BELLEVUE, Neb. — Officer Karen Wrigley’s pink nails tapped her body camera as she stepped from her cruiser into the cold. “You want to open up the door?” she asked the middle-aged Black man sitting in a parked minivan. “You’ve got an arrest warrant.”
The man had a criminal record for assault and other offenses, had run from Bellevue police before and was wanted for missing a court date for a traffic violation. He had no interest in returning to jail. “That’s horses---!” he cried, as Wrigley and her colleagues asked him 11 times over 15 minutes to exit the vehicle.
Wrigley, who is White, never raised her voice. She got on the phone with his lawyer through a cracked-open driver’s-side window — a window she had the right to bash in, given the circumstances. As reality set in, the man smoked two cigarettes and cursed his luck. He finally exited the car, remarking that he was freezing.
“Yep, us, too,” Wrigley said, handcuffing him. “Just to let you know, others aren’t going to be as nice as me.”
Wrigley, 35, is one of a slew of female officers hired over the past year and a half in this suburb south of Omaha, part of a deliberate strategy by Police Chief Ken Clary to reduce the likelihood of misconduct and excess violence on the force.
Clary, a former Iowa state trooper, believes the research and his own experience, both of which tell him diversity makes for better policing and decreases the use of force against civilians, especially those who are Black. He’s rewritten the department’s rule book and promoted an officer to become head of recruiting, with an eye toward adding more women and police officers of color and making sure they stick around.
It’s too early to see significant changes in data generated by the 103-officer department. But officers say the personnel efforts have helped usher in a culture shift, which experts say is the key to long-lasting change.
Outsiders seem to be noticing. This winter, seeking to understand the police hiring climate in a post-George Floyd world, Nebraska Fraternal Order of Police President Jim Maguire asked the state’s 225 law enforcement entities whether recruiting was up or down. Each chief who responded said the number of applicants had shrunk dramatically. Except one: Clary. He told Maguire he had more applicants hoping to police the city of 53,000 than ever before, with officers transferring from departments as far as New Mexico. Many new arrivals were women.
As a captain for the Iowa State Patrol seven years ago, Clary hadn’t given much thought to the dearth of women in policing (nationwide, about 7 percent of state troopers are female). He did notice that the two women under his command drew citizen complaints far less than many of their male peers. In 2016, he attended the National Institute of Justice LEADS Scholars Program in Washington, where he was introduced to a wealth of academic research indicating female officers excel at de-escalation and use force less frequently than male officers.
Between classes, Clary struck up friendships with Ivonne Roman, a Newark police officer who would go on to be a finalist for New York City police chief earlier this year, and Maureen McGough, an attorney who is chief of staff for the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law. Roman shared with Clary many of the obstacles she faced rising through the ranks in Newark. In a later conversation over lunch, Clary shared with McGough a dawning realization.
“He looked at me and, out of nowhere, he said, ‘Mo', we have got to figure out how to get the toxic masculinity out of policing,’ ” she recalled. “And it was just like this moment of, ‘who are you and how do I support you?’ ”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...women-police-nebraska/?itid=hp-top-table-main
