The Women in Blue

Family quarrels are a recurring nightmare for policemen, who frequently end up on the receiving end of a warring couple's wrath. In an effort to be more effective at peacemaking, an increasing number of police departments are now trying a new strategy. They are sending policewomen to do what was once strictly a male cop's job. The reason: women seem to calm these disputes far better than men. "Some of these families will call you back two or three times a night," observes a battle-tested Indianapolis patrolman, "but I've noticed that when the women go, that's the last time we hear from that family."

Women are also being assigned to other police duties traditionally reserved for men. In at least seven cities, lady cops are driving squad cars, responding to radio calls and investigating crimes. Their experience to date indicates that their sex does not handicap them on the job. Indeed, for the service calls that account for 80% to 90% of police activity, it may be an asset.

In the family quarrel, for example, male officers "feed the fire through their own aggressive, provocative behavior," says Lewis J. Sherman, a University of Missouri-St. Louis psychologist who studied the activities of security guards in eight St. Louis housing projects last summer.

Women, on the other hand, stepped in "with greater tact and subtlety. They tended to stay longer and seemed much more concerned about getting to the root causes of the conflict." The women had another advantage: a built-in "calming effect," discovered during psychodramas that were part of the guards' training. Enraged men, Sherman found, "simply could not respond as angrily or violently to the women as to the men."

This feminine capacity to dispel male anger (also observed in studies of aides in mental wards) may be due to the value system of male criminals: assaults on male authority figures are ranked high. Policemen are often attacked "because it is heroic," says Ronald G. Talney of the Multnomah County, Ore., sheriff's department. But policewomen might avoid such assaults simply because "it is cowardly to attack a woman, even though she is a police officer." Actual incidents seem to support Talney's view: a child-beating suspect who had twice resisted arrest surrendered peacefully when Private Mary Ellen Abrecht and two Washington patrolmen came to his door.

Such experiences suggest that more women on the beat could mean less use of force by police, contends Catherine H. Milton, assistant director of the Police Foundation, an organization that promotes new methods of law enforcement. Her prodding is apparently winning some converts among police chiefs. About 45 women are currently pounding police beats across the U.S., and the first large-scale experiment in the use of patrolwomen is under way in Washington, D.C., where the metropolitan police force is hiring 100 women for regular patrol duty. Still, resistance to the trend--mostly from officials who think being a patrolman is too dangerous for the "weaker sex"--must be overcome before many more of the nation's 6,000 policewomen (out of 400,000 police) are assigned to the streets.

Those who are there already have provided a devastating new weapon to the police crime-fighting arsenal, one that has helped women to get their men for centuries. It worked well for diminutive Patrolwoman Ina Sheperd after she collared a muscular shoplifter in Miami last December and discovered that there were no other cops--or even a telephone--around. Unable to summon help, she burst into tears. "If I don't bring you in, I'll lose my job," she sobbed to her prisoner, who chivalrously accompanied her until a squad car could be found.

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