Why Women Do Not Make Good Police Officers
Police is an essential unit of society and its function is as important as the functioning of a vital organ in the human body. If one removes this unit then the society will fall apart and become diseased and corrupted beyond imagination. It controls the crime within a society and within a nation. It protects the rights of a normal civilian and gives him security and shelter. This department aims to zoom in to the problem factors of society e.g. drugs, prostitution, thefts, murders etc and eliminate the people who cause such factors to exist. These factors corrupt a society from within and causes harm to the well being of the general public. The department to prevent domestic violence is called "Police". Hence the proper and efficient functioning of a police department is of unprecedented importance. If one travels back in time, we see that the police department comprised only of the male population. Men were selected and given the authority to control crime. Soon with time and increasing awareness about women and their rights, women were also recruited in this department to prevent crime standing hand in hand with the males.Sworn women officers have been facing many problems in this male dominated society. Although they are r
ecruited in more numbers than the recent past, they are still underused and their talent is going to waste. "The move to recruit more women was initially prompted by a shortage of suitable male applicants. Women were also recruited because they were better qualified than male applicants" (Prenzler, et al, 1997). Very few women are assigned the patrol task and although that number is increasing, comparatively more women are given non-patrol tasks. Some women tend to perform well as police officers and there have been instances when women police officers like Ken Sanders of the Utah Police Department have been given the officer of the year awards for the helpful efforts (Anonymous, 2003). This type of an observation or result regarding such performances by women is what one calls an exceptional case rather than it being normal. Quite a few factors add on to why women do not perform well as police officers. One of the factors is stated by Linden where he brings it to our attention the fact that women have a much higher attrition rate as compared to men and thus it confines the diversity of their job experiences (Linden, 1983). Women are often underutilized and one of the reasons that can account for this underutilization is the fact that there are limited supervisory posts and this makes the competition severe and promotions are rare. Another fact is that to be eligible for a promotion, one should have adequate experience in field patrolling. As only a minority number of women are assigned field patrolling, it is found that women hardly qualify for promotion and have limited credentials. This too can serve to be a reason why women hardly get to be good police officers. They even lack the incentive and their morale is low and when morale is low then productivity falls down. To them this may seem as a dead end job. Despite the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it is a fact there are present "institutionalized barriers" as far as promotion policies are concerned. A certain barrier described by Steinberg was the makeup of the eligibility pool for promotion. In it women who were not given the opportunity to train or were not given assignments are filtered out and are hence ineligible for a promotion (Steinberg, p.21). To have productivity one must be satisfied with their job. Job satisfaction is really important and it seems that women police officers are not very satisfied with their jobs. Many people oppose the idea of women being recruited in the police department. This is only natural in
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Approximate Word count = 1692
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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