Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

This blog entry should rightfully be divided into separate topics, but it’s been a full week and I haven’t been able to post as often as I wanted. And I wanted to get this one up before the weekend started, as we are going to have a special “9/11/01: Five Years After” edition of Officer.com on Monday, and there will be a new entry for that day. So, here goes:

On Dressing Lady Cops

Okay, this isn’t going to be nearly as racy as it might sound. Sue Grant’s column for this month discussed the need for officers to assimilate with their colleagues. She used the difference between men’s and women’s uniforms as an illustration, and it works well. Every new officer has that excited-but-terrifying moment the first time he or she walks into the roll call room (Sue would call it “parade”) and sees all those veterans waiting for the festivities to begin. The rookie wants to blend in with the crowd, more so than anything they’ve ever wanted to do. But they can’t. The rookie wears the FNG (for the uninitiated, that’s “f***ing new guy”) label as much as if he had been branded. Sue’s column bemoans the ill-fitting uniforms that she wore in her rookie years.

The uniforms were a special cross for the female officers to bear when I started my own law enforcement career in 1979. The department did not have women’s uniforms (and yes, they existed) in their contract specifications for initial issue, so the women got men’s uniforms. The trousers had to be four to eight inches oversize in the waist in order to fit female hips, so the waist had to be taken in to an extreme. Our uniforms had blue and gold piping along the trouser seam, and that re-tailoring made the stripe go anywhere but straight up and down. The waist of the trousers was too low for women, and that exaggerated the discomfort of wearing the Sam Browne belt. The holster, driven outward by the wider hip, pressed into their pelvis so much that their legs would occasionally go numb. If the rise was adjusted on the trousers, then the shirt design was thrown off. The chest pockets were usually too big for women’s smaller frames, anyway, and the lower seam of the pockets touched or occasionally submerged below the belt line. When uniforms designed for women became available, they looked better, but weren’t always practical. The redesigned shirts had proportionally smaller chest pockets, but this meant that items that were considered “pocket size,” weren’t. Pens stuck out of the tops, and notebooks and cheat sheet laminated cards wouldn’t fit at all. If they wore ties, the tie clip attached to the wrong side.

The body armor merchants weren’t real helpful in the early years. After they got the message that body armor should be customized a bit more than “small, medium, large” would allow for, only male dimensions were taken into account. Smaller-breasted women didn’t fare too badly, but those more generously endowed were hurtin’ for certain. Other than the greater protection the vests offered, the only advantage the women gained was that bras became optional. After all, who could tell? And they were already uncomfortable enough. One lesson learned by male officers who have worn body armor for extended periods is that they have greater empathy for women who are forced to wear constricting lingerie.

Now, body armor is made in styles that are distinctively male or female, and it’s considerably thinner and more flexible than it used to be. I assume that it’s at least marginally more comfortable. It also provides something of a litmus test for the way that a law enforcement agency views and treats its female employees. If a new female officer is being provided with body armor, and the agency doesn’t ask for her bra size on the form, then expect that she will be treated like cattle.

My academy class was the last all-male class for my agency. Every one that followed had at least one female recruit, although they didn’t always finish and graduate (and the same was true of the men). Even though the department espoused gender equality, the misogynistic bent of our administration was evident in other ways. The women’s locker room was much smaller than the men’s, and for years it had no shower. Even after it was plumbed for a shower stall, it was located so near our ancient boiler room that only scalding hot water came out of the taps, and the room was constantly at around 95 degrees.

One of the dimmer bulbs in the academy training cadre decided that the female recruits were going to have to commit to the police uniform policy to the same degree as the men. This might not sound so unfair, except that they interpreted this to mean that male and female recruits were to conform to the same hair length standards. Where the female personnel already in the officer ranks could have conventional hairstyles, as long as the hair was arranged so as to be off their collars and out of their eyes, the recruits had to get their hair cut at least as short as the men’s. This was a bullying tactic, as any recruit that complained would be shown the door, forever after condemned as a piece of fluff that couldn’t cut it (no pun intended).

This was in an era where perms were semi-fashionable for both genders, and we had a few men that went that way. One of them was Steve Bourquin, who was a fine officer, but was smallish and slight of build. A few days after one academy class had graduated, I had come in to work and was going through the phone messages placed in a wire basket directly behind our front desk. A fellow officer came up to me, and with a smirk, pointed to one of the desk officers, with a perm, who had their back to me. He said, “Look, Bourquin’s working the front desk.” I didn’t think there was anything especially noteworthy about that, as we all had our turn on the desk now and then. He then giggled and said, “That’s not Bourquin.” I looked again, and saw the faint outline of a bra strap across the back of the desk officer’s uniform shirt. The perm and the uniform belonged to rookie officer Janice Novak, who would never be mistaken for Bourquin from the front, but bore a certain resemblance from the back, at least while she was sitting down. Jan went on to be both our first female sergeant and lieutenant, and later became a supervisory special agent with the FBI. I hope that she’s not too mad at me for telling this tale. Actually, I suppose I should be more worried about Bourquin.

Now that there are more women in command positions around the country, I hope things have improved some. Even so, my bet is that there are some departments that still believe that girls are yucky and will give one cooties.

Annapolis

And this brings me to an observation I made last week while watching the movie Annapolis on an airplane. The movie itself isn’t going to win any Academy Awards. In fact, it’s a near-remake of An Officer And A Gentleman. A young man (think Richard Gere, but younger) from a blue-collar upbringing manages to get admitted into the U.S. Naval Academy. He happens to be white. His three plebe roommates are Asian, Black, and Hispanic. All four have their own demons. Their first-classman company commander, a former Marine who is Black (think Louis Gossett), makes it his mission in life to get our hero to quit. They even have a couple of fights, although the techniques are those of boxing, instead of karate. There is, of course, a love interest in the form of a female upper classman who appears to be a younger clone of Demi Moore (but, to keep the analogy going, think Debra Winger). The ending is predictable. I liked it, but then I usually do like these things.

The aspect that I noticed, and was not emphasized even a tiny bit in the movie, was that there was absolutely no reference to the ethnicity of any character. Even the genders were ignored in military situations. Every character could have been played by any actor, of any race. Idealistic? Sure. But maybe there is still hope for moving toward the creed of “a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character.” Or their haircuts.