Women are often in the minority in police departments.
There may be another female officer at the Ohio University Police Department, but the goal of achieving a gender-diverse police force still remains a challenge.
Following a recent hire, OUPD now has two sworn female officers — its largest total at least since 2009. Lt. Tim Ryan, who has served in the department for about 10 years, said the number of women clad in OUPD uniforms has varied but typically hovers between two to three officers at a time. The Athens Police Department currently does not have any full-time female police officers.
With 26 total sworn OUPD officers, that means women make up about eight percent of the department’s force. About 52 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in Athens’ campus in Fall 2013 were women, according to university data.
Almost 12 percent of local police officers nationwide in 2007 were women, according to data from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Looking at different public universities in Ohio, Miami University has three female police officers who have been part of the force for at least five years. Kent State Police Department has nine female officers out of a total of 32 sworn officers, which means women make up 28 percent of the number of sworn officers in KSUPD.
Bowling Green State University has 25 sworn officers—five of which are women, including Police Chief Monica Moll.
OU Police Chief Andrew Powers has said his department is hard-pressed to get a diverse pool of applicants both in terms of gender and ethnicity, because many academy graduates in Southeast Ohio are white men. There is an academy on campus at Hocking College in Nelsonville and at OU’s Chillicothe Branch.
Powers said he needs to recruit outside of the region to attract more women and minorities.
“In an ideal world our department would reflect the diversity of the community we police,” Powers said. “We don’t have a good minority pool either in terms of gender or race and ethnicity to pull from in Southeast Ohio.”
Similar to Powers, Miami University Police Lt. Ben Spilman said that recruiting a diverse applicant pool is a challenge even in Southwest Ohio.
“We continually have issues trying to recruit a diverse workforce,” Spilman said.
Kent State Police Chief John Peach whose department has the largest total of female officers of those surveyed, said police work still is a male-dominant sector, but believes it is the responsibility of the department to create an attractive venue for women to strongly consider police work.
Peach uses what he describes as a “community policing” approach, in which officers are pushed to engage students, staff and visitors at Kent State to create a more opportunistic environment for female participation. He also contributes the number of female officers to the location, which is less rural to other areas in Ohio
“We’re really trying to partnership with the campus,” he said. “You got to have role models and it can’t be someone you see on TV. It has to be a real person that you can have contact with, and I think that really has attributed to our increase of female officers.”
He said his department’s diversity “strengthens the department significantly.” At a broad sense, Peach said, women are better at communicating to people and more relationship-oriented.
“They don’t need to rely in muscles and martial arts because they are able to de-escalate the type of problems pretty effectively,” Peach said.
BGSUPD Chief Moll, who was previously an officer in Kent State University, said her officers spend a lot of time reaching out to people in student groups, career fairs and functions to build a diverse applicant pool.
“The best way to learn about people that are different than you is to work with them every day,” Moll said. “I think you have even more success when you diversify your ranks.”
All officials The Post interviewed noted that there were no salary differences between male and female officers of the same rank.
Kelly Faust, OU assistant professor of criminology, said she agrees with Powers that the biggest challenge for OUPD is locating a large pool of female applicants in the region.
Though research has shown there are little differences between how a female officer and a male officer do his or her job, Faust said women still face stigmas in the line of duty.
“It comes back to changing these cultural ideas, and that’s easier to say than to do.” Faust said. “Even if you try to make your policies welcoming towards females, there are still some very inadvertent ways that they receive the opposite message.”
Faust said she and Powers have discussed collaborative efforts to look for applicants in the university’s policing and criminology classes.
“I think they are definitely concerned with increasing the diversity of their police force,” Faust said. “I think that policy-wise and attitude-wise they seem very open to it.”
OUPD received about 250 applications this past summer, 67 of which passed the screening tests.
Powers said the department has three candidates in the final stages of the hiring process for full time positions — in accordance to the approved proposal to hire additional officers.
Natasha Lorenz was the newest officer to join the force, raising the number of female officers to two.
“As we continue our recruitment process every year we will continue to strive for the most diverse applicant pool that we can in terms of our future hires,” Powers said.
@joshualim93
jl951613@ohio.edu
