--:-- Sean Ramos: 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 protests 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: On the show today, we're going to ask if something as simple as hiring more women can fix policing.
--:-- Sean Ramos: I'm Sean Ramos from It's Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Ramos: Today, today explain.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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% of leadership positions in law enforcement.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Growing up, I didn't really see that many Hispanic females or even females in general on doing police work. But there's a program out there right now trying to change those numbers, not just change them, like overhaul them.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Maureen McGough is leading the charge. 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?
--:-- Sean Ramos: What is their unique value? Why are they so underrepresented? And what do we need to do in order to fix it?
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: The NYPD has just signed a 30 by 30 pledge. They hope to increase representation of women to 30 percent by the year 2030.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: It has signed the national 30 by 30 pledge. We are here to announce MPD's commitment to the 30 by 30 pledge.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Austin police making a pledge to recruit more women to get APD to 30 percent women by the year 2030.
--:-- Sean Ramos: And we've got LAPD, Seattle, Dallas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, and we've got state agencies.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: What exactly do police departments have to do when they sign up with your program, 30 by 30?
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: Things like policy improvements, improved data collection, surveys, focus groups, strategic planning to really prioritize this issue.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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?
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: They necessarily knew exactly how to start addressing that. And what we given people is not only just a really stepwise framework for how to make those types of improvements but also a reason to right.
--:-- Maureen McGough: Like there are so many different priorities. Police leaders are pulled in all of these different directions. It's complicated. There's union issues.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: So what do we know? What data do we have on the differences between the way men and women police?
--:-- Maureen McGough: You know, the research is somewhat limited, but most of it tends to be trending in a very particular direction.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: They're named proportionately less in citizen complaints and lawsuits. They use their discretion to make fewer arrests for minor nonviolent offenses.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: They're associated with better outcomes for crime victims, especially victims of sexual assault. You know, the list is growing.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Why do you think there hasn't been a real shift in gender parity on police forces across the country in decades?
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Is part of the idea here sort of traditional, patriarchal thinking that this is a job that is unsafe for women?
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: I think it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what the job of policing actually is and requires.
--:-- Sean Ramos: And I think it shows a fundamental misunderstanding about the skills and abilities and strengths of women as a gender broadly.
--:-- Sean Ramos: I don't want to be too gender reductionist about it, but, you know, the research is there. We've got evidence to support it.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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?
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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?
--:-- Maureen McGough: Is that happening here? And is that the sort of, you know, opposite the problem? I struggle with this a lot when we talk about it, right?
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: And those things aren't true. But the research suggests that there is an over representation of those strengths and traits in women officers.
--:-- Sean Ramos: When will you get to, I don't know, start seeing the results of your work? When do you get receipts?
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Maureen McGough: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: He's one of the only agencies, if not the only agency in Nebraska, who's actually seeing application numbers go up.
--:-- Sean Ramos: And he's actually seeing women join his ranks from neighboring states.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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 do.
--:-- Sean Ramos: It kind of feels like we're on the precipice of much larger and more sustainable change.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Maureen McGough is the chief of staff at the Policing Project at NYU Law. It's a nonprofit focused on improving democratic accountability and policing.
--:-- Sean Ramos: In a moment on the show we're gonna ask someone who studies policing if simply hiring more women can make enough of a difference.
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--:-- Sean Ramos: We're back. It's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: How far does that go to solve what are clearly some of our systemic policing problems in the United States?
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: And why are you not reassured by this initiative as far as its potential to solve a lot of problems in policing we see?
--:-- Sean Ramos: First, it's really impossible to separate like hiring and training with regards to policing from policing more broadly and from policing's history more broadly.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: A lot of Southern police departments, you know, 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: And what I found and what I was really, really struck by throughout the time that I did fieldwork, 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: Tell me more about the issues that are inherent in how police officers are trained.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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?
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: Because these are things that they are trained to think about and to conceptualize during those six to eight months in the academy.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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, you know, century, but we've been talking about for the last several years, right?
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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, you know, ambushed at any moment, they're trained to believe that this violence is getting worse, that it is intensifying, that Ferguson has made it worse.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: But I think what you 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Is that right?
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: I'm not arguing that police officers should not receive 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: And again, that was the de-escalation class. Come on. So that's sort of the undercurrent of the de-escalation class, right?
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: What is this environment like for women? Is it any different? Do you see different results in the field?
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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?
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: I'm like, yes, there should be more women officers. You know, this could potentially change policing.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: So for women, like even seemingly small things really revealed how foreign their bodies were to the institution.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Once they get into the field, are women more likely to deescalate?
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: There is a lot of mixed evidence empirically as to whether or not women police differently than men when they're on patrol.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: 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.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: The idea that women are going to fix policing's violence and racism problem is misguided.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: I think hiring more women to police departments is worthwhile in and of itself as an equity issue.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: And this institution, policing, has been historically quite exclusionary towards women, right? They really weren't even hiring women until Title VII.
--:-- Sean Ramos: That was not very long ago.
--:-- Dr. Samantha Simon: And 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.
--:-- Sean Ramos: And maybe, just maybe, that will create a different cultural context for the institution if they are indeed valuing women in the department.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Dr. Samantha Simon, University of Missouri in St. Louis.
--:-- Sean Ramos: You can find out more about the 30 by 30 initiative to hire more women police officers at 30x30initiative.org.
--:-- Sean Ramos: That's 30 by 30 initiative.org.
--:-- Sean Ramos: I'm Sean Ramos for him.
--:-- Sean Ramos: Our show today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed and mastered by Paul Mounsey.
--:-- Sean Ramos: It's Today Explained.
