LOS ANGELES TIMES

PERSPECTIVE ON LAPD SCANDAL

This Is What You Get When Men Rule Roost

By KATHERINE SPILLAR and PENNY HARRINGTON

0ver the past several weeks, the citizens of Los Angeles have learned that their police department is home to what has been de scribed in press accounts as a "fraternity." The "macho-bonding rituals" include drunken parties in the presence of command staff at the Police Academy, celebrating shootings and killings by officers and sharing an apartment for sexual liaisons while on duty. There are even tattoos and patches to signify membership in the brotherhood.

Police Chief Bernard C. Parks blames the department's troubles in part on hiring too fast during the recent department expansion. It is not that the men in blue were hired too fast. It's that the wrong kind of men were hired. And not enough women.

For too long the LAPD has sought out men trained in violence by recruiting at military bases and using screening procedures that overemphasize upper-body strength--a trait that has proved to bear less relationship to performance as a police officer than do verbal and mediation skills. The impact of these recruiting practices has been to systematically screen out qualified women and screen in violence-prone men. Therein lies the root of the LAPD's current scandal.

Years of research both in the U.S. and internationally show that female police officers are less authoritarian and use excessive force less often than their male counterparts. Female officers are better at defusing potentially violent confrontations with citizens and possess better communication skills.

Perhaps the difference is best explained in men's and women's attitudes toward policing. According to one noted researcher, Joseph Balkin, "Policemen see police work as involving control through authority, while policewomen see it as a public service." He concluded, "In some respects at least, women are better suited for police work than men."

The comparative lack of women in the LAPD--fewer than one-fifth of the force is female--reinforces and exaggerates a workplace culture that condones authoritarian personalities that thrive on violence, where men with common backgrounds and values participate in unacceptable behavior with no fear of scrutiny by their like-minded peers.

It's not likely that many women officers will be implicated in the everwidening Rampart scandal. Ex-officer Rafael Perez, who has blown the top off the Rampart scandal, said it best when he told investigators that female officers could not be trusted to be "in the loop," referring to one of the women officers as a "weaker link" because she was female. Perez's comments are reminiscent of Mark Fuhrman and his "Men Against Woffien," a secret society within the LAPD that schemed to harass women and drive them off the force. Introducing significantly greater numbers of women to the force would break down this locker room mentality.

In 1991, the Christopher Commission issued its stinging indictment of the LAPD and found that the underrepresentation of women contributed to the department's excessive force problems. Since then, the City Council twice has mandated that the LAPD dramatically increase its hiring of women officers with the goal of gender balance as soon as possible. Yet in its expansion by more than 2,000 officers in the past few years, the department has squandered its greatest opportunity to hire enough women.

Long ago we ended the debate about whether women make good cops. Perhaps now we should ask whether we should allow men to be cops. Their proclivity toward violence and the attitudes exhibited by many men within the LAPD have ruined lives and threaten the ability of police to effectively serve the community and may end up costing the citizens of Los Angeles many mfllions of tax dollars.

Any investigation into LAPD corruption will miss the mark if it fails to examine how the exclusion of women officers and the promotion of macho, militaristic tough guys contributed to this massive policing scandal. Maybe boys will be boys, but should we allow them to be cops?

Katherine Spillar is the national coordinator of the Feminist Majority Foundation. Penny Harrington, a former police chief in Portland, Ore., heads the foundation's National Center for Women and Policing.