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Policing Women: The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD

NCJ Number
176041
Author(s)
J Appier
Date Published
1998
Length
237 pages
Annotation
This book traces the origins of women in police work and the development of modern police work into one of the most male-dominated occupations in the United States.
Abstract
In the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the first to hire women, and in other major cities, policewomen's roles were constructed as maternalistic. The book describes how the early policewomen succeeded in expanding the scope of their police work, and how, within a generation, those gains and women's authority eroded and a masculinized model of crime fighting took hold. A section on gender, the police and criminal justice reform, discusses the female reform tradition and the origins of the movement for women police. A section on women police in Los Angeles studies the city's Mother Bureau, policewomen and the LAPD Juvenile Bureau, and the death of the crime prevention model. The book also reviews the legacy of the crime control model. Tables, notes, index