments are on board. And to me, that at least gives me a sign of hope that police departments across the country, even ones that are notorious in some cases for having these de-escalation issues,

seem to say like, hey, we could change and be better. The idea that women are going to fix policing's violence and racism problem is misguided. I think hiring more women to police departments is worthwhile in and of itself as an equity issue. And this institution, policing, has been historically quite exclusionary towards women, right? They really weren't even hiring women until Title VII. That was not very long ago. Again, I'm not saying that this is not worthwhile, and I am sort of heartened by the fact that so many departments have signed on to it and that this creates a system of accountability so that we can at least track, you know, the demographic composition of these departments and have some sort of system of accountability for these departments to have to report

what they're doing to recruit more women. And maybe, just maybe, that will create a different cultural context for the institution if they are indeed valuing women in the department. Dr. Samantha Simon, University of Missouri in St. Louis. You can find out more about the 30x30 Initiative to hire more women police officers at 30x30initiative.org. That's 30x30initiative.org. I'm Sean Ramos for him.

Our show today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed and mastered by Paul Mounsey. It's Today Explained. you