Author and humorist P.J. O’Rourke described the elitist view of global overpopulation: ‘Not enough of me, way too much of you.’ The deeper I researched this topic of greater female representation in law enforcement, the louder his words echoed. The 30 X 30 website greets you with a bold claim:
The under-representation of women in policing undermines public safety.
Confronting a claim like that is a bear trap of semantic hazards. There is valid research and evidence that, with unfiltered statistics, female police officers use less force and kill fewer criminals than male officers. There are more dimensions to the data, and we should care about the results enough to explore them in full detail.
Today, given the current public safety staffing crisis, the last thing any recruiter would consider is turning away any qualified candidate based on gender. Today, there are not enough willing and viable future police officers to be able to pick one over another, especially including female over male.
We need them all and we need them immediately!
If you aren’t suffering the direct effects of the policing staffing and recruiting crisis, you must not live in the several major cities around the country who can’t keep up with their emergency 911 calls. In those many places, if they were in pizza delivery, they would be out of business. Diminished and scaled back services in cities like Oakland, (CA,) San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Austin, Jackson, (MS,) and New York City are resulting in a public outcry for more officers available to respond to critical emergencies.
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Thirty years ago, police recruiting sorted through hundreds of applications to find the single best candidate. Lives were put on hold for months waiting on tests, polygraphs, medical exams, and background investigations. Major agencies focused on achieving previously neglected racial benchmarks by removing unnecessary obstacles. At that time, it worked and underrepresented minorities joined law enforcement ranks at a higher rate than they do today. Those options can only be exercised when there is a surplus of candidates and within that affinity group, there also is a surplus of candidates. Today, if 75% of qualified candidates were female, they would be hired.
About the Initiative
This was the path to create a national agenda with IACP, Major Cities Chiefs, Major Counties Sheriffs, federal agencies, and other police professional groups. NAWLEE has no hidden agenda. They are a professional police organization, and they advocate for values that the majority of the nation’s peace officers support; unlike the NYU Policing Project.
NAWLEE is present for credibility and on the 30 X 30 initiative website they share partner credit with the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP), an organization advocating policies counter to proven law enforcement practices including drug liberalization and harm reduction models.
“First established as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition in 2002, LEAP was co-founded by Police Captain Peter Christ (Ret.). A 20-year law enforcement veteran of the War on Drugs, Captain Christ has been speaking out to end drug prohibition since 1989. He co-founded LEAP with the mission of reducing harmful consequences resulting from fighting the war on drugs and lessening the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction by ending drug prohibition.”
The NYU Law School Anti-Policing Project
Their website is the familiar refrain of self-proclaimed police reformers who seek to end the overuse of law enforcement officers. The NYU Policing Project agenda also promotes their police replacement theory labeled as Alternative First Response. It is the same reimagining justice proposal: don’t send an armed officer to a call where a social worker would be more appropriate. Police, responding to 911 calls, is referred to as a ‘bad bet’ when non-specific social services would be a much better fit. Barry Friedman of NYU states that this will “bring the public’s voice to policing.”
“Given that an estimated 80-90% of policing involves non criminal or service functions, the emphasis in traditional policing on physical strength might actually serve as a liability to police department seeking to successfully met the demands of their community. “
Their support of diversity, equity and inclusion is consistent with the current ideology of the non-binary and transgender community.
“There is no universal experience of being a woman in law enforcement. Each of a woman officer’s many identities — race and ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, and more — defines her experience, and often multiplies her exposure to discrimination.
Black women and other women of color, in particular, face compounding experiences of bias and discrimination in law enforcement because of their race or ethnicity, in addition to their gender. Transgender and gender non-conforming officers face discrimination on the basis of their gender identity and presentation.”
If I’m interpreting their statement properly, there is a broader and more expansive view of ‘who a woman is’ than a (XX chromosome) biological woman. Today, in 2023, many recognize that the ‘trans’ movement as the greatest contemporary infringement of hard won female rights, a movement that is simultaneously anti-woman and a mockery of women, their earned achievements, and well-deserved recognitions. State legislation supporting Title IX is called either transphobic or pro-woman.
In the end, we have an organization, a law school within a prestigious university, proudly taking direct action against the profession of law enforcement. That is precisely where the NYU Police Replacement Project gets it wrong. Their complaint when they are reimagining justice is that police mostly respond to non-violent crimes. The police replacement theorists, who advocate shifting calls from police first responders to more appropriate alternative resources, are the very group that is pushing the expansion of women in the ranks of law enforcement, a group overall that according to their work should be shrinking, not growing. If their goals are achieved, more women would be responding to more violent calls. Also 30 X 30 is supposed to further women as a discrete group, but their inclusion of non-binary and transgender, means that they will support those who, biologically, are not women.
As this is published, police leaders will be traveling to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in San Diego. The true courageous leaders will be easy to spot. They will be telling 30 X 30, and programs like them, they won’t be making promises and pledges that are valueless distractions to the core mission of policing, including unbiased recruiting.
Please keep all of our nations officers in your prayers.
This article originally appeared at The American Peace Officer Substack.
