FOCUS: Women in Blue

University Police Lieutenant Susan Holmes comes from a family of policemen. Her brother is a lieutenant with the New York Police Department, her father is a retired detective who worked in the Nassau County Police Department in New York and both her grandfathers were police officers. But Susan Holmes is the first policewoman in her family. Holmes and other women on the force say that being a woman has not impeded their careers. But that long-sought equal status for female police officers is the result of a long hard struggle fought here and across the country. · Until 1910, no women were allowed to work as police officers in the United States. And then, until the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, women working in law enforcement were designated "policewomen" and were restricted to limited facets of policing. Today women have the same legal status as men in police departments, yet they are still a clear minority. In fact, only about one tenth of the University Police force consists of women. For many, police work has traditionally been considered the province of men. The public has stereotyped the physicality and occupational hazards needed for policing as unfit for a woman's career. But the past 20 years have heralded a new awareness of women's ability to perform police work in Philadelphia, due in large part to Ruth Wells, currently the director of Victim Support and Special Services in the University's Department of Public Safety. When she entered the field of police work over 30 years ago, Wells found herself a pioneer in the battle for the rights of women in police in Philadelphia. Her struggle echoed across the entire country. Wells said she first considered a career in police work in 1955, when her brother Albert, then a Philadelphia Police officer, told her that the Philadelphia Police Department planned to hire several women officers to be trained at the Philadelphia Police Academy. Wells said the Philadelphia Police Department had started hiring women about 30 years earlier to serve as police matrons, whose functions consisted primarily of tasks the men in police would rather not handle, such as frisking women, plainclothes patrolling in "red-light districts" and handling runaway children. The women with whom Wells was to train at the Philadelphia Police Academy were slotted for duties that would extend beyond the traditional roles of women in police. But before the women could begin training, they had to be admitted to the police academy -- in itself a feat of considerable proportions. "There was an intense search conducted for applicants, and the qualifications were higher for the women applying," Wells said. For instance, she explained, women had to undergo a massive background investigation, whereas men did not. In addition, unmarried mothers would not be considered for admission to the academy, and women enrolling had to sign an agreement indicating they would resign from the police force if they became pregnant, she said. These rules are officially obsolete today, and women are permitted leaves of absence for pregnancy. University Police Officer Maureen Forsyth, for instance, has been on leave from the department since last Labor Day to take care of her now-four-and-one-half-month-old baby boy. "I knew sooner or later pregnancy was in the cards, and I didn't know how it would work out," Forsyth said. "But it wasn't a problem at all." But when Wells applied for admission to the Philadelphia Police Academy in the '50s, she faced a far less liberated system. According to Wells, the Police Academy admissions decisions were based on a standard breakdown of factors which allowed for discrimination. She said 50 percent of the admissions decision was based on a written exam, 40 percent on an oral exam and 10 percent on Veteran's Preference for war veterans. Because of this, Wells said, a woman could get a score close to perfect on the written portion of the test and still be ruled out by a sexist interviewer on the oral portion. Of the 1300 women who applied for admission along with Wells, 19 were appointed to police jobs, she said. "I'm sure that men's rates were higher," she added. Wells' admission to the academy by no means meant that she had escaped gender-based prejudice or segregation. Men and women attended separate classes in the academy and "were not permitted, under any circumstances, to fraternize. Not at lunch, never," Wells said. In addition to regular police training, women at the academy received Juvenile Courts training so that they could become Juvenile Aid Officers upon graduation. Such officers handled all juvenile crimes, notably runaways and shoplifters. According to Wells, however, police departments used women for other purposes on an unofficial level. "The curious thing was that whenever one of the male officers needed women for an assignment, we would be detailed to the narcotics unit, homicide unit, major crimes unit or any unit of the department without being given the title or the compensation for it," Wells said. Wells worked in the Philadelphia Police Department, primarily as a Juvenile Aid Officer, from 1955 to 1967. In 1967, after being passed over three times in promotional exams, Wells filed suit against the City of Philadelphia for discrimination. "The kinds of things that were happening were also prevalent in the promotional system," she said. "The commanding officer of the Juvenile Aid Division appointed the oral board, which called into question the board's evaluations. It would have been different if the oral board would have been completely separated from the command of the Juvenile Aid Division." Wells went to court under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in employment but is limited primarily to the private sector. Wells said she was aiming to extend the prohibition of discrimination in employment to government agencies like city police. Confirming that the "case had merit," the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission decided to use Wells' suit as a test case for all Philadelphia policewomen. In 1972 the Equal Employment Opportunity Act extended to state and local governments the same regulations set forth in Title VII. The Act decreed that state and city governments had to remedy past discrimination against women in government jobs. Testing procedures and entrance requirements for police academies were made the same for men and women, classes were integrated, fraternization became permissible and women began to be assigned to all units of police departments. Between Wells' filing suit in 1967 and the 1972 Act, she said she experienced serious discrimination. "I was subject to various forms of harassment from both any male peers and from the supervisors," Wells said. "I was labelled as a troublemaker and given the most difficult assignments." Wells said she was forced to work on every holiday one year, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. "I was transferred to every division in the city, but I continued to do my job," she said. During the resurgence of the women's movement in the early '70s, Wells said her situation began to improve. She said she was the first woman assigned to the Police Community Relations Division, where she pioneered a program in self-defense and personal safety designed particularly for women and children. After five years of work in this division, Wells ran some programs to teach female students at the University about self-defense and personal safety. "That was when Penn first got to know me," Wells said. The University hired Wells as a security specialist in 1976. Her title was later changed to Crime Prevention Specialist, and ultimately to Director of Victim Support and Special Services. Today, Wells is in charge of programs in crime prevention, safety education, services to victims, sensitive crimes and acts as a liaison between the University community and the Department of Public Safety. · Among Wells' other responsibilities is the active recruitment of women and other minorities to work in the University Police Department. When Wells joined the University Police force in 1976, only two of 40 officers were women. "You get your employees based on your recruitment efforts, and the evidence would not indicate that they had made that specialized effort to recruit women," she said. And Sylvia Canada, a staff assistant at Victim Support who joined the force in 1977, said "we're still not where we want to be." Until October 1989, when the University began a redoubled hiring effort, seven of 45 officers were women. In the three major hirings between October 1989 and May 1991, 3 of the 55 officers hired were women. Of 100 officers currently employed by the University Police, 10 are women. In addition, one of nine shift supervisors is a woman, and one of four detectives is a woman. The comissioner, director and captain are all men. Canada, who supplied these statistics, said that the gender imbalance reflects a similar disparity in the number of applications submitted by women and by men. According to Canada, only 10 of the approximately 200 applicants over the past two and one half years have been women. University Police Commissioner John Kuprevich said last week that "there are certainly less women [than men] who apply to law enforcement. I think it is because it was for so long a male-dominated environment that so few women apply." "There are just some natural hesitations [for women to apply] because there are so few women in police work," he added.

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