Maybe America Needs More Female Cops

I was reading with interest a short story about police departments in the November 16 edition of Time Magazine. The article entitled "Why America Needs More Female Cops" caught my attention.

It used two recent situations that were handled totally different from each other, one by a male officer and the other by a female officer. Perhaps you saw both of these videos on social media but one was the belligerent youth in a classroom which led to the male officer using force to remove the student from the classroom in South Carolina.

The other incident was on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C. where a group of youth were engaged in a fight that took place. That situation was defused when the female officer got the youth to participate in a sidewalk "dance off."

I found this article fascinating in that the reference made is that female officers just might have less need to utilize force in some situations where a male officer would be more forceful in handling the same situation. Could it be females can relate better to the perpetrators than their male counterparts? It is an interesting question.

The article also used as a source The National Center for Women & Policing and their report that a survey of seven major city police departments showed that females in those seven cities made up 13% of the police force yet only 5% of the excessive force complaints were directed toward female officers. In case you were wondering, the Quincy Police Department has a total of 12 female officers on their staff and the Hannibal Police Department has 5 female officers on duty.

Numbers can be deceiving, but basically the theory is that women cops are more likely to use excessive force only as a last resort. It certainly is something to think about.