This paper will go over the pervasive influence of the female gender in Law Enforcement. It will go over the challenges and some solutions to those challenges. The paper will also show how females and police departments overcame some of these challenges.
THE CHALLENGES FEMALE FACE IN LAW ENFORCEMENT
Police Departments years ago would only hire women for clerical roles such as filing and doing paper work or dispatching. The civil rights act change all that making it possible for women to hold the same jobs as the men in law enforcement. Most law enforcement agencies face a lot of different challenges with having a multicultural society. The first challenge is within the recruitment to join the force which involves knowing about the cultural, racial and ethnicity back grounds. More and more minorities are joining the criminal justice fields today such as women, ethnic groups and homosexuals. Women face challenges in the physical side of the hiring practices because a lot of department still are based on the male aptitudes. There are some departments over the years that have change some of their physical test for women. They now set their standards for the female based on the percentile of the national physical ability of females. Females also have the challenges that male counter parts don’t have to deal with and that is prejudices of being a female in the work place. Most police departments have gotten more aggressive on verbal and sexual harassment issues. The departments have come out with strict policies and classes for the officers on this subject. Even though females have challenges on a department most departments have realized that the females play a vital role in the department. The National Association of Women Law E...
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...ready for the multicultural problems they will face. They lack the training or knowledge in dealing with the different cultures. The work places have to find ways of coming up with training programs to better help workers to see though their differences. They have to show everyone the benefit and positive side of having a multicultural work place. This all can be solved with the right training, tools and equipment in the work place.
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Historically, criminology was significantly ‘gender-blind’ with men constituting the majority of criminal offenders, criminal justice practitioners and criminologists to understand ‘male crimes’ (Carraine, Cox, South, Fussey, Turton, Theil & Hobbs, 2012). Consequently, women’s criminality was a greatly neglected area and women were typically seen as non-criminal. Although when women did commit crimes they were medicalised and pathologised, and sent to mental institutions not prisons (Carraine et al., 2012). Although women today are treated differently to how they were in the past, women still do get treated differently in the criminal justice system. Drawing upon social control theory, this essay argues that nature and extent of discrimination
Belva Lockwood’s legacy continues today. Not only did she open opportunities within the criminology community, but she also gave a voice to women in all areas of work. Today’s women in law enforcement, the courts system, and politics owe their careers to women like Belva Lockwood. She tirelessly paved the way for women and minorities. She would be proud to see how may influential women dominate the criminology work
Which is one of the unique aspects to being a female law enforcement officer. By large, female police officers are a minority. Only about 10% of officers in the Bowling Green Police Department are female, and that percentage is even lower for departments in smaller counties. Prior to going to the interview I expected the female officers we spoke to, to tell us they heard a lot of people tell them they could do the job. I also expected that some male officers would be uncomfortable or would act different around female officers. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Officer Fields say that the male officers treat her just like one of the guys. Even though they have both heard their fair share of “policing is a man’s job”, the males in their field do not seem to have that attitude. Instead, the men they work alongside with act more like protectors, or big bothers. Hopefully, in upcoming years the ratio of male to female officers evens out, because both sexes bring different strengths to the
The first police department in America developed in New York and began the first era of policing which spanned from the 1830s to 1900 and is known as the political era (Walker & Katz, 2012). As emphasized by Walker (1999) not only did the political era of policing revolve around politics but provided officers with little to no training, education or recruitment standards (as cited in Police: History, 2014). The era also forced shaky job security for law enforcement and officers could be fired and hired at any point with little to no reason. Even men with criminal records were foot patrolling and women were only seen as “matrons” for the jail; they did not carry weapons and often times had very little arrest discretion (Walker & Katz, 2012). According to Walker and Katz (2012), “a $300 payment to the Tammany Hall poli...
Traditionally, there has been little research on or interest in the impact of female crime in modern society. In addition, juvenile crime rates are on the rise, which combine for a void of research or information on female juvenile offenders. In general, crime rates for women offenders have risen since the 1990's. Increasing numbers of young women are also offending at higher rates. In a 1996 U.S. Department of Justice Report, the number of arrests of young women had doubled between 1989 and 1993. Twenty percent of all juvenile arrests were committed by girls, an increase of 87 percent. However, according to The National Study of Delinquency Prevention in Schools, males are far more likely to admit to criminal involvement than are females. For example, 12 percent of males and 4 percent of females reported carrying a hidden weapon other than a pocketknife in the past year (Wilson, p.150). There are several theories for this rise in crime proposed by modern feminists, including that the introduction of women into traditional male roles prompted women to commit increasingly dangerous and violent crimes. However, this paper will rely on Meda Chesney-Lind's theories from The Female Offender.
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