A Police Force: The Last Frontier for Women
On Monday, PBS’s documentary series Frontline aired Women in Blue, a documentary about the Minneapolis Police Department. In May 2020, actions by a male policeman from this department led to the death of George Floyd, triggering peaceful Black Lives Matter protests nationwide, including in Mississippi.
Last week, the Marshall Project reported on six other Minneapolis residents of color who had survived the kind of encounter with police that Floyd had: the same officer’s knee on their necks. One was a Black woman whose mother had called the police for help after an argument.
To make Women in Blue, independent filmmaker Dierdre Fishel followed four women officers inside the Minneapolis Police Department from 2017 to 2020 and George Floyd’s death. The four struggle against racism, homophobia and misogyny while working for reform, inside the department and in how they work with local communities. As a Black sergeant puts it, sometimes she has to “choose between Black and blue.”
The four women in Fishel’s film encounter different career obstacles. In 2017, when Fishel began her project, Minneapolis’ police chief was an openly gay White woman, Janee Harteau, and the mayor also was a White woman. Fishel says Harteau made her film possible and worked to recruit, retain and promote women under her command. But in July 2017, as Fishel documents, after a Black officer shot and killed a White woman, Minneapolis’ mayor asked for Harteau’s resignation.
Harteau was succeeded by her deputy, a Black man whose career she had fostered. He surrounded himself with other men. Melissa Chiodo, a White woman commander who had headed the sex trafficking and domestic violence unit and was relegated to internal affairs, lobbies him on behalf of other women in the department. In the end, she becomes so discouraged that she accepts a job as police chief in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, a much smaller city. Here Chiodo says she has recovered “the spark” for her job that she had lost in Minneapolis: “Chief Harteau inspired me.”
Another woman, C.J. Johnson, a gay White inspector in charge of a precinct in one of Minneapolis’ most violent neighborhoods, is obliged to step down thanks to the new police chief’s reorganization. She has begun a new career teaching criminal justice at Hamline University in St. Paul.
By 2020, two other women officers remain on the beat in Minneapolis. One is a young White rookie working with a Black male partner. Fishel says that she came across 30-year-old statistics showing that women officers didn’t rely on violence because they communicated better. The rookie describes how she came to terms with her partner’s much more aggressive tactics.
Independent filmmaker Dierdre Fishel developed "Women in Blue," a documentary about the police department in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The City College of New York
The other woman who is still part of the Minneapolis Police Department is Alice White, a Black single mother with a gentle face. In 2017, when Fishel began filming there were only six Black women in a department of 850 officers. White is promoted to sergeant: when she puts on her new shirt with its sergeant stripes, “it feels different,” she says, smiling.
The film shows White, who regularly attends meetings with her community, using better communication with a terrified Black driver. Fishel also shows the ribbing and passive aggression White regularly endures from male police she oversees in her precinct. After watching George Floyd’s death on television, White says, she sat at her desk and wept uncontrollably: “I never cry at work. It just hurt.”
Through Independent Television Service, I was able to participate in an interactive screening with many former and current women police officers who commented on scenes in Fishel’s documentary. Afterwards, we were able to ask questions of Chief Chiodo, C.J. Johnson, the former inspector who is now teaching, and Lt. Col. Mo Brown, a Black woman in the Baltimore Police Department. Yes, that police department, the one you saw portrayed in Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire.
Brown began by noting that her department now is under a consent decree, which means that the U.S. Department of Justice has refrained from suing her department in return for its refraining from criminal behavior. Brown posts on Facebook, where the department says it is hiring. It uses a smiling young Black woman as the face of its Twitter feed.
There are still so few women police officers nationwide — Fishel says that they make up only 12 percent of the police — that their different approach isn’t obvious yet, except when responding to domestic violence. Chiodo, Johnson and Brown agreed that women officers notice more signs of abuse and are better at talking to all parties.
Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amc@mississippicir.org.