Policing Women: The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD. - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2000 by David R. Johnson

Policing Women: The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD. By Janis Appier (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. x plus 227pp. $59.95/cloth $19.95/paperback).

Policewomen are a much neglected group in the history of law enforcement. With rare exceptions, the historiography of policing focuses on such issues as the administration of departments, corruption and efforts at reform, and twentieth-century efforts to professionalize the police. Very little has been done on actual police work, and that has dealt exclusively with policemen.

Dr. Appier's new book is therefore a welcome addition to this literature. Focusing on female pioneers, during the years from 1910 to 1940, Appier's first concern is to examine their "ideas, working lives, and problems" (p.1) as they attempted to create a place in law enforcement for women. Basing her discussion on the experiences of these women in the Los Angeles Police Department, Appier ably analyzes their attitudes, problems, and accomplishments. Not surprisingly, she traces the interest among women in police work to the progressive movement in which women played so prominent a role. The first female officers approached policing as an extension of social work, especially among women and children, which was so characteristic of early twentieth century reform. Eschewing any interest in patrol duties, these pioneers struggled to create specialized programs within the LAPD which would shield adolescents (especially young women) from the rigors of an insensitive criminal justice system. As firm believers in th e theory that the environment provoked criminal behavior, these pioneers agitated for programs which would intervene in the lives of young people before they became hardened criminals.

These female officers followed the general, if ironic, trend which characterized other essentially conservative social agendas in the progressive era. Driven by the very best intentions, they sought to deploy the power of the state in the pursuit of their goals. Female officers needed the state to give them the opportunity to intervene in their charges' private lives. Los Angeles' City Mother's Bureau, founded in 1914, symbolically and practically exemplified this belief in the necessity for state sanctioned authority to implement their program. Once in their protective custody, youthful offenders were shielded from the consequences of their indiscretions and counseled to mend their ways.

Dr. Appier is very adept at analyzing the motives, successes, and problems which these first police women encountered. She is also quite perceptive about the reasons for the eventual failure of these pioneers to transmit their values and programs to the second generation of female officers who began to enter police departments in the thirties. By that point the progressive impulse had weakened considerably, and the first generation of policewomen no longer had the political support which had been crucial to their efforts to join departments twenty years previously. Furthermore, the women's movement during the twenties abandoned its gender specific focus in favor of an argument for the equality of the sexes in the work force. As a result, the second generation of policewomen, which apparently was raised in the new approach to gender relations, rejected the social work model of their predecessors in favor of patrol work, with all that implied for the adoption of male-dominated definitions of appropriate police behavior.

Having rescued these pioneers from obscurity, Appier quite naturally attempts to define the significance of their work in the larger context of policing. She argues that these pioneers had a "profound impact on the development of twentieth-century police methods, functions, and subculture." (p.1) In support of her claim, Appier asserts that these women developed a "new, female gendered model of police work, the crime prevention model." (p.3)

Dr. Appier might better have claimed that these women officers developed a crime prevention model, rather than the crime prevention model. While she amply demonstrates that women approached policing from a different perspective from men by the early twentieth century, there is considerable doubt that these reformers invented the concept of crime prevention. That idea originated with the English, particularly with Patrick Colquhoun, and was the basis for the initial efforts at creating "modern" police forces in the first half of the nineteenth century in England and in America. Appier seems not to know the relevant historiography on this point, which is unfortunate because it creates confusion about her claims to women reformers' unique contributions to twentieth century policing.

Those claims are also not substantiated by her discussion; indeed some of her evidence contradicts her assertion. Appier demonstrates that the pioneers seriously undermined any possibility of influencing the long term evolution of policing models by deliberately and successfully isolating themselves from the departments in which they served. They worked very hard to create separate institutions, such as the City Mother's Bureau, within the police, essentially severing themselves from the culture which Appier criticizes for its male dominated ethos. It is difficult to understand how the social work model for policing could affect a single department, even less a majority of them, when its purported advocates marginalized themselves so effectively. Furthermore, as she illustrates so well, the second generation of women police officers rejected the heritage of the pioneers. In the absence of any sustained interest in the social work model among subsequent generations of police women, Appier's assertion for its pervasive influence is unconvincing.