How policewomen make communities safer | Ivonne Roman

I've been a police officer in an urban city

for nearly 25 years.

That's crazy, right?

And in that time, I've served in every rank,

from police officer to police chief.

A few years ago, I noticed something alarming.

Starting in 2014,

I started monitoring recruits

as they cycled through police academies in the state of New Jersey,

and I found that women were failing at rates between 65 and 80 percent,

due to varying aspects of the physical fitness test.

I learned that a change in policy

now required recruits to pass the fitness exam

within 10 short workout sessions.

This had the greatest impact on women.

The change meant that recruits had about three weeks

out of a five-month-long academy

to pass the fitness exam.

This just didn't make sense, though.

Police agencies and police recruits

had made huge investments to get those recruits into the academy.

Police recruits had passed lengthy background checks,

they had passed medical and psychological exams,

they had quit their jobs.

And many had spent more than 2,000 dollars in fees and equipment

just to get kicked out within the first three weeks?

The dire situation in New Jersey

led me to examine the status of women in policing

across the United States.

I found that women make up less than 13 percent of police officers.

A number that hasn't changed much in the past 20 years.

And they make up just three percent of police chiefs as of 2013,

the last time the data was collected.

We know that we can improve those rates.

Other countries like Canada, Australia and the UK

have nearly twice the amount of policewomen.

And New Zealand is steadily marching towards their goal

of recruit gender parity by 2021.

Other countries are actively working

to increase the number of women in policing,

because they know of a vast body of research evidence,

spanning more than 50 years,

detailing the advantages to women in policing.

From that research,

we know that policewomen are less likely to use force

or to be accused of excessive force.

We know that policewomen are less likely to be named in a lawsuit

or a citizen complaint.

We know that the mere presence of a policewoman

reduces the use of force among other officers.

And we know that policewomen are met with the same rates of force

as their male counterparts, and sometimes more,

and yet they're more successful

in defusing violent or aggressive behavior overall.

So there are vast advantages to women in policing,

and we're losing them to arbitrary fitness standards.

The problem is,

the United States has nearly 18,000 police agencies --

18,000 agencies with wildly varying fitness standards.

We know that a majority of academies rely on a masculine ideal of policing

that works to decrease the number of women in policing.

These types of academies overemphasize physical strength,

with much less attention spent to subjects like community policing,

problem-solving

and interpersonal communication skills.

This results in training that does not mirror the realities of policing.

Physical agility is but a small component of police work.

Much of an officer's day is spent mediating interpersonal conflicts.

That's the reality of policing.

These are my babies.

And we can reduce the disparity in policing

by changing exams that produce disparate outcomes.

The federal courts have stated that men and women

simply are not physiologically the same

for the purposes of physical fitness programs.

And that's based on science.

Respected institutions that law enforcement deeply respects,

like the FBI, the US Marshals Service,

the DEA and even the US military --

they rigorously test fitness programs to ensure they measure fitness

without gender-disparate outcomes.

Why is that?

Because recruiting is expensive.

They want to recruit and retain qualified candidates.

You know what else the research finds?

Well-trained women are as capable as their male counterparts

in overall fitness,

but more importantly, in how they police.

The law-enforcement community

is admittedly experiencing a recruitment crisis.

Yet, if they truly want to increase the number of applicants, they can.

We can easily recruit more women

and reap all those research benefits

by training well-qualified candidates to pass validated, work-related,

physiologically-based fitness exams,

as required by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

We can increase the number of women,

we can reduce that gender disparity,

by simply changing exams that produce disparate outcomes.

We have the tools.

We have the research, we have the science, we have the law.

This, my friends, should be a very easy fix.

Thank you.

(Applause)