Women in the police: Integration or separation?

This study reports on the incorporation of female officers into the Atlanta Bureau of Police Services which until recently had an all-male occupational subculture. Fieldwork techniques included one-year of participant observation and the structured interviewing of 50 police officers.Findings indicated that women have been acculturated into the behavior and attitudes characteristic of the male police group. Specifically, they express increased cynicism and distrust of the public, and their behavior is abrupt with an unsympathetic demeanor. Conversely, women police officers have not been accepted as equally capable as male police officers by the latter. This discriminatory reaction results in a male overprotective attitude which is expressed in male domination of both detective and uniformed officers' work. These findings are congruent with the data from other studies which examined occupations in which women were numerically rare (tokens).The author concludes that because females emulate the male officers' ethos and behavior, and because they have not been accepted as equals in the police group, they have not greatly changed the male subculture of policing.     

Research on Women in Policing: A Look at the Past,Present and Future

There are more women employed by police agencies today than ever before. Their role and workplace experiences have changed significantly from the time that they were first employed as police matrons in the late 1800s‐early 1900s. This article covers the history of women in policing. It provides an overview of past and contemporary research focused on female police officers. A trend found in the contemporary research reveals that there are many similarities among male and female police officers. This trend is interesting as policing has traditionally been a male dominated profession in the United States.     

STRATEGIC RESPONSES TO THE POLICE AMONG INNER-CITY YOUTH

Research on police–citizen relations is largely focused on how police officers treat citizens, with much less attention given to how citizens behave toward officers. Several studies report that citizens' demeanor affects the way they are treated by police, but researchers have neglected the larger question of how citizens manage their contacts with officers more generally, outside the parameters of face-to-face encounters. The question is particularly salient for young males living in high-crime, inner-city neighborhoods—many of whom have frequent, negative contacts with or observations of the police. This article examines the contours of the youths' strategic responses to the police, drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in disadvantaged neighborhoods in St. Louis. Our analysis draws on Hirschman's framework of exit, voice, and loyalty as options available to individuals when dealing with problematic organizations.     

Information and Compassion in Crisis Responses: A Test of Their Effects

We used a national survey of 371 public relations officers in 4-year colleges and universities to examine environmental constraints, style of research, and certain personal characteristics to determine if they differentiate female and male practitioners. First, with regard to constraints, female public relations officers are most likely to occupy what we call the conscience of the organization role, whereas their male counterparts characterize a dominant insider position. Second, no differences in use or style of research were found by gender. Although this is encouraging, it is apparent that there remain environmental constraints—notably administrator expectations—that need to be addressed. Higher education was selected as the context to study in part because it is where we educate future practitioners. With regard to gender-related stereotypical expectations, colleges and universities are not practicing in their public relations offices what they are teaching in their classrooms. Findings are framed and discussed from both individual, liberal-feminist and collective, socialist-feminist perspectives.     

TMZ shifts blame from police to drugs in Floyd death coverage

Last week, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner released the cause of death report of George Floyd, and when celebrity website TMZ got hold of it, it started what seemed like blaming the victim. Floyd's murder by the police was followed by days of protests around the country. The Minneapolis police officers involved — one choked him to death with a knee on his throat while the others watched — were fired. But TMZ's headline said “M.E. says he died from heart attack, had fentanyl…,” and the article went on to interpret the death certificate as follows: “In other words … he suffered a heart attack while they were arresting him, and that complicated their efforts to subdue him. The report says George had fentanyl in his system, and they also found signs of recent methamphetamine use. It also says his manner of death is homicide.”     

Police interviews of sexual assault reporters: do attitudes matter?

Sexual assault is underreported in the United States. Survivors are often reluctant to make police reports for various reasons; one is fear of revictimization by criminal justice professionals. Conversely, police officers often lack skills for interviewing crime victims. Posttraumatic stress reactions among victims can exacerbate the problem. Although some victims prefer female interviewers, it is not known whether they are more skilled. A sample of 429 police officers completed a written survey testing their rape myth acceptance and knowledge of how to interview rape reporters. A significant relationship between rape myth acceptance and interviewing skill was discovered. Although officer gender was related to interviewing skill, the effect was mediated by rape myth acceptance. Specific officer behaviors related to high rape myth acceptance were identified. Implications for selection of police to conduct victim interviews were discussed.     

Fear and expectations: differences among female victims of domestic violence who come to the attention of the police

This study investigated a broad range of female victims of domestic partner abuse who came to the attention of the police. Ninety-five consecutive victims were interviewed by officers in a police department's domestic violence unit. Twenty-two percent of the victims matched expectations of women who were both afraid of their abusers and expected future abuse. Surprisingly, 46% of the victims were unafraid of their offenders and believed that future abuse was unlikely. A consistent pattern of findings supports the conclusion that a much broader range of victims than expected comes to the attention of the police. These results suggest exploring alternative police responses for different types of victims.     

The Rules of (Dis)engagement: Black Youth and Their Strategies for Navigating Police Contact

Prior work on youth–police relations examines young people's general perceptions of the police, their differential treatment by police officers, and officers' discretion in dealing with youth. Yet researchers have largely neglected the question of how young people attempt to shape these encounters. I address this critical gap, while also incorporating the experiences of “on track” youth and young women—two groups that are not exempt from police contact but traditionally ignored in the youth–police literature. Drawing on semistructured group and individual interviews with 19 black young people in New York City, I investigate the strategies they employ or subscribe to in navigating police contact. Three types of strategies emerged from my analysis: avoidance, management, and symbolic resistance. Avoidance strategies are marked by young people's attempts to preemptively steer clear of officers on the street. Management strategies are employed by young people during police encounters to limit risk or harm, while symbolic resistance is a subtle tactic used by some youth to preserve their dignity in these interactions. This study also considers the gender differences in respondents' approaches and offers new insights into how they assess their police interactions in an era of highly publicized incidents of police brutality.     

On Assessing Organizational Priorities: Concept and Method*

Criticisms of the concept “organizational goal”are summarized. An alternative formulation is proposed wherein organizations are viewed as open systems. Through continual interaction incumbents seek to manipulate, and are manipulated by, expectations that they, and persons within various environmental sectors, hold for the organization regarding its mission, authority relations, relative status, affective expressions and sanctioning activity. Organizational missons include sets of social expectations which define appropriate tasks, priorities, territoralities, processing procedures and evaluation criteria. Behavioral observations of police communication officers are used to explore one aspect of mission—organizational priority. Three types of criteria appear critical in understanding priority rankings: 1) feedback intensity, 2) environmental capability to influence recognition and acceptance of feedback, and 3) sequential requirements.     

Lexical struggle in court: Aboriginal Australians versus the state1

This paper presents a critical sociolinguistic exploration of the cross‐examination of three young teenage Australian Aboriginal boys in a Queensland court. The boys alleged that they had been abducted by six police officers, so they were prosecution witnesses in the case against the police officers. The paper examines the lexical strategies used by defence counsel to construct these victim‐witnesses as criminals with ‘no regard for the community’, and to reinterpret the alleged abduction as a consensual car ride. Of greatest concern is the strategy which I term ‘lexical perversion’– the rejection of a witness's labelling of their own experience, through overt correction with, or covert substitution of, another lexical item. These lexical strategies are central to the judicial legitimation of neocolonial control by the police over the movements of Aboriginal young people.     

“Whoa! They Could’ve Arrested <Emphasis Type="Italic">Me</Emphasis>!”: Unsuccessful Identity Claims of Women During Police Response to Intimate Partner Violence

Many jurisdictions in the U.S. have implemented mandatory arrest policies in an attempt to limit police officers’ discretion in their arrest decisions when responding to intimate partner violence calls. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with female victims of intimate partner violence, I explore the ways in which mandatory arrest policies have influenced the identity work of women during their interactions with police officers. I focus specifically on women’s “unsuccessful” identity claims: situations where women are unable to convince police officers that they are victims and situations where women are unable to convince officers that they are not victims. I examine the strategies that women use during their identity work and explore the consequences of women’s failed self presentations under mandatory arrest policies, the most significant of which is a woman’s arrest. I argue that under mandatory arrest policies, for many women, the risk of failed identity work is even more consequential than before these policies were established.     

Generating Common Sense Knowledge Among Police Officers

This research looks at police officers to illustrate how common sense knowledge is generated within the context of everyday life routines. At a broader level, this research challenges the idea that common sense knowledge is innate, spontaneously generated, or simply transmitted from one generation to the next. Common sense knowledge is highly valued in police culture as a means of dealing with the many ambiguous situations that officers face. This study describes how police recruits are taught to accept and respond effectively to the ambiguity intrinsic in most situations. Finally, the article provides empirical evidence of the process by which police officers collectively generate common sense knowledge, emphasizing the role of work-related routines.     

Nightlife Girls: Envy,Theatre, and Encounters with Men and Women

This article explores how envy influences affective performance in the service industry. Utilizing the first‐person accounts of 12 women working in one Manhattan bar, it examines how the experiences these women have with male and female customers are differently intersected by expectations for gendered performance. It further explores how envy — as the emotion most prompted in the servers in the face of these expectations — can in response be harnessed as a force for their critical agency. Seeing envy as both an antagonizer and central defence mechanism, the paper goes on to dissect the various strategies employed by the serving women to both adopt the differing embodiments of affective gender performance expected by their male and female customers, and protect themselves from the emotional damage that is risked in adopting such externally dictated subjectivities.     

Who Cares If Police Become Violent? Explaining Approval of Police Use of Force Using a National Sample

Understanding police violence is important in part because police violence, if generally tolerated, could transform a society based on law into one governed by political and personal whim. This research asks whether the conflict perspective can explain which groups are more likely to approve of police use of force, and whether several dimensions of power are at issue or just a few. Previous studies have found that race is the most important factor in determining approval of police use of force. Gender, age, class, and other variables have shown mixed results. Using a national sample (1998 General Social Survey), this paper contributes a more comprehensive examination of this issue to the small body of literature in this area. We look at approval of police use of force in five scenarios. Our findings show that minorities and women are more likely to disapprove of police use of force. Supporting a narrow application of conflict theory, other dimensions of power appear not to affect attitudes toward police hitting citizens. Context of violence matters too. When situations are not actively threatening for officers, by near consensus, violence is unacceptable. Disagreement comes from less clear-cut circumstances.     

The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Critical Review of the Punitive Paradigm Shift

This paper reviews evidence of the school-to-prison pipeline, a confluence of two child- and adolescent-caring systems—schools and juvenile courts—that simultaneously shifted over the past generation from rehabilitative to punitive paradigms. While there was crossover impact between these systems, the movements were both independent and inter-dependent. In the school systems, and particularly those that are overburdened and underfinanced, many students have been increasingly suspended and expelled due to criminalizing both typical adolescent developmental behaviors as well as low-level type misdemeanors: acting out in class, truancy, fighting, and other similar offenses. The increased use of zero tolerance policies and police (safety resource officers) in the schools has exponentially increased arrests and referrals to the juvenile courts. While impacting many, unfortunately, these changes disproportionately affect vulnerable children, adolescents, and their families. Thus, millions of young people have become encapsulated in harmful punitive systems. Very few of these young people are actually appropriately involved, in that they do not pose safety risks to their schools or communities. Thus, the school-to-prison pipeline does not improve school or community safety.     

Interviewing child witnesses within Memorandum guidelines. A survey of police officers in England and Wales

Since 1991, the evidence‐in‐chief of child witnesses in United Kingdom (UK) criminal proceedings can be an initial video‐recorded interview between a police officer/social worker and the child witness. This paper reports on the results of a survey of the attitudes and opinions of police officers who conduct video interviews with child witnesses in 18 police forces in England and Wales. Notably, officers' views were sought on the conduct of interviews. This builds on previous surveys which have focused on general views of videotaping children's evidence (for example, Davies and others 1995) and training issues (for example, Davies, Marshall and Robertson, 1998). Our findings support previous reports in that police officers view current provisions for child witnesses as a step in the right direction (Davies and others, 1995) but there are some reported limitations for example, gaps in training (Davies, Marshall and Robertson, 1998). In addition, we highlight the difficulties that can arise in relation to language use and some differences of opinion amongst officers (for example, with respect to the use of props in interviewing). Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rescaling the Sanctuary City: Police and Non‐Status Migrants in Ontario,Canada

Canadian cities pledge to provide access to municipal services to non‐status migrants and withhold information identifying non‐status migrants from federal immigration authorities. Despite these promises, local police continue to cooperate with the Canada Border Services Agency, which raises questions about the capacity of cities to honour their promises. An empirical study involved interviews with high‐ranking police officers in eight local jurisdictions in Ontario about police perceptions regarding their role in the enforcement of federal immigration law and their obligations to honour sanctuary‐city policies. The results show that many police officers believe they possess legal authority to report non‐status migrants to federal authorities. We suggest that this belief rests on misconceptions about the relationship between criminal law and immigration law, claims of jurisdictional immunity from municipal government, and distortions of the principles of policing in Canada. Rescaling of sanctuary policies to the provincial level may offer solutions.     

Affirmative action,political representation,unions, and female police employment

Using data from three time periods (1981, 1987, and 1990/91), we analyze the factors that affect the hiring of female officers by municipal police departments. We find that affirmative action litigation significantly increased hiring of new female recruits, but female political representation in the form of female city councilors or mayors did not significantly affect the gender composition of police recruits. Consistent with co-worker discrimination, we find that hiring of female recruits is negatively related to the proportion of males already employed in the department. Furthermore, maledominated departments are more likely to employ fitness exams for recruits (a potential barrier to women) than are more integrated departments. The effect of a police union is mixed; there is some evidence that unions boost the hiring of female officers, yet unions are also associated with an increased likelihood of using fitness exams to screen new recruits.     

Striking A Balance: Female Correctional Officers,Gender Role Stereotypes,and Male Prisons*

This paper examines the strategies developed by female correctional officers to circumvent interactional and organizational barriers to advancement in the traditionally-male work organization of the men's prison. Data for the analysis are drawn from interviews with female officers and other staff in a state department of corrections located in the western United States. In a dramaturgical-like fashion, female officers seeking to advance must moderate–strike a balance–between a series of countervailing negative sex role stereotypes. However, regardless of their success in presenting a “balanced” image at work, female officers experienced stress from their responsibility of accommodating to this predominantly male work environment.     

Gender,Working Conditions and the Job Satisfaction of Women in a Non-Traditional Occupation: Female Correctional Officers in Men's Prisons*

Despite the recent interest in women working in nontraditional occupations, few analyses have systematically compared the work-related attitudes of such women with those of men holding the same positions. This article presents an exploratory analysis, drawing hypotheses from the “gender” and “job” models described by Feldberg and Glenn (1979), to compare work-related attitudes among male and female correctional officers. Data drawn from a survey of male and female correctional officers working at the same prison facility (three male and one female units) are utilized to contrast the importance of gender, with experiences on the job as determinants of job satisfaction. The results support the job model, which suggests that the attitudes of working women are a function of their position in the organizational structure and immediate working conditions.